Rambling on housing

I've been guilty of a lot of modern architecture-bashing on here recently, which in no way reflects my own avowedly modernist tastes. So I'd been meaning to make it up when a glimpse out of a train window set my brain meandering.


These simple blocks of flats reminded me of Mies van der Rohe's work at the IIT campus in Chicago. I might have been spending too much time in Muji recently, but their very simplicity (and the neatly-tended garden setting) appealed to me.


Turns out it's a development called Hawthorn Crescent, on the outskirts of Portsmouth, which is, apparently, the most crime-riddled part of the city.


Who'd have thunk these apparently well looked-after flats would be such unpleasant places to live?


In turn, this reminded me of a recent experience in King's Lynn: there, huge numbers of people lived in "yards" -- tiny 1-up/1-down or 2-up/2-down houses grouped in pedestrianised alleys and courtyards off the main streets.


Most of these have long-since disappeared, in slum clearances of the 1920s and 30s.


But one or two still remain (including part of a local history museum) to give you a flavour of what an entire district was once like.


They really were tiny -- especially for the extended families that would have lived in many -- although some of these photos appear to show at least some of them being well-kept (but without sanitation, the gutters in the street would be used to dispose of urine and all sorts of other unpleasantnesses).


It often seems that richer people can more easily live in crowded, cramped developments (see the Barbican in the City of London, for instance), but that pressured or unhappy communities quickly turn on them.


An aside to illustrate my point: Whitening Yard, seen above, was in 1882 the scene of the brutal killing of a 19 year old, James Stannard, by the family who lived next door: the teenager had asked his neighbours not to let their children bully his younger siblings, and they set upon him.

This architecture then reminded me of Japanese architect Tadao Ando's exquisite but tiny house in Osaka.


Built of the most brutal materials -- concrete and glass -- this tiny, tiny house (did I emphasise just how tiny it is?) turns in on itself, like many historic houses (traditional Roman villas, for instance).


In Ando's house the outside world is presented with an almost blank facade of shuttered concrete...


...while the four main rooms are grouped around a central light-well which also houses the (external) staircase.


I'm not sure I'd be disciplined enough to live in somewhere like this, but Ando's architecture can be much more generous.


Even though he always uses the same apparently limited palette of materials (and colours), his buildings are living sculptures that often seem to express an exuberant joy at their place in the landscape, seeming almost to flex and breathe as the light around them changes.


Smallness isn't necessarily unpopular in the marketplace: tiny mews houses in Kensington & Chelsea can go for £1 million and up.


These houses look, to me, as quasi-industrial as Ando's Japanese row house -- but just with a patina of age.


Many mews houses have been refurbished with a more contemporary feel to them -- things like this are not at all uncommon:


But designing them from new is less usual -- here's a delightful set in Dublin:


Maybe Tadao Ando's approach is not so alien, after all.