drafts:bd_online_blog_001 [re.search.notes]

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There are no new spatial solutions to be found in the field of housing design. Or perhaps more accurately; there are no new spatial problems. Relax, you can stop looking. The essential human needs - be they psychological or phenomenological - have been met in our shared understanding of the home for centuries. Even the most idiosyncratic of new houses today (hello Japan) are in essence a rearrangement of a familiar set of archetypes; cloaked in the privacy of hiding beneath the linen draped table legs of our childhood, sinking beneath the earth to the cellar of our teenage years or climbing the stairs of the attic to dream of the past from the heights of our adulthood. Meanwhile, between the oblivion of the flames in the fireplace and the immediacy of the street outside the window we command our domain from our very own panopticon or camera obscura. If you don't believe me try some Charles Moore, Christopher Alexander and Gaston Bachelard or, for the less clichéd alternative, go for Clive King and Roger Deakin.

<wrap hi>"Once you've put a chimney and a window on a house, you've really made a house."</wrap>

Clive King - Stig Of The Dump

"I really do want to come home to a real fire. A nation without the flames of a fire in the hearth, and birds singing outside the open window, has lost its soul. To have an ancient carboniferous forest brought to life at the centre of your home, its flames budding and shooting up like young trees, is a work of magic."

Roger Deakin - Notes From Walnut Tree Farm

Yet there is change and for brief, lurching, uncertain moments, progress too. The poetic amongst you - enthused by the liberal mention of the esoteric thinkers above - may be disappointed however to find that the reason for this progress is actually to do with something slightly more prosaic: namely, the plumbing. Technology is the driving force.

Whilst I, and many like me, may spend hours lying awake at night antagonising over the nuances of the relationship between the stairs and the chimney breast (to my mind one of the key spatial manoeuvres in a home), it's often ultimately the service spaces that are the central narrative of day to day life, regardless of the type or size of the property.

Charles Moore's 196??? seminal work 'The Place of Houses' calls this the order of machines. Alongside his more seductive explorations into the order of rooms and the order of dreams I suspect the machines are too often neglected by his readers. In our 21st century adventure to peak oil and beyond I say this order needs to be shown a bit more respect.

The scullery needs to make a come back.

Leaf through the pages of any housing design book from the late 40's and early 50's and you'll see why. Kitchen services, fuel storage and the developing mechanical installations we began to grapple with as we started to explore whole house heating systems dominate the housing layouts. We had a healthy respect for the importance of the order of machines; a respect that has to return if we are to make our houses perform to the standards we so pressingly require to make it to the carbon reduction finish line in 2050.

Here's Walter Segal in his 1947 book 'Home and Environment' examining our access to - and control of - the serviced spaces.

*image of segal kitchen location diagram*

The health and well-being questions raised by two issues as simple as the provision of front to back access and/or the location of the kitchen are as relevant now as then. Density demands, be they political or economical, continue to encourage a predominance of narrow-fronted or terrace type developments in many new build schemes and the circulation through these service zones remains the greatest problem. I'm interested in how the scullery can be the mediator in this often unhappy relationship.

Walter goes on to explore some house types that order their machines nicely. Here's his 'compromise type':

*image of compromise type*

Note the annotation in that space alongside the kitchen. Note also the dedicated access - two doors to the street!

Here's his 'castellated' type:

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The principle remains the same but here he introduces the opportunity for secure, semi-private outdoor space at the front. A buffer zone preventing the house from spilling its service guts directly onto the pavement.

Here's my personal favourite, the 'patio type':

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The creation of modestly sized outdoor space, well used because of it's privacy and connection to the house, combined with the fenestration/overlooking control on this type make it ripe for a revisit. It's certainly proved a useful typology in some of our Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust work recently. Note again however, the control of the machines kept successfully away from the living spaces.

That annotation I highlighted - fuel, cycles etc - is where it gets interesting. How often under current space standard regimes do you see house types that have the ability to accommodate that sort of provision today? Yet the likely return of increased quantities of mechanical equipment and the continued encouragement of sustainable transport will surely demand it. If team biomass win the argument, we'll all need space in our homes like this and, as the folks at HAT Projects pointed out to me on twitter last week, it'll also be jolly useful if the local produce debate takes hold and we need more fresh food storage.

A final example. Here's an LCC scheme by Tayler and Green from 19** that I discovered only last week in FRS Yorke's 'The New Small House'.

*****

It was the beautifully mannered elevation that caught my eye, but it was the plan that got me thinking and writing this blog entry.

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Check out that big space simply marked 'S'. It took me a few moments to realise that this meant more than just store - it's a scullery.

I'm focusing on that word, given it's infrequent use page today, in an effort to make the idea stick. Call it a utility if you prefer. Either way, our housing needs to once again make sure that the utilitarian is given proper attention and house types built with the right order of machines as well as rooms and dreams.

If nothing else it'll perhaps allow me to stop peppering my schemes with crappy sheds that ruin modest gardens, just because Code for Sustainable Homes says I have to.

p.s. - and please, let's have no more house types in which you have to walk through the living room to get to the kitchen.