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JRF names shortlisted teams in design and build competition for new suburban homes

Background to the Design and Build Competition

In 2005, the JRF sponsored a design and build competition to draw out the possibilities and provide the inspiration for the best designs – for housing associations, housebuilders and house buyers – for suburban housing in this new century. The emphasis was on relatively inexpensive, affordable housing.

We hope to commission the winning entry to be built on land we own in the centre of New Earswick, on the north side of York. But, the competition was intended to provide us with ideas for a much larger development we are planning as an urban extension on the east side of York, at "Derwenthorpe".

This paper explains the thinking behind the JRF Trustees' decision to organise this competition.

Four million new homes

The JRF has been at the forefront in pressing for acute housing shortages to be eased by the building of more homes, as definitively argued by Kate Barker's Bank of England report for the Chancellor last year. The government has now taken this issue on board: it is busy modernising the planning system, streamlining the bureaucracy, finding more resources for the housing associations, and designating "Growth Areas" in London and the South East and Eastern Regions.

The last time there was an energetic pursuit of more housing numbers, huge mistakes were made – in the 1960s and 1970s with tower blocks and concrete Council estates. Many of these developments have not stood the test of time and widespread demolition has followed.

The private sector has not done much better than the public sector: volume housebuilders have produced standardised homes, so often in soulless estates, around every town and city.

Although British architects win international awards for major commercial and cultural buildings, domestic / residential architecture for middle and lower market has been largely ignored. The JRF has done its bit in the award-winning designs of our CASPAR schemes (City-Centre Apartments for Single People at Affordable Rents) and other housing associations like Peabody and Guinness have done some imaginative high density urban projects. However, the majority of the new homes of the next twenty years will be "ordinary" low-rise, suburban developments – some on big "brown field" sites like airfields, some in urban extensions on the side of existing towns (particularly in the Growth Areas) and some in the Millennium Villages elsewhere.

What will all these new homes look like? What will be distinctive and different about the suburbs of the 21st Century? Is the answer the "pastiche" architecture of Poundbury, which seeks to recreate a Dorset village of the 19th Century? What could inspire housebuilders to move on from their identikit houses that look the same wherever they are in the United Kingdom? Will the quest for "modern methods of construction" and procurement techniques intended to drive down costs lead to even duller design for affordable housing? How will the raising of energy efficiency / environmental standards affect the external appearance of tomorrow's new homes?

The JRF pedigree

The JRF can lay some claim to being a godparent of 20th Century suburban architecture and design. Inspired by Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1899), Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree commissioned Raymond Unwin and his brother-in-law Barry Parker, in 1902, to plan and design our model village on 163 acres to the north of York. When the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust (the precursor of the JRF) was created in 1904, it adopted the master plan of Unwin and Parker and proceeded to build the garden suburb of New Earswick.

Parker and Unwin went on to design the new garden city at Letchworth in 1904 and in 1905 they planned the Hampstead Garden Suburb for Dame Henrietta Barnett. Unwin moved into one of his own designs in Letchworth in 1905 and Parker moved into the property semi-detached to it in 1906.

Gavin Stamp in The English House 1860-1914 – writes of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb:

"Here is the humanity of the vision, both social and architectural. Most domestic architects were apolitical – probably Conservative, if anything – after all, they worked for the rich if they could; but some, like Lethaby, Parker and Unwin, shared the socialist ideals of Morris and Webb. They believed that the benefits of a good, homely, well-built domestic architecture should not be enjoyed only by the comparatively wealthy but by everybody. The detached countryside English House could be built simpler, smaller and more cheaply without losing its charm or integrity. At Letchworth, Port Sunlight and other garden suburbs [like New Earswick], architects showed how cottages could be cottages still, decent houses in which ordinary people could live. Often they had to be grouped together but the uniformity of the working class tenement was always avoided. Each tenant could feel he was living in a house – his castle – and in a villagy atmosphere which was healthy. Architects both famous and obscure addressed themselves to the problem of designing cheap but decent housing and several competitions were held, notably the 1905 "Cheap Cottages Exhibition" at Letchworth where cottages were built for £150 if possible.

