Transcript
Kevin McCloud
Thanks, Paul. Thanks very much, Jim, for allowing me to now read my words to your slides for the next hour-and-a-half. I’m here to talk to you about HAB. HAB is the company I started a few years ago. It stands for happiness, architecture, beauty. We’re a development company, we build houses. We build houses at the bottom end of the market, you could say. We build social housing.
And we work with social housing associations, people like the Homes and Communities Agency and housing associations like Green Square Group. We were going to call it Sustainability Happiness Architecture Beauty but that wouldn’t have, I don’t think we’d have sold many.
Anyway, so what we do is we try to build very, very distinctive, special projects, projects which are special to where they are, that look as though they belong where they are. We like to make places which are more sustainable, we like to make places which are also enjoyable and delightful and we use the design process, we use the architectural process, which is the design process, as our principal tool in that and I’ll explain that a little bit more later.
We’re not shy of excellence. We’re a bit shy of funds at the moment. The housing budget was cut last year. It was the single biggest cut in the Government’s round of cuts last autumn. It was cut in half so we haven’t got much money to play with at the moment but in a way, that’s even more of a challenge, isn’t it, because we’re all used to designing for no money at all.
So what I thought I’d do is actually just show you, rather than talk about community and how we engage communities and try and involve schemes, I thought what I’d do is just show you my slides that I use when we do go out and talk to communities so this is our first one. This is not one of our schemes but the reason I show this is because, in a way, for me, this exemplifies so much of what we’re about which is actually improving the world, taking care of homes, giving them new leases of life, improving the caravan experience, indeed.
And I like the idea that design can be responsible for order out of chaos and sometimes chaos out of chaos which then leads to more order and sometimes taking order which has disintegrated into chaos and regenerating it back into some kind of order again. And there’s that lovely Phillip Johnson quote about architecture having this responsibility to both cuddle and exalt and these – heavens – these are exalted caravans offering an exalted view of the world.
This is design whereas this isn’t. This is, again, I’m pleased to say, not one of our schemes. In my worst moments, I describe design as a process which is there to resist compromise and sometimes when you’re battling with planning departments, environment agencies, utility companies, highways departments, it feels like a constant erosion of principles and ideas and ambitions and therefore we see actually keeping a design team around as, as part of that process, as a really effective tool against compromise, against the erosion of what we’re trying to achieve.
Building houses in the real world, constructing, I mean, as Jim will know, is a very, very brutal affair and it happens in very, very unfriendly places in the rain and it doesn’t happen in design studios. And it happens with objectors and protestors, it happens with aggressive local authorities, sometimes, and hostile planning departments and you have to be very, very fierce to cope with all of that.
And so I think resisting compromise is, well, it’s the thing we cling onto. Having said that, I do say to people, look, this is, of course, you know, that design is something that we all do every day. We do it. You see, I’m not wearing a tie. I choose not to engage with the design process today. We do it when we choose a tie, we do it when we plan a menu, we all do it when we dress ourselves in the morning, we do it sometimes subconsciously and it’s a process of refinement, of improvement, of engagement and of even consultation with ourselves.
And the interesting thing about it is that we come back and we do it again and next time we try and do it better. and I use this slide and that explanation to encourage people to think of design as something which they do. It’s just that designers and architects do it much faster because they’ve trained for much longer and therefore that places them as, if you like, as instruments of excellence that we, as clients and indeed communities, can use and exploit.
This is not design and I think actually, seriously, in many people’s minds, the notion of brand and of fashion and of the desirable, renewed object that is rebranded and given a new, shiny bumper every three months or whatever it is, or the new lining, I think many people confuse the process of branding and selling with the process of design and we try and encourage people to think about design as a much more active and a much more engaged process that involves them.
And here are a couple of models. This first one’s from NASA. All the design models I’ve seen are more or less the same, they’re more or less circular and they involve refining and feeding back into the process. Some would argue that NASA sort of stopped round about, I think, there, building a prototype. And, but certainly for us, these models – here’s one from Massachusetts Institute of Technology – if you like, building on that idea of resistance to compromise, what these suggest is that design actually can do more, it can bring positive and continuing improvement to something.
