Driving home the need for ecological housing
YOU probably saw the headlines: “Eco-friendly Norwich council estate wins RIBA Stirling Award for UK’s best new building”.
So what? Everyone knows that, like actors, architects love awarding each other prizes. I’m not joking – Norwich actually secured five regional and other awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) alone.
The Stirling, though, is the undisputed biggie – so big that nowadays they don’t even need prize money. The citation is reward enough: “The architects of the building making the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year.”
“Building” is flexibly defined, but usually biggish. Previous winners include Lord’s cricket ground media centre, Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the Scottish Parliament Building, Hastings Pier, and, nearest to us, Astley Castle – the derelict 16th century moated manor house outside Nuneaton, now renovated as classy holiday accommodation.
Norwich’s Goldsmith Street was the first social housing project to come seriously near winning. Moreover, it’s not even a ‘new building’ – not singular, anyway. It’s exactly what it says on the tin, a STREET. Indeed, a street with traffic, but with the traffic secondary – to the housing and residents’ requirements, so parking is pushed to the perimeter.
A better description still would be ROWS, seven terrace blocks comprising 40 two-storey houses and 53 flats arranged in four rows, all facing south to catch the sunlight, built directly by the council for renting with secure tenancies at fixed social rents.
It is literally its own community, with the back gardens of the central terraces sharing a secure play area for children and a landscaped walkway for communal gatherings running right through the middle. But that’s only the start.
There are now plenty of pictures online, but search ‘Goldsmith Street Mikhail Riches’, the name of the lead architect, and you’ll see this award’s real importance, coinciding as it did with Extinction Rebellion’s Autumn Uprising in London. There’s no home page mention of the RIBA or Stirling, just “The largest Passivhaus scheme in the UK” – which, for both council and architect, was what Goldsmith Street was crucially about from the outset.
Passivhaus, or, as Wiki insists, Passive House, is a German Institute that has long promoted and measured energy efficiency in buildings, to such effect that the Passivhaus standard has become the main international voluntary standard for energy efficiency in buildings of all types, including residential.
It’s about what we will increasingly all be about – reducing our ecological carbon footprint. It’s reckoned a new UK house, incorporating the full Passivhaus ‘package’ – solar building design, energy-efficient landscaping, super-insulation, advanced window technology, ventilation, plus plus – would use three-quarters less energy for space heating than standard building regulations.
Goldsmith Street homes, therefore, are timber-framed, ultra-low energy buildings, needing minimal fuel for heating or cooling. Insulation is extra thick, doors and windows triple-glazed. Even the letterboxes are built into external porches, to reduce draughts.
Though voluntary, Passivhaus performance standards and guidelines far exceed those of the Government’s current Building Regulations and must surely signal the way forward. Norwich may be the largest Passivhaus UK housing project, but the UK’s share – 1,000 plus ‘units’ and growing – still represents a tiny fraction of its global 65,000 plus total.
Brexit-distracted, we’ve been drifting, not least in the West Midlands, despite an encouraging start. Over a decade ago the Orbit social housing group built the UK’s first Passivhaus estate of 23 ecohomes in Coventry’s Bell Green, reckoned then to be 90 per cent more energy efficient than the average Coventry home.
Since then, though, we’ve seen a few Wolverhampton primary schools, a trendy ‘eco-vicarage’ in Kingswinford, and in Birmingham – nowt.
I’ve indicated where credit for Norwich’s Stirling Award should chiefly go, to the council and architect. Now for where it definitely shouldn’t.
First, to the Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established not a decade ago, when Orbit were doing their thing, but last November, like some desperate afterthought of that year’s Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, James Brokenshire.
Given time, he might well have developed it but, while its cumbersome title seemed unfortunate, his choice of Commission Chair was almost incredible. Sir Roger Scruton is a distinguished “conservative aesthetics philosopher” and writer, but his contribution to modern architecture is chiefly as an archcritic, in a volume, The Classical Vernacular, that prompted one design correspondent to label him “the Alf Garnett of architecture”.
It was not his detestation of modern architecture, though, but his other public views – on homosexuality, date rape, Chinese people, Islamophobia, and much else – that were felt inappropriate for even an unpaid chairman of a government commission, so he was sacked before it could produce even its interim report, Creating Space for Beauty.
It’s big, worthy and wordy, has one main diagram, reproduced three times, mentions ‘beauty’, ‘beautiful(ly)’ on virtually every page, and Passivhaus not once. Maybe they’re saving it for the final report.
The second group deserving almost none of Norwich’s kudos are recent Housing Ministers generally, and the current one, Robert Jenrick, particularly. Goldsmith Street happened despite the Government’s contentious Right to Buy policy, allowing councils – still, after ‘relaxation’ – to use receipts from sales of hugely discounted council homes to cover only 30 per cent of the cost of new ones.
Jenrick was there at the Stirling Awards ceremony with his congratulations, but having previously made clear that, in some contrast to Theresa May, his focus would be clearly “on ownership because... most people in this country want to own a home of their own”.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham