What is pattern book housing?

A few interested parties in our competition have asked us what we mean by ‘pattern book housing’.

For a detailed historical perspective, I would recommend visiting www.crowstep.co.uk, which is the website of architect and architectural historian Colin Davies. He has researched pattern book housing in detail, explaining it clearly on his site, and he has addressed its thorny relationship with the UK architectural profession in an essay ‘Professionalism and Pattern Books’ which you can download from the site.
AT ESP-sim we explain pattern books in the competition brief that you can also download when you register for the competition, but essentially our view is as follows:

Pattern book designs are not based on a specific site, but capture the necessary design information in order to allow others (usually individuals and builders) to adapt that design for a particular site. The basic pattern book design itself might capture the overall layout and aesthetics of the design, but it is usually backed up by technical production information that need to be purchased from the author or publisher of the design.

We think an approach using contemporary pattern book housing can offer a practical and sustainable solution to UK’s housing crisis, and presents an opportunity for good architects and designers to develop extremely well designed housing ‘products’ which are adaptable to different sites and housing markets across the UK, and which can be constructed in large numbers by individuals and their own builders in enabled self procured developments. We also think contemporary pattern book housing can be both sustainable and cost effective.

The Youcanplan Pattern Books competition is deliberately an ideas competition, so a degree of interpretation of the pattern book concept is invited. The results should help us develop our illustration of ESP and bring the pattern book debate further into the public domain.

Youcanplan Pattern Books: FAQs

Apologies for the delay in posting this:The following represents the questions we have received for the competition.

1) What is pattern book housing

This is explained a little in the brief which you can download when you register. We have also published a separate blog post on the subject. The competition is an ideas competition, so a degree of interpretation of the pattern book concept is expected.

2) Can we submit designs for apartments

Yes.

We need a range of typologies for our Youcanplan illustration of ESP to work. So apartment designs and collective housing patterns are warmly welcomed along with other individual house typologies. Please ensure you communicate the adaptability of your design to suit different sites and residents’ needs, and consider the self procurement aspect of your proposal.

3) How can I vote? When can I vote?Where do I vote?

Having registered interest in the competition, you are now a member of the UrbanBuzz community. As such you will be offered a vote in the competition. You will be directed to the Youcanplan Pattern Books online gallery, and here you will see thumbnails and text descriptions of all the entrants.

If you wish to vote, you have to vote for a total of five schemes and you cannot vote for less than five schemes. Once submitted your choices will be entered into the big database of votes, from which we find our winners.

4) I don’t understand the copyright issues. If my design is published online, can’t people just steal it?

You retain the copyright of your submission. If your scheme is built into the software, then your idea will still be protected. Whilst users will be able to view and explore your design, both internally and externally to see if they like it, they will not be able to download technical drawings of it, or use the software as a shortcut to get planning somewhere.

Beyond the demonstration in July, the use of the pattern book designs on a real site would be subject to separate fee negotiations between enabling developers and designers, in the normal manner.

5) Do I have to use the template provided? or can I come up with my own?

Yes you must use the template provided. This will help the technical jury check your submission. You are free to use the rest of the space as you see fit to communicate your idea.

6) Can associates of technical jury members enter the competition?

Slider Studio and Mae Architects are not permitted to enter the competition. Along with UEL staff, these practices comprise the technical jury. We have many associates and colleagues in the professional and academic world, and they are all welcome to participate in the competition. So long as the submission meets some basic criteria relating to appropriate size cost and environmental performance, then the designs will be posted in the online gallery and the UrbanBuzz community will ultimately be the collective judging panel.

7) Can previously published work be submitted?

Yes. We want to see the best ideas from wherever they come, and we want to see as many of them as possible. Many architectural practices have already designed ideas which might be appropriate as pattern book housing, and many of these schemes perhaps never see the light of day. If so please review them, check their suitability for contempoary use in the UK and consider submitting for the competition.

We have several people interested in submitting their work for our office.Can a single practice have multiple design entries? If so do we need to register each one of them for competition.

Yes, this is possible. In the case of multiple entries from a practice, each design needs to be represented by an indivudual who has registered with the UrbanBuzz community.

