P3 - On Living and Working
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All architecture must, by its very nature, address living – all spatial practice is defined by the people who move through, interact with, and live within it. However, within the modern built environment, the architecture of labour and work is extremely alienated from the domestic, the homely, architecture designed for living.
In prehistoric and pre-industrial epochs, working people almost invariably lived alongside or within their workplaces – the merchant above their shop, the farmer amongst their fields, the day labourer in tents and shanty towns that followed the roads and railways that they were constructing. However, with the advent of a more advanced capitalist mode of production, labour forces were concentrated in factories and urban environments like never before, meaning more and more people could not live where they worked. Instead, they were forced to join an ever-expanding class of commuters, one which in the 20th century came to define our urban spaces through the car and the road. Now, the vast majority of people in Scotland commute to and from work by car and public transport, and most of them travel distances further than 5km (61.4%, Census data).
One new method of bridging the divide between work and living is the work from home, or WFH, movement. WFH was popularised during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many people and employers discovered that whilst being at home, they could continue much of the same labour that was previously carried out in offices, and that they could spend much less time on said labour. While this could potentially speak to the pointlessness and inessential nature of much of these white-collar jobs (Graeber, D, Bullshit Jobs. 2013), they allowed people to spend more time with their family, cut pollution from the daily commute, and improved the efficiency of labour in many cases. Nice work, if you can get it. While this was happening, nurses, shop clerks, binmen, janitors, industrial workers, farm labourers, line cooks and the millions of other working-class people who grease the wheels of our modern society had to continue to work the same or more hours, doing harder work in a much more precarious situation where any interaction with another human could give them a serious respiratory illness. While the WFH phenomenon was widely covered and discussed, the people who actually did the physical labour of maintaining society throughout a global pandemic went severely underappreciated, despite the periodic clapping from doorsteps.
Throughout the past decade, architecture has mainly explored the live/work relationship through WFH (Holliss, F, Beyond Live/Work. 2015, & Yudina, A, Home Work. 2018 ) . This is in perhaps quite a selfish manner; after all, despite much of the big talk about collaborative practice and studio culture, much of the day-to-day work of the architect can be carried out on a laptop in a home office or in bed, as it was during the pandemic. Furthermore, as WFH remains the domain of the “professional”, middle and upper classes, those who work from home also have the necessary capital for private architectural work, much more than the rubbish collector or furloughed factory worker. Another potential reason is that although there is much fertile ground to be covered in the work from home space, much of it also sticks to very simple, easy to manifest typologies; the home office; the extension/ shed for working; the bedroom-cum-study. Creating a domestic space that addresses the work of inhabitants who happen to be fruit-pickers, or binmen, or shop clerks potentially involves much more complex, personalised typologies and adaptations that are more subtle and encompass the whole of a space. This perhaps necessitates developing a set of typologies and practices which do not place the architect at the centre of the design process, instead pushing forward residents and other spatial practitioners and stakeholders.
The brief of this project asks us not only to address the live/work tautology, but also the site and area of our terraced housing. And whilst the broad task to “address live/work”, paired with a relatively short project timespan, may naturally lead to thinking and designing for WFH, is that what Forres really needs?
The problem of commuting and transport to work in rural areas like Forres is even more enhanced; the lack of public transport means people need to spend longer travelling, walk further or spend more to own a car. However, Forres faces perhaps more important issues for working people. Housing in the area is more expensive than the national average, and there is almost no social housing provision for the town’s most vulnerable. With a 3000-person waiting list across Moray council area, applicants for housing in Forres are told “With such a small supply of housing, you will have to wait a very long time to be allocated a property...” on the council website. Although around one in five households in Forres are in a form of social housing, demand still far outstrips supply. The houses in Forres are a mix of Victorian terraces and detached houses near the centre, and swathes of new-build properties sprawling away from the town on all sides. Very little social housing is currently being built in the area, and what is there is of low quality, and still separates the domestic from work in a very clear and stark way, most being car-orientated detached houses with little or no public transport provision.
On a more anecdotal level, talking to residents and students of the nearby GSA campus, the town is perceived as lacking new buildings with ‘character’, that work well with the traditional Scottish architecture of the town centre – the new build schemes are widely reviled by locals. Furthermore, there is very little accommodation for younger or single people, with the few homes for rent being occupied quickly, often by students at GSA H&I. Housing provision for working class people near the centre of town and Greshop estate, where many of the retail and light industry jobs are located, is almost non-existent, those areas traditionally being the most expensive in the area.
The precedent of Hertzberger’s Diagoon housing in Delft provides a source of inspiration. The home is designed to be ultimately malleable; the very entrances, stairs and boundaries of the building were changeable, intended to be designed and completed by the residents. Although the scheme was built for upper middle-class residents, the houses provide a flexible, comforting home that pays great attention to the wants and whims of its inhabitants. A further precedent of practice would be the work of the experimental architecture collective Raumlabor Berlin. Raumlabor creates interventions in urban space using interdisciplinary teams of specialists and spatial practitioners, centering the residents as the ultimate situational specialists, creating temporary interventions for and with residents of the urban realms. The projects use simple structural frames which then are added to by residents to define the programme of the space; openings, partitions, coverings and the very use of the space is defined using simple, recycled materials. This community based spatial practice makes the architect take a back seat as a designer and act as a facilitator and organiser of ideas. A temporary, changeable structure on site in Leask Road could provide a focal point to the natural space, and broadly expand the possibilities for live/work.
Many political theorists and philosophers of the 20th century understood the need for housing improvements as a part of the emancipation of working people, and dedicated much of their studies to understanding the City and how its inhabitants live and could live better (Tafuri, M, Architecture and Utopia. 1976). Much of this led to the introduction of social housing along with other parts of the post-war welfare state in the UK, and maintained much of its socialist, utopian characteristics; as Nye Bevan famously proclaimed his dream of classless social housing for all: “... the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer will all live on the same street...” This belief in a classless, solidaristic form of living was taken further by thinkers such as Proudhon and Kropotkin, who proposed that a dwelling and its surroundings are a vast massing of the labour and energy of hundreds, if not thousands, of working people who cut the timber that becomes beams, formed the clay roof tiles, made the bricks, chiseled the stone, assembled, painted, wired and waterproofed the structure, as well as built the pavement, the parks, the plazas, cafes, museums and reputation of the neighbourhoods and areas which provide value to the land upon which a house sits (Kropotkin, P, The Conquest of Bread. 1892). As such, it is illogical and immoral for one person to claim ownership over and place in perpetuity, and that land and homes should be held in common, as much land in Scotland was and remains today (Proudhon, P.J, The Old Society and The New. 1851). They believed that as part of a much greater social upheaval, the reorganisation of housing would be taken upon by the local community, one which itself was greatly re-organised away from capitalist interests and modