Architect and educator Astrid Smitham: You can build good housing for the same cost as bad housing

In one interview, you said, “There is no excuse for bad housing.” What then specifically constitutes “good housing” for you?

Good housing works both technically and socially. Even though a building’s technical side is easier to solve, in the UK we still have major problems with basic building physics. Most new buildings are prone to overheating and some even have mould and damp. 

Then there is the question of how homes work socially – both in the collective sense and within a household. Apartment buildings in the UK are typically based around a shared dark corridor, artificially lit, artificially ventilated, often hot or smelly. This is the “collective space” – the environment in which you encounter your neighbours. The building itself presupposes a certain kind of behaviour, namely that people won’t really speak to each other very much.

Conversely, a well-designed building can create opportunities for informal encounters, support the emergence of a community, and help alleviate social isolation. The same goes for the apartment itself – good housing should be open to unforeseen uses. During Covid, it became clear that many apartments in the UK were designed so that they could not even accommodate a desk. Something as small as that was almost impossible in many apartments, as they were designed only for a sofa, a TV and a small dining table.

A home must allow for ways of living that are not predefined, that are ultimately chosen by future occupants and their lifestyles. And as architects, we must ensure that this is possible – in simple terms by how we dimension spaces, the materials we use, and the connections we make between spaces.

It sounds like there is a housing crisis in your country too. How affordable is housing in Great Britain?

It's quite possible that the housing crisis in the UK is even worse than the Czech housing crisis. A recent study, which drew on data from all European countries, found that the UK is the least affordable nation – the country with the highest proportion of individuals spending more than 40% of their income on housing.

In the UK we’re living through the effects of a neoliberal experiment with housing that has been going on here since the early 1980s, and we're now at a total breakdown of availability and affordability.

And to this I would add that we have a crisis in design itself, something which is talked about far less. When Britain does build new homes, which could provide an opportunity to do things better, homes are usually badly designed and poorly built. 

How would you address the housing crisis?

This question actually brings me back to why there is no excuse for bad housing. You can create good housing with the same budget as building bad housing. And that is a great irony. In Britain, it is mainly developers and high-volume housing construction companies that build. And because there is a housing crisis and extremely high demand, there is no incentive to improve quality.

There needs to be massive investment from the state in well-designed housing. This would have a knock-on effect of raising the bar for developers and therefore the quality of housing for everyone. An investment of this kind would pay for itself over time.

Simultaneously there would have to be regulation over long term empty flats – and there are a lot of them in London. A combination of different approaches is needed and would significantly improve the situation. But the political will is still lacking.

Rental housing is often considered less prestigious. How can we improve its quality and restore its former glory?

A very strong desire to own property is pervasive in British society. This is an ideological position. Rental housing could equally be considered better than ownership, renting could become the norm and ownership the exception as in some other countries. The problem is that in the UK you only acquire meaningful rights to a home if you own it. And that is very sad.

While some adjustments are being planned in terms of ending “no fault evictions”, renters live with a lot of uncertainty. At the moment, a landlord can cancel an agreement at any time and raise rents extortionately each year, without giving reasons. Laws favour landlords.

Your biggest and most highly acclaimed project is the House for Artists. The building is adaptable and the units can be connected in different ways. What specifically can the residents transform in the building? And do you think they really take advantage of it?

The building is designed with a high degree of flexibility, which can be perceived in different time frames and scales. 

Within the apartment, a basic principle was to eliminate the internal corridor – the space that it would normally occupy has been added to the living rooms so these are 10 m² larger than usual. This extra space gives flexibility, allowing for variable uses: a desk, a piano, a big dinner table, a play area. One of the residents uses the living room as a painting studio. This is a level of adaptability that the residents can use daily, monthly.

Another flexible part of the apartment is the kitchen. The basic core of the kitchen – items requiring plumbing and electrical connections is provided. The rest is decided by the residents themselves. Every kitchen in the house looks different today.

