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Ferdinand

Entry posted by Ferdinand

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I think that the pleasure of living in a house is at least as important as its design and performance. The ability to get that right in advance from mere conversations with a client seems to me to me to be the core skill of a good architect.

This ebuild blog is a conversation around this theme, named for a famous quote from Ludwig (really) Mies van der Rohe.

My conversation starters will be details of buildings, but also details of how things are built, that I find interesting or attractive. My hope that others will respond with their agreements and disagreements.

I have started the blog after a pointer from an article "Whither Fashion" by Caliwag from July 2013 to a book "A Garden and Three Houses" by Jane Brown and Richard Bryant. The book is about a small scheme called Turn End by an architect - Peter Aldington - who was unknown to me. Peter and his wife Margaret built their house themselves in 1963, and have lived there for half a century.

My own project is to find out how to build an energy efficient 2 or 3 bedroom studio bungalow as a viable build-to-let, which is also a home prospective tenants want to live in. I have one that works well already, which I will write about in the future, but can one be built for a reasonable budget in 2014, and how? 

This is also a process of finding the right details and setting them in the right context.

To add some meat to the first post, here's Peter Aldington himself talking about the house he and his wife built in 1963 and have lived in for half a century.

Watch out for the discussion about sun and light, but also their perspective on sleeping in your living room for 50 years. And that hanging staircase goes to a storage loft.

Here's a frame from the video. Yes - those are bifold doors 1963-style. Ecclesiastes was right, there is nothing new under the sun.

vmu42b.jpg

(Note: I will embed the video if I subdue the technology, but for now please follow this link).

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Ferdinand

A Comment reproduced from the orginal copy of this blog post:

ProDave
04 Jul 2014 12:01 PM

He talks a lot of sense.

I have to say, most of it (to me at least) is common sense. Of course you want the main living rooms looking out onto a private garden. Of course you want those main rooms to get a good deal of sunlight etc. Why would you do anything else?

We chose our present plot (over another available nearby) because it faces south and we can get all of that (the other plot faced north making that a whole lot harder)

Of course not everyone has the choice to buy a south facing plot with a private non overlooked garden.

But all this makes me think back to the mid 1980's when I bought my first house, a 1 bedroom mid terrace "starter home" brand new off plan on the development. It staggered me that the builders paid no attention whatsoever to the orientation on the site of particular houses. They just built 3 different designs of house (1,2 and 3 bedroom ones) all identical across the site. So depending on the position on the site, some have lovely sunny south facing living rooms, others had dark dismal north facing main rooms. It would not have been rocket science to have 2 or 3 different layouts of each house type so they all could have benefited from sunlight. I chose one off plan specifically to get a south west facing garden (with the living room at the back of the 1 bed houses) which was the best I could do. None of the 1 bed ones faced south. I thought even back then "I can do better than this myself"

 

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Ferdinand

A Comment reproduced from the orginal copy of this blog post:

caliwag
11 Jul 2014 11:47 AM

Great find that Video Ferdinand...thanks for posting.

Sadly I suspect very few students at schools of architecture have heard of Peter either. I don't recall his name when I was at S of A. 1976-1981 .He was never really fashionable, somewhat like Ralph Erskine, Carlo Scarpa and many more who cared for effects of climate, light and detail (the nub of Ferdinand's blog): great stuff...let's turn this 'what can an architect do for me?' thread on its head. Jim

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