At Home in Britain: Designing the House of Tomorrow
The exhibition 'At Home in Britain' re-examined how we live and speculated on the future of housing in Britain. Taking the cottage, the terraced house and the flat as a starting point and using the RIBA Collections as stimulus, six newly commissioned works from contemporary architecture practices Jamie Fobert Architects, Mӕ, Maison Edouard François, Mecanoo, Studio Weave and vPPR transform these three familiar housing types to reflect the way we live and work in the 21st century.
Here RIBApix features three galleries of these housing types to highlight the huge range of material held in the RIBA Collections. Discover the remarkable variety of cottages often shaped by locally available building materials. Explore the development of flats from model housing and seminal Modern Movement blocks including Highpoint One to post war reconstruction and notorious housing failures such as Hutchesontown C which had replaced the tenement blocks of the Gorbals. Witness how terraced housing functions at all levels of society and continues to be adapted in modern styles.
NOTES: Hutchesontown C was the name given to a so-called Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) of an area of the city of Glasgow, designed by Basil Spence in 1960-1965. The design of the central 20-storey block was inspired by Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, Marseille. It was demolished in 1993.
NOTES: The market town of Milton Abbas was demolished in its entirety by the Earl of Dochester between 1771 and 1790. He commissioned Capability Brown the plans for a new village, consisting mainly of cottages lining up the main street. The cottages were designed by Sir William Chambers.
NOTES: The building of Killingworth Township began in 1963, was undertaken by Northumberland County Council and was not sponsored by the Government. The demolition of this 3-tier housing estate of the township was undertaken by the Architects' Department of the Metropolitan Borough of North Tyneside.
NOTES: This multi-family housing development was one of the first major examples in Britain of community architecture. Erskine oversaw the development of this project, begun in 1972 and completed in 1978, allowing for tenant cooperation and architectural innovation on a large scale.