Homes fit for a post-Covid world
IT IS HARD TO SAY WHETHER the suburbs of Britain rejected contemporary architecture first or whether contemporary architecture rejected the suburbs. But by 1999, when Richard Rogers published Towards an Urban Renaissance, contemporary architecture, still ostensibly motivated by the progressive tenets of modernism, had deserted the field.
The report argued that Britain’s rising population should be housed in denser housing in the urban core rather than in expanding suburbs, preparing the ground for the surge in contemporary high-rises in city centres across the UK. Not only did Rogers’s proposals, picked up by the New Labour government, give modern character to an age-old schism, they doubled down on a planning system that could never provide enough quantity and variety in size of apartments to cope with the surge in demand. Britain’s population grew by 8 million between 2000 and 2020.
At the same time, traditional architecture began its domination of suburban development. By the end of the millennium, the first phase of the Prince of Wales’s model settlement Poundbury, a Milk Tray box of housing stuck on the side of Dorchester in Dorset in different traditional styles, was nearly complete. Since then there has been a thorough parting of the ways, with contemporary architecture reserved for urban centres, the odd semi-rural cultural building or a stylish weekend rural retreat aside. The fiftieth anniversary of Milton Keynes’s incorporation as a new town in 2017 raised nothing but rueful smiles and a nagging sense of an opportunity lost among contemporary architects.
Tim Abrahams is a former editor of Blueprint magazine and Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is also a publisher with Machine Books
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