And this reinforces Jim’s point about how really important it is to keep the design team on, not to simply treat design as a process which you buy in and then discard once you’ve got your prototype but something which you retain and that you feed back into, continuing evolution of the product right up until and even beyond its use.
And we’ve got a design team on our housing schemes involving architects, landscape architects, engineers like Max. and we retain them throughout the entire process, indeed afterwards, so that we can continue to evaluate, post-occupation, how the buildings perform and whether or not the customers enjoy them.
So this is design too. This is design because for us, design takes place in all kinds of places. It can be collaborative, it can be fun and it takes place in surprising places. Now, of course, people do think of architecture as being very, very important and it’s in a hurry to do important things. We think, actually, that the most important piece of architecture that any of us experience is our own home and therefore we start within the home, designing the internals first.
This is the externals of a project designed by Glen Howells [?] for us. This is just getting onto, getting off-site now. We… This is pre-planting; very important that I say it’s pre-planting because all of these bin containers will be covered in sweet-smelling, flowering plants and every home is, its garden is packed not with thorny bushes but with gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries and fruiting trees as well.
This is our first major tool. We don’t call him that but architects, of course, we think of them as being very important people in a great hurry to do very important things in concrete bow-ties. But of course, actually, our architects are not like… Here’s Jim, look, a living, breathing human being in a shirt, you know, no bow-tie.
You… I challenge you to spot the architect in any of these photographs. I think an extraordinary thing has happened in architecture in the past ten to 15 years and that is, it’s become a far more engaging and far more accessible discipline and we work very specifically with practices that we like to think are good at dealing with our customers, with people who we engage with on the street.
This is one of our consultation days. This is actually a design meeting taking place on a site with models, not too many drawings but lots of physical models that people can muck about with and they can come back and respond to and write Post-It notes on and actually involve themselves formally as well as informally in the design process.
Here we’ve got our engineers in the room, we’ve got planners, we’ve got our landscape architect and we’ve got our team, plus the architects there. It’s in… Very importantly, we don’t have them in dusty town halls if we can help it. We try to put up a tent and have lots of cakes available, giving it the feel of a village fete, really.
This is our tool number two. This is Luke, our landscape architect, who’s part of our team and this is him in combat gear. And Luke’s job – well, why do we have him? Well, this is, of course, this can be seen as an eco-home. It’s a load of rhubarb in a dustbin and it could be equally a load of hot air.
The point about ecological construction is it’s actually not that difficult to build an ecological house. It’s fantastically straightforward right up until the moment you put people in it and then what happens is that people turn up the heating and open the windows and it’s no longer an ecological house. So how do we achieve the kind of culture change and the, and everything we need in order to make our places and our communities and our buildings more sustainable?
Well, from our point of view, in order to reduce car use, in order to reduce the environmental impact of lots of cars parking everywhere, in order to promote bicycling, pedestrian use, bus use, in order to promote shared use of social space such as amenity space, somewhere to sit out and drink, somewhere to… maybe the possibility of even standing in the street and drinking tea with your neighbour. In order to promote the kitchen garden, the shed poly-tunnel, and generally increase sociability, all these strategies – for example, playing in water and having the water express through the scheme; tiny things.
These are not, in a way, in the hands of our architects, they are in the hands of our landscape architects and indeed, in dealing with the fiercest opponents of what we try and do, people like highways and the utility companies, we find actually that the landscape architects really come into their own in that respect.
So I’m going to say, to conclude, Paul, that our strategies are really very straightforward. We try and make design accessible. We try and make community consultation in design work by leading it, by not throwing it so open that people aren’t led and don’t feel as though they’re being shown real excellence. We make it extremely collaborative which, as Jim pointed out, requires keeping your consultants on throughout the entire project.
And we also really like to join up those disciplines from interior to product to special design, architecture and landscape to make our places desirable and more sustainable. Thank you.