9) Can I submit Le Corbusier’s “Dom-ino” House?

Erm, this is an interesting question in terms of who would might be alive to sue you, but we ask that you own the copyright of designs that you submit, or if entering on behalf of a company that you have the authority to do so.

10) Can I vote for my own design?

Yes of course, but you must also select four other designs to vote for from amongst competing schemes, otherwise your vote will not registered in our voting system.

11) How is the prize money divided between winners?

There are to be 10 winners at £1500 a piece.We assume we will get over 30 entries.

ESP mustn’t be painful

Ignoring our temporary and very cliched technical hitch on stage, our evening competition launch event on Monday 26th went pretty well, with a good attendance including architects, designers, students, press and local authority representatives.

David Birbeck of Design for Homes introduced the evening, recounting his own personal experience in procuring a new build house in the UK, likening the process to being tortured through an inappropriate use of barbed wire. This was clearly a painful experience that he intends never to repeat. If ESP could offer one thing, it should be a smoother ride for individuals following the same path to a new home.

Colin Davies set the scene for pattern book architecture for ‘popular housing’, sharing his long standing interest in the subject, and explaining how the term ‘architecture’ was actually introduced to the country through the introduction of renaissance architecture pattern books from Europe. Colin suggested that, in the contemporary context, this territory should again be explored by architects and that a pattern book approach to popular housing can offer commercial and creative opportunities to practices.

Alex Ely presented the evidence for enabled self procured housing, drawing clues from the self build sector, and suggesting that a kind of ‘DIY urbanism’ is possible, where self procurers and self builders can work side by side to deliver quality places, with genuine architecture and resulting in sustainable communities.

I followed these two interesting talks with a presentation of our enabled self procurement system as we currently understand it, and a call for bold local authorities and the new breed of enabling developers to step forward to help us try it out.

I also took questions on the competition and all Q and A will be posted under a separate post.

Breaking all rules in software development, we also presented the half complete Youcanplan software. Slider Studio’s Chris McDonald fought galantly to re-establish the faltering internet connection with UEL’s Miao Kang, sitting a distant 5 metres away, and attempted to send a half in focus image through the projector. The software simulation eventually found its way onto screen, and this seemed to get the message across of how Youcanplan will be able to help visualise the apparent complexity of the planning process.

There were also some very interesting questions from the audience about the nature of the enabling developer, and some lively discussions afterwards over drinks. In fact I believe a range of local authorities are about to become really interested in this whole idea, especially those that need to increase housing delivery and engage their communities, and of course this would be good news for everyone on the project, and everyone participating in the competition.

I came away from the meeting, still thinking about David’s barbed wire comment. Ouch! For many, building your own house equates to stress and pain and hassle. Alex Ely told us, 70% of homeowners consider building their own home, but how many actually do? And if its not the potentially painful experience that puts people off, then perhaps its simply the difficulty.

Clearly ESP has to be made really easy to follow, and really painless if its going to be a success.The supporting Youcanplan software equally has to be really easy to use, and the technology reliable if its going to be helpful.

Youcanplan Pattern Books Competition evening, 26th November 2007

Youcanplan Pattern Books is now live.

After a busy two weeks of completing briefs and website set up, we are now ready to answer questions from budding pattern book designers about the details and nature of our competition.

In anticipation of this flurry of questions on the competition, ESP-sim is hosting a Q and A evening, with guest speakers and drinks reception to help ease the ‘knowledge exchange’ which is all part of the UrbanBuzz mission.

The event will take place att UCL on Torrington Place, just off Tottenham Court Road. We have invited guest speakers Colin Davies and Alex Ely, and I will present our latest understanding of ESP, and present the Youcanplan software under development. Design for Homes will chair the evening.