"Garden suburbs, garden cities and well-designed public housing represented an ideal which was very English: a confident assumption that the less-well-off aspired to what the better-off had; it was an ideal of levelling up rather than levelling down, an expression of the social fluidity of British society. If the social experiment of an organic community has failed in places like Hampstead Garden Suburb, it is because the houses intended for the artisan have proved equally attractive to the stockbroker."

One hundred years after the birth of New Earswick we are heavily involved in the design of another major development which provides the opportunity to put a stamp on design for the suburbs of the 21st Century. This makes us as interested as anyone in a repetition of the 1905 "Cheap Cottages Exhibition".

Building the winning design

We have recently received outline planning consent for "Derwenthorpe" which comprises 540 homes on about 50 acres in the ownership of our partners, the City of York Council. (See http://www.jrf.org.uk/housingandcare/derwenthorpe/.) PRP Architects are planning the first phase of 65 homes but we have not yet determined the detailed design of the housing.

Our immediate opportunity is to develop a sensitive site in the heart of New Earswick, opposite the "Folk Hall", the community centre. We think six homes could be built here. It is this small development which is the subject of our competition, but with the hope that ideas generated from this project will influence our major development thereafter.

Our competition will aim to achieve a mix of houses and flats, for sale and rent, with an emphasis on affordability: because the tenure of each home should not be apparent and the quality should not vary according to the tenure, regard must be paid, for all the houses, to the cost limits for affordable housing set out by the Housing Corporation. However, the JRF would expect to see high eco-standards, if necessary covering the costs by a subvention to the scheme. We will also insist that the homes meet the Lifetime Homes standards of accessibility which were devised by a JRF-led initiative and are universally applied to all our developments. The site lies within a conservation area, calling for further sensitivity on the part of the architects.

To guard against a pioneering design that is unworkable in practice, we have decided on a design and build competition: we would expect the winning team to deliver the housing at a fixed price.

Organising the competition

We have some experience of design and build competitions having run three of these, for the CASPAR schemes and for a model office development in York.

We are delighted that Les Sparks, previously Director of Planning and Architecture for the City of Birmingham, and now a CABE Commissioner, has agreed to act as Co-ordinator and Adviser for the project. We are inviting a panel of judges to provide us with links to the key agencies:

• CABE – which has been supportive of our Derwenthorpe project;
• the Housing Corporation – for whom the exercise may be helpful in drawing out good design for affordable housing projects elsewhere;
• English Partnerships – which has special responsibilities for major private and public development on both green field and brown field sites;
• the housebuilders – who are getting more interested in design, on the back of opportunities to sell to a more "discerning" purchaser;
• plus representation from the local community and an Observer from the City of York Council.

The panel will be chaired by a JRF Trustee.

A number of those involved will have close connections with the RIBA. And the outcome could be of interest also to English Heritage (which said recently: "New design...is especially important in the context of the need to build new and sustainable communities in the Thames Gateway and M11 corridor. Here is a chance to reinvent an English vernacular that derives its energy and inspiration from a full and proper understanding of the human landscape; contemporary design that neither parodies the past nor brutally suppresses the texture and topography of today's landscape. This will need leadership and partnership, the seeds of which already exist. They will need to be grown and grown quickly if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the post war era").

Process and costs

The process involves:

• advertisement in the Architects Journal and Building magazine in February;
• inviting interested teams of architects / developers / QSs to express an interest by the end of March;
• selection of four finalists by our judges – advised by Les Sparks – at a meeting in York on 15 April. Each finalist will receive an award of £10,000;
• interviews for the four with the judges and selection of a winner on 15 July.

In the meantime, the JRF will be carrying out remedial work to the site, which was previously a garage and then a second-hand car outlet, so we are ready to go when the competition concludes.

RICHARD BEST
February 2005