Tenants can add or remove partitions to change the number of rooms, something which is typically impossible in rental agreements. The rent does not increase when a partition is added, because the floor area remains the same. The rules are simple – if you add something, you do not have to remove it when you move, if you remove something, you do put it back. This was useful during construction: one resident was expecting a baby and asked for a partition to create an extra bedroom. On the other hand, another family is already planning to remove a partition when their children move out. So, this is a kind of adaptability that is put into use over a time horizon of several years.

And then there's the long-term scale – maybe 50 years or more. The apartments are designed so they could also function as work spaces, clinics, or classrooms. This means the building could serve a completely different function over time.

Did you use a participatory approach in the design process itself? Did you talk to the artists about their needs? 

In the design stage, the individual future residents were not known yet. It is council housing rather than a cooperative where you know the residents from the start. So, we spoke to many people, and artists, and the residents as soon as we could, but it was very important that the building would work for people we didn’t’t know and for people who would be there twenty or thirty years from now. That is why adaptability is key. We think of it as a lifetime participation between building and resident.

While the building is for artists, we were really looking at exploring a new, more flexible, more sociable model of housing for the whole of Britain. But designing for artists allowed us to work more experimentally. If the building hadn't been for artists, there are some things we would not have been allowed to do as designers. But now a lot of our proposals are understood as relevant. For example, artists often work from home, so this something we integrated into the design. Following Covid, anyone might work from home. It needs to be more widely understood that everyone needs adaptable homes.

You say that a lot of buildings in London are overheating these days. How have you dealt with this aspect?

The building has shared loggias to the south, which serve as access to the apartments but also as collective balconies. Residents say that these spaces are key in how they meet and get to know each other. They say the shared space gives them a sense of security – they know who is coming and going, and feel seen, if anyone is in trouble.

At the same time, the loggias act as shading – in winter they let the sun deep into the apartments, and in summer they prevent the sun from overheating the apartments, which remain pleasantly cool without air conditioning.

The building is made of concrete. What was your thinking on its environmental impact and long-term sustainability?

The building was originally going to be made of glulam timber. But during the first stage of the project, the Grenfell Tower fire happened. It completely changed the approach to fire regulations in the UK. Even though timber was not a factor in the tragedy, it could no longer be used in multistorey housing. 

After this we had to look at standard UK materials. We chose concrete, because it could serve as the structure, facade and fire protection. We replaced 50% of the cement with granulated blast furnace slag, and kept all other materials lean, rather than adding more layers of carbon heavy material like brick. So the building has a better embodied carbon balance than the UK's 2030 targets. Regulations do need to change in the UK in relation to timber, but this was a solution for a specific context.

There are “only” 12 studio apartments in the building. Do you think the project is scalable to a larger scale?

Yes, the building is designed to be scalable. The key is to have a maximum of three to four apartments grouped together – that way people know each other and feel safe. But these groups can be arranged on both sides of a staircase.

People that don’t live there often bring up the issue of privacy, but residents say that this has never been an issue – about half the residents don’t even have curtains. In the UK we have a major loneliness crisis and many people would like to say hello to their neighbours and feel a connection with a community. I think that if there is a clearly defined private space, there can also be a clearly defined shared space. 

There are various ways to customize the connection to the shared space. You can use curtains or plants, or you can situate the kitchen towards the shared space. I don't think we should design on the assumption that everyone hates their neighbours, yet, that’s exactly what we do in the UK. And then we wonder why we have such a big problem with loneliness.

You transformed the Manor Park Library in London into a public space for artists and creators. You inserted several movable lightweight walls made of wood and glass into the listed building. What is their significance?

These glass partitions divide the space into individual studios while making sure the historic Edwardian library rooms can still be experienced in their entirety. But these rooms also had a social function: that open, transparent environment made it very easy to see who was in and say hello to people. We had a studio there ourselves for five years ourselves and saw how many people made friends there. If someone wanted more privacy, they could just hang a poster or a curtain on the partition. An open space can be made more closed, but it is hard to make a closed space more open. There were also more conventionally private studios elsewhere in the building, so people had a choice. 

How did you view the building's historic preservation?