If you haven’t found you way through the labyrinth of web pages to our competition page, then please just follow the link below. Remember you have to be part of the UrbanBuzz community to enter the competition.

http://ns5.meganexus.com/scommunities/simIndex2.jsp

To sign up for the competition evening, please email competition@esp-sim.org

The Use of Local Development Orders to Enable Self Procurement

We need more housing, of better quality, that matches more accurately the expectations of those who are going to live there. Little new there then… yet with the ink barely dry on the Housing Green paper, the latest figures show that even last year’s relatively modest increases in the number of new housing starts is already on the wane. The raft of recent policy initiatives in housing and planning seem to tinker with existing arrangements rather than offer convincing solutions to deep rooted problems of the current system, so ESP’s aim of re-engineering the procurement process is a timely one. But a big question will be how ESP develops the new procurement process in a way that avoids it being dragged down by the inertia of the regulatory planning system.

The key attributes of the current planning system are that, for all the talk of proactive ‘spatial’ planning, the system is regulatory and reactive. While considerable time and resource is allocated to the regulatory control process, comparatively little effort is dedicated to the more important job of providing a structured framework for development – for example planning delivery of public infrastructure or planning how houses, plots and streets should relate to each other. Instead of providing a means for early and coordinated decision making, as Ian Abley points out, the different regulatory processes form a barrier to the effective sequencing of design development and approvals. The upshot is a system inimical to ESP’s aim of plot based development allied to innovative whole building solutions – where pre-approved pattern book housing can be procured for a serviced plot sold complete with a planning permission.

So where there is a desire for bringing forward a site for development, and local democratic agreement to do so, how can provision be made for better upfront agreement as to how the different parties to a development should proceed? To satisfy PPS 3 and Environmental Impact Regulations, are there means for agreeing on a few key parameters on the urban dimensions of a place? And can these agreed parameters be translated into a set of technical specifications that can be formalised – or adopted – so they provide clear instructions for all those who wish to build as to what they must do to meet with approval of the regulatory systems?

The answer might be found in Local Development Orders (LDO’s), a little known (and as yet untested) amendment to the Town and Country Planning (General Development) Order 1995. An amendment Order of 2006 makes provision for all Local Planning Authorities to prepare Local Development Orders which will them to specify the type of development which can be granted planning permission across a local area – effectively allowing a democratic response to local circumstances that amounts to extending permitted development rights on a localised basis. LDO’s must meet with a number of strict conditions – for example they can only implement policies already embedded within a Development Plan. Also, adopting an LDO requires it to go through some of the same elongated consultation processes required to adopt any form of policy today. The difference is that once the LDO is approved, all development that meets with the provisions of the Local Order becomes permitted development – and consequently need not go through a formal planning application process. For those that want to build outside the terms of the order, the option remains of going through the normal process to secure permission.

Before an LDO can be consulted on and subsequently adopted, it must contain a description of the development which the order would permit, and a plan identifying the extent of the area to which it applies. This effectively requires the preparation of a design code – a technical specification at an urban scale that instructs on the different components of place, and how they should be assembled. It is here that the greatest area of uncertainty lies in the new procurement process ESP is developing. Although some local authorities have declared an interest in using LDO’s, as yet this has still to happen. Consequently there has not yet been any work to ascertain the level of detail in the urban specification that will be required to allow adoption of the LDO. So for ESP, in parallel with developing the procurement process software and working through how whole building systems can be type approved, answering questions as to the shape of the LDO process should be a priority.

How do you co-ordinate a planning permission for ESP developments?

How do you co-ordinate a planning permission for, say, 150 homes where each resident is an individual developer, decision maker and partial designer of their property?

The ESP-sim project sets out to answer this tricky question.

Well for starters, we are looking at the existing planning system, to see how it can already support ESP without the need for reform. Our instinct is t0 encourage the use of an instrument called local development orders or LDOs, which would allow pre-approval of certain types of development based on some prescriptive design rules or codes. To find out more about this, read Alastair Donald’s post under planning category.

Secondly, and we are developing the Youcanplan software to store these design rules and support multi user online community consultation. An enabling developer would be able to consult with the future residents who want new homes, and with existing neighbouring communities also. Youcanplan software would show the consultees what the development is looking like, whilst also allowing everyone to have an individual say in the design of their individual house and that of the community. The software would also report on compliance to regulatory requirements such as Code for Sustainable Homes, which is now needed in order that planning permission is granted.

Crtically, Youcanplan will be able to simulate possible outcomes based on consumer choice, so a local authority can take comfort in approving a scheme by publishing a LDO referencing the design rules and codes used in the simulation.

