Small is not beautiful - when it comes to homes

In the latest blast in its campaign to see more spacious and lighter homes, the RIBA has issued the results of a poll by IPSOS Mori showing that natural light and space are the most important consideration in our homes. 80% of the public would be more likely to choose a home with minimum space standards and, damningly, wanting more space and light is the main reason why people in new homes would consider moving. This is part of the RIBA's HomeWise campaign for better homes and coincides with its launch of a new and rather snazzy website. The kneejerk response is of course that we can't afford anything better than the minimum. But this is madness. Despite the very real financial crisis, by most measures this country is more affluent than at almost any time in history. Some of Victorians were horribly overcrowded in slum dwellings. We should not go back to that way of living. It is no coincidence that mean residences so quickly can become slums - it only takes a small change in the way we live to make such a dictatorial residence (only one way of using it) uninhabitable.

Why websites can be so wrong

I was talking to an architect recently about his work and he told me not to rely on what I saw on his website as it was so out of date. Then when I decided to email him, he told me that the spelling of his name (and hence his practice's name) on the email address given on his website was wrong. Websites are meant to be a communication tool, but sometimes they can be more of a miscommunication tool.
Recently Sutherland Lyall and I revived an idea we had a few years ago for appraising and improving architects' websites. Originally we developed a sophisticated matrix for scoring and found some shocking examples, even among the big names. This time we carried out a simplified version, giving a quick fire assessment of six practices' sites in 15 minutes total at the Guerilla Tactics conference for small practices at the RIBA.
Full marks to the six who bared their strengths and weaknesses. And there were some elementary errors: the website with no email address, the site where it appeared at first glance that the practice had built nothing, the practice where none of the work came up on Google. Not to mention the blogs and news sections where most content was a year old.
A good website can be a vital tool in a practice's marketing armoury. A bad one is useless at best and a turn-off at worst. Setting up a website requires commitment. So does maintaining it. But it is an effort worth making.

Is it too good to be true?

Can it be possible? The RIBA's Future Homes Commission has proposed a means for local authorities to invest in new housing using money that, effectively, is just sitting around.
Its idea is that they can set up a housing fund from part of the money that they are holding in their pension funds. Of course this money is not 'doing nothing'. It is invested elsewhere. What the RIBA is suggesting is that they invest in their own future. It would take an accountancy expert to work out what exactly would happen to the value of those assets - presumably at some stage the local authority would have to sell them on to a housing association in order to realise the money for its pension pot? But it is a really exciting idea. It gives a central role back to local authorities, it gives them a vested interest in making sure that the housing they produce is well designed, appropriate and well-maintained. It is the localism that the government claims to want, although not in the form that it foresaw.
Will it happen though? That, I fear, is the hardest question of all.

Don't forget the drainage

Congratulations to Wilkinson Eyre, whose Guangzhou International Finance Centre is one of the projects to make it onto the shortlist for the Lubetkin Prize, the RIBA's award for buildings outside the EU.
Not only is the tower the tallest building by a British architect, but it is also a proper, decent piece of architecture - otherwise it would never have been shortlisted. It is however representative of much of the architecture in China's biggest cities, in that it reflects a desire to be bigger, newer, taller and smarter than its neighbours.

This attitude may have implications for the overall urban design of cities, but today journalist and China specialist Isabel Hilton spoke on the Today programme about a much more immediate concern. This interest in bling, she said, may be at the expense of vital infrastructure. She was talking about the recent dreadful floods in Beijing, to which official figures attribute more than 60 deaths. While most of her report was about the way that social media are allowing citizens to contradict the official line, she mentioned that a contributing cause is believed to be a simple lack of drainage. Much of Beijing has been paved over to accommodate the rush to develop, and no new flood drains have been built to compensate. Victorian London, famously, became livable through the attention to water supply, drainage and sewage. Beijing's experience is a timely reminder that we neglect infrastructure at our peril, especially in our increasingly volatile climate.