When we took over the building, it was neglected. It had lain empty for several years – it was damp, some of the structures were rotten and we discovered beautiful parquet and terrazzo covered with cheap vinyl.

We removed the existing accumulations but tried to keep our interventions in the building to a minimum. Still, we allowed ourselves to be playful – for example, a detail where a wall passes over a radiator shows the meeting of old and new. And it is actually practical, as the radiator heats both spaces. I think we sometimes take old buildings too seriously even when they are quite fun in their design. Playfulness is part of the historic context.

This is another project where you focus on artists. Why do you consistently focus on artists in your work?

Before studying architecture, Nicholas (Nicholas Lobo Brennan, co-founder of Apparata studio – ed.) and I both studied art, and it has been part of our practice from the start. From an architectural perspective, we find working with and for artists supports experimental approaches.

You studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and the ETH Zurich. You now live and work in London. Standards and context of designing vary from country to country. Does this not limit you in your designing?

After graduating, I started working as an architect in Switzerland. My experience was that the regulations and space standards there were clear and supported architects to design to a high standard. In Britain it is different – ​​the regulations are complicated, sometimes outright contradictory, and they lack a holistic view over what architecture they result in: for example, there is an implied tendency towards inner corridors but this has an effect on overheating, ventilation and poor-quality shared spaces.

That is why we always start the design work with the regulations. At the House for Artists, our first meeting was with a fire consultant. By working with regulations from the start we were able to design an outdoor walkway that could be furnished, and give the apartments more usable space and flexibility. In the end it is about knowing the regulations well and engaging with them in the creative process.

Last year, you and Nicholas were visiting professors at the Technical University of Vienna. You are now teaching at the AA in London. What do you devote yourself to with your students?

We try to work both anthropologically and constructionally. We try to engage with the important topics of our time – climate, social isolation, biosphere loss. It is easy to feel powerless against today’s crises, so we try to equip students to feel able to be propositional and positive about what a future architecture might be.

For housing for example, we guided our students through anthropological studies, drawing the homes of their ancestors. It was extremely revealing and liberating to go through this process – to document carefully how differently people lived within living memory both socially and in terms of low carbon technologies. 

Our current ideas about housing are often relatively new. For example, having bedrooms and living rooms with fixed functions is a relatively recent thing. As is the concept of a nuclear family living without other people in the household. In everyday practice, you are tasked with designing a certain number of one-bedroom, two-bedroom or three-bedroom apartments of certain sizes with certain bathrooms and kitchens – alone the brief contains a huge number of assumptions about how people live. With their research, students recognize that prevailing ideas can be limited, inappropriate, and that they can design both more freely and more meaningfully.

Apparata has exhibited in many places, including the Venice Biennale of Architecture. For the Bahrain Pavilion, you designed a translucent structure inside which people can stop and listen to a sound piece based around the Friday Sermon. How did you approach working with a topic that is both politically and culturally sensitive?

For one, by working closely with the curators and their interpretation. But also by responding to the work and site: at the Venice Biennale, you see one installation after another, you see so much that it can be difficult to concentrate on each new exhibit. Therefore, we wanted to create a space where the visitor can pause, even has to pause, to listen to the audio work and enjoy calm. The structure worked with light, supported a shared experience and, with its lightness and playfulness, offered different possibilities for use.

This year’s November Talks will focus on housing. What perspective on housing will you be bringing to Prague? 

I have called the talk What Housing Owes People. I would like to talk about designs that do not strictly pre-determine use, about a lifetime participation between building and occupant. I will talk from the perspective of the British context, because Britain should serve as a warning to other countries on the failure of adopting a neoliberal approach to housing provision. But also, on a positive note, about what ways of living homes can enable.

If you were to recommend one book about housing that every architect should read, what would it be?

For me the book, Family and Kinship in East London is very important, it is a 1957 sociological study that speaks about the vital role of wide and informal networks between individuals and extended family that make a community beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family home. It addresses the experience of women, of childcare, companionship and social isolation in the post war reconstruction of London and has not stopped being relevant in how we should think about housing.

Interview by Sára Kročková.