In fact by directly coupling these two elements, the planning permission linked to the online software, we think planning permission can be granted with some confidence in achieving quality, sustainable developments as the outcome.

Keeping up with the Johansens

The willow-the-wisp of cost savings aside those who self-procure their homes would seem to have more freedom than the clients or customers of other sectors to get the homes they want; rather than what they are offered. So product satisfaction would seem an important aspect in the mix, however, perhaps the greatest payback for this sector would seem to be neighborhood satisfaction. If self-procurement is enabled at a large scale it offers the chance to hothouse communities.

If you or your next-door neighbour or the chap up the road not only built all the houses in your street, but also the bin-store, or planted the trees in the pavement outside the sense of community ownership is enormous. Building together means you will get the chance to know each other. Most people in London have, in recent years, seen well meaning, quite well designed, quite well built social housing schemes grit blasted in short order by the disaffected children of the very people who live there, not because they don’t necessarily care, but because they might not know who’s children they are, and because it is not their job to pick up after them.

Neighbourhoods take quite a long time to develop, perhaps the social speed dating of combined endeavor is required if a neighbourhood spirit is to be fostered before our society’s toxic parenting practices kill the ’hood in-vetro. It’s not just an issue of getting a “nice new neighbourhood” it might be the only way to get a “new neighborhood” full-stop right now. Of course we hope that the Thames Gateway will be socially fantastic, but it looks rather like chucking thousands of souls into a hamster hutch and telling them to get on with it.

Vauban is a German Housing development were the locals population, government and Housing Associations, and student Union Housing organizations appear, in our view, to have got something drastically right.

It is a new district on a 38 hectare former barrack site in south Freiburg. The Planning for the district started in 1993, the third and final development phase is due for completion in 2006. It will eventually form a home for some 5000 inhabitants, and 600 jobs. It’s all the things one would expect these days, low energy, pretty much car-free and dense, this is achieved by not allowing detached development on the site, though not too dense as a maximum four stories are allowed for each building and priority is given to smaller group development, i.e. no strip block nonsense.

What is interesting about this scheme is the manner in which the local city authority, (who happens to be the site owner), sought to create a socially diverse city district in a participatory manner enabling individuals and groups to self-procure their own homes. The initial stages of the development consisted of an urban design competition for a masterplan and implementation strategy. A group of local citizens formed an organization called Forum Vauban. They were recognized by and financially supported the city of Freiburg as a legal body forming a sort of client (i.e. home-builders), reach-out, and co-ordination, training and representative body. They offered help with information exchanges and events to help inform self-builders; ran practical DIY seminars and information on energy saving, and offered advice on design and cost management in respect of these issues for some of the projects.

At the other end of the scale the city recognized that by empowering this organization with embedded local officials dealing with Planning, road and building standards as advisers Forum Vauban could shorten the time it took to review and agree the multiplicity of individual and group building proposals. In fact this organization went on to drive standards for design, green space, amenity and social policy and energy efficiency, were they were particularly successful. There are over 50 passive houses and at least 100 units with “Plus energy” standards, the completed projects generally exceed the pretty strict energy criteria originally set down in the development plan organized by the City.

One of the development goals at Vauban is the creation of a variety of housing catering for a balance of social groups. One of the drivers for this was the creation of Baugruppen, (small, one off building co-operatives). Several households get together, decide on a plot of land to purchase within the master plan (typically 10 – 15 units), often hiring an architect and building team to assist in the design and construction process. The cost savings generated by this co-development approach, in terms of fees, economies of scale and building materials etc. over individual self-procurement allowed larger numbers of lower income households to participate in the scheme. Social interactions through the planning and building process help to knit community before any one moves in- it’s a sort of “bake and shake neighbourhood”.

These Baugruppen in turn had the practical assistance of a Citizens’ Building Stock Corporation, (The Buergerbau), set-up in order to coordinate their efforts. The corporation offers a range of services throughout the project development, right up to the moment when the self-builders move into their houses. These services include guiding the building group and answering any questions during planning and contract periods, acting as centralized QS and Clerk of works, ensuring that the generally agreed standards for the scheme are met in the most efficient manner, ‘enabling’ in its broadest and most constructive sense. This organization currently manages 5 co-operative housing groups in the development.

