Concrete reasons for change

For many, the decision to place the fortress-like 1950s housing development among the nation's elite architectural treasures amounted to little short of heresy.

Critics lined up to denounce the development as a product of the whimsical fantasies of remote architects whose brutalist obsessions with concrete were responsible for forcing hudreds to live in miserable conditions.

For Jeremy Till and partner Sarah Wigglesworth, however, such criticism is entirely unfounded.

As professors of architecture and designers of a number of housing association developments, it offends their creative sensibilities to witness their profession ridiculed for, as they see it, society's failure to invest in mass housing like Park Hill.

After all, they should know. Not only are they well-regarded authorities based at Sheffield University, they live in Park Hill.

And critics of concrete have yet to come to terms with their latest vision for affordable housing - building with bales of straw.

"Park Hill is kind of notorious and for all the wrong reasons, I think, mainly because people are ignorant," says Till. They say "It's Park Hill, it's mass housing, it's concrete, it's ugly, ergo it's a failure". The link between mass housing equals social deprivation is complete nonsense. It was used a lot by conservative critics to basically shift the burden and the blame on to architects as social engineers."

One gets the impression this is a well-trodden path, although Wigglesworth is more philosophical. "One of the sad things about Park Hill is that if it were really chock full of people it would be really lively, but because half the flats are empty it is really dead," she sighs. "I think that you've got to be careful about putting the equation between the spacial situation and the social and economic situation that pertains in that area together to make up whether [Park Hill] is good or whether it's bad. It is very, very easy to be too simplistic about that equation."

At this point Till points out that Park Hill is in fact only five per cent empty, which in a way is even more revealing. "It feels very dead," Wigglesworth emphasises. "People are afraid to go out, those balconies which were intended to be used as places where kids play, the streets in the sky, are not used that much."

They concur that the construction of mass housing to a similar scale, even in areas of extremely high demand, has been consigned to the dustbin of history. But nevertheless they insist that despite the very public failings of some housing experiments in the past, it is the duty of their profession to continue with visions such as theirs. Will such visions hold any relevance in the 21st century?

Till and Wigglesworth have a second home, in Islington, north London, which is currently being built from sandbags, steel girders, timber frames, and, yes, straw bales. All of which ought to be used more widely in modern housing construction, they argue. Particularly straw bales.

Setting aside the ill-fated attempts of the three little pigs, there is a logic to the concept.

Enormous building blocks, cheap, fast to build with. They slot in between timber trusses, are sealed so no water or rats get to them, and without a supply of oxygen they can't burn. Once plastered on the inside, bales also offer about three times more insulation than government rules require.

"I think that straw bales have a potential niche market, particularly because they are cheap and because they are sustainable," says Till. "I think one of the things you have to do is do it first yourself to show that it is feasible. They've been there for 100 years in Nebraska."

He says one housing association has already approached them about the bales. "For a housing association to take on straw bales would be an act of faith. Now we've done it I don't see why they shouldn't."

Straw bales may smack of a return to the past, but Wigglesworth and Till should not be mistaken for Luddites. Rather, they prefer a mix of high and low tech, as their home/office building in Islington testifies. It reflects their desire to solve construction dilemmas without relying solely on new technology.

So many forms of sustainable technology run through its tongue-in-cheek design it looks almost like an exhibition - gabions of recycled concrete, sandbag walls, rainwater recycling, industrial compression springs. All visions of what can be done for the social housing market, Till reckons. "There are a series of technologies here which are being pushed right to the limit but which have wider application. We wouldn't have done it if it was just going to be a one-off. There's too much time gone into it."

For them, sustainability is essential. "Buildings use over 50 per cent of our energy, and we cannot afford just to continue building stupid cavity wall buildings. In the end I think the building industry's going to have to adjust itself to knew methods of building. A lot of these technologies are going to be much more viable within years, and I donÕt think that the mass housing market can afford to ignore it."

So building with straw isn't in any way eccentric? "I think that's really insulting," Wigglesworth retorts. "It's like many inventions, people think you are mad when you start off, and then they sometimes see the sense in them and then realise its not really eccentric its actually very logical in many ways."

Till interrupts. "It's not eccentric because you put so much work into it in terms of research, in terms of precedent studies and so on. You don't enter into anything like this lightly, particularly a project of this scale. It's not a kind of "batty" project. Yeah, it has new things in it, innovative things in it, but it's not eccentric. He stares at it ruefully: "This building's too expensive to be eccentric."

But do people actually want to live in the dreams of architects? Would architects not be better employed as technical enablers for the community, building exactly what the community wants? Certainly not, Till argues. Otherwise, what you get is the complete debasement of what the architect is meant to be good at, which is envisioning space, materials, etcetera etcetera. I do think there is a role for architects to suggest new ways of doing things. I don't think that that is incompatible with what clients want.

"It's incredibly frustrating as architects, and I think it is incredibly stupid socially as well, because what you get is an embedded set of living patterns. People aren't given alternatives. The potential for exploring different types of living patterns has kind of disappeared."

The industry itself is also partly responsible for stifling creativity, Wigglesworth adds, with the largest amount of housing produced by volume housebuilders who are "very conservative".

"So the only place that innovation is possible is through the public sector and there you get accused of using people as social experiments, and that's where the problem arises because people like Peabody are trying to look for new forms of housing and new ways of cutting costs. But if they are not really careful and they do not win the PR battle they are going to be accused yet again of social engineering."

So architects have become professional scapegoats? "Abolutely. Absolutely. We are," they chorus. Wigglesworth offers her explanation. "I think architects attract that kind of criticism simply because we are in the business of being visionary and not all visions work, but without vision you're not going to move forward and nothing's going to change. So it's very, very easy to scapegoat us. You're trapped because that is actually what you're in the business of doing. I think there is a thin line between being visionary and experimental and being labelled eccentric. Just because you're not doing what everyone else does doesn't mean you're a weirdo."

Besides, Wigglesworth concludes, with a hint of wistful reflection, British architecture is not very visionary, compared with, say, Scandanavian. "Although we claim that our visionary schemes don't work, actually now we are not visionary any more."

And these would-be visionaries of the future, who also live in the supposedly failed vision of the past, are determined that the dreams and experiments should continue.

Till adds: "Housing is a reflection of society's patterns and therefore as society's patterns change so will housing. One of society's patterns is the environmental crisis and therefore housing has to change with that. Another one is the rise of the single person, housing has to change with that. Another is the rise of the single parent family - is it possible to have communal housing where there are facilities like creches where single parents can live in a way which isn't dominated by different family regimes? Housing's got to keep changing."