What this settlement shows is a political will. Local Government behaving like government, giving a lead for it’s citizens, enabling them, but perhaps more then these two points, trusting them to make their own decisions about what they want and need in terms of housing. Backing them, empowering them through training, helping them organize, and then letting them get on with it like a bunch of grown-ups.

DIY Urbanism: Self-Build in cities

Self-build opportunities in the UK tend to be limited to individuals working on marginal and suburban sites. Here we want to explore what the barriers are and the potential is for large scale self-build in an urban setting and how creating a better framework could enable ’self-procured’ housing .

The self-build market is a valuable but often overlooked provider of housing in the UK. Self-build and self-procured projects in the UK currently make up approximately 10% – 12% of new housing, which means that the output of the self-procurement sector is larger than the output of the largest single UK volume house builder.

However this is piffling compared with say Germany, where the self-procured sector can take up as much as 55% of the total new housing market and France were it hovers at around the 45% mark. Of course we believe that the market in the UK for self-build, co-operative, catalogue/kit and self-procured housing is so much greater then at present.

A survey by Norwich and Peterborough Building Society revealed that 70% of Homeowners considered the idea of building their own homes. Homeowners- that is just the people on the housing ladder, never mind about people who rent or god forbid don’t have a permanent home right now. Nearly 100,000 homeless households are living in temporary accommodation right now. This figure is the highest on record and has more than doubled since 1997.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation anticipates that the self-procured sector could reach 20,000 units per annum.

One of the problems for this sector is that of density, most kits are essentially suburban in outlook, plot costs for individuals in city settings are often prohibitively expensive. Our wonderful “timbery Scandinavian world” gets a bit complex in terms of fire spread when we get closer then 1m to the party boundary.

This boundary is we believe a key to pull individual family self-builders into town, as with barrier rails on stairs in the circulation spaces of large sports venues, (four people use a 3m wide stair with a barrier rail in the center, as opposed to two people without), the party wall as we all know acts as a cleavage – i.e. a separation or a bring together.

The Party-wall project, developed by mæ Architects aims to enable the self procurement of housing by providing the infrastructure that can help deliver self-build housing at a density required in PPS3 and achieve economies of scale through the efficient use of land.

Basically it’s a system of serviced plots and, as it’s name suggests, Party walls. First of all footings are installed below for a load bearing façade and party walls. All services connections are brought to the plot and capped off at screed level. The party walls are structurally and acoustically separated, if next door takes a year to complete their house and you have finished in three months you do not want to be bothered on Saturday morning by their power tools etc. The walls provide all the structure for a project, which is designed to accommodate simple sawn timber joist floor decks. The parameters for detailed design such as materials could be agreed across the whole self-build neighbourhood with the Local Authority and could be subject to an agreed set of design codes to give some certainty of outcome, if it was felt that was a priority.

So we know who these potential self-builders are, they would seem to be most of us, but why do people want to self-build in the first place? There may be cost benefits, (this is often why most people say that they embark upon this route of procurement), however because self build sector is so small in this country, and because the sites are often single plot or with only a few units, there may not be the economies of scale which any volume house builder can pass on, even with their 10 – 15% profit margin.

Co-operative self-build housing schemes offer benefits in terms of establishing social capital early on in the development of a project; it offers educational benefits, evidenced through a number of enabled self-build training programs run by Housing Associations such as Mosaic Housing Association. Groups help with cost saving issues. The enabled group approach to self-procured housing provision offers the potential to create, (that most Blairite concept), a truly sustainable community.

ESP and the Code for Sustainable Homes – read with the code summary attached

Ian Abley’s Summary of Code for Sustainable Homes – down load PDF

The challenge for the Enabled Self-Procurement project will be to organise itself around the structure of the Code for Sustainable Homes. Inventing another structure will be redundant, and only add to the plethora of competing design methodologies. The CSH might not be perfect – in fact aspects of it are downright irrational – but by 2008 it will probably be mandatory, and will probably be the framework into which Building Regulations are revised. Any “Enabling Developer” using ESP-SIM will want design decisions made at any stage in the process to be readily seen as a point score against the Code levels. If it were possible – and I am sure it is – the software should show a constant readout of the points being scored and the Code levels being reached, or fallen short of, as the 9 Code categories are addressed in all their contradicting detail. For example the decision to procure a town house type under the Ecology sub-category 9.05 for Building Footprint with an internal floor to ground floor area ratio of 3:1 will probably mean that points for Lifetime Homes under the Health and Well Being sub-category 7.04 will not be available. The Code credits available for the decision to go for a town house are 2 of 9, while Lifetime Homes are 4 of 12. When weighting has been factored into the 4 credits for Lifetime Homes, giving 4.67 points out of 100, the decision to procure the 2 weighted credits for a town house instead results in only 2.67 points being scored.

7.04 Lifetime Homes gives 4 credits from 12 – (4/12) Credits x 14% Weighting = 4.67 Points9.05 Building Footprint 3:1 gives 2 credits from 9 – (2/9) Credits x 12% Weighting = 2.67 Points

That loss of 2 points has to be made up elsewhere. Or the design revised to make a larger ground floor to obtain Lifetime Homes. Like a bungalow. The “Enabling Developer” can toggle between house types to total the overall point score, shown as a running total and on a tabulated check sheet. The ESP-SIM could then assist the process by providing drop down menus of all the detail in each sub-category. If you do that you will of course have achieved something that the Building Research Establishment has spectacularly failed to do: produce a way of understanding the Code for Sustainable Homes in all its necessary contradictions. My recommendation is that you do that for Code levels 1 to 5, and leave aside the irrationality of Code level 6 until it becomes clearer what “zero carbon” means to the Communities and Local Government ministry.

Ian Abley’s Summary of Code for Sustainable Homes – down load PDF

ESP- Can we have better names?

Enabled Self-Procurement or ESP is such a horrible name for this project. Can we think of something more appealing and accessible? Maybe there is no rush for that, and maybe all ideas should be tabled, but ESP-SIM is not going to connect with anyone.

Equally, the abstraction of “Enabling Developer” needs to be given a face – or faces. For example:

CIVIC TRUST BRANCH CHAIRMAN – a local branch of the Civic Trust could take the initiative to design in the abstract the sort of housing they would like to see in their area, assuming the developable sites that are identified in an area. In that way a site purchaser would know whether objections to alternative developments were likely to be raised by the Civic Trust.

PLANNING OFFICER – planning officers could take the initiative and sketch up ideas for developing critical sites within the limits of Planning Policy Statement 3, and provide those free issue to councillors as a briefing, prior to discussions with developers.

PLANNING COMMITTEE MEMBER – being braver than their planning officers, some adventurous and politically aspiring elected local authority members sitting on planning committees could work through more ambitious alternatives to the proposals for particular sites being recommended for rejection or approval. If the resultant design were self-generating by adjusting the input data in accordance with the Code for Sustainable Homes the councillor would not have to learn how to draw in a CAD package.

MR and MRS SMITH – objecting to the lack of imagination being shown by the elected membership, individuals being consulted on a neighbouring planning application could challenge some of the assumptions being made. Or, if Mr and Mrs Smith are the applicants, they could have taken the online design process so far themselves that it was acceptable as a planning submission, with the building regulation application to follow.

BUILDER – as part of the tendering process for Mr and Mrs Smith’s planning approved home, the builder takes the simulation process forward into the detailed selection of and specification of construction materials and products, presenting alternative renderings to the prospective client.

ARCHITECT – recognising that Mr and Mrs Smith could benefit from professional help, tipped off by a builder who would like to win the job based on house types and construction the architect has used before, an architect might provide a service in guiding Mr and Mrs Smith through the process of meeting the Code for Sustainable Homes. Recognising that her friend, a Civic Trust member, had already made suggestions to the planning department several years earlier, the architect guides Mr and Mrs Smith to that outline proposal.

These could all be “Enabling Developers”. But they all have realistic narratives. I suppose that is why you are looking at using Avatars…

Maybe the point is redundant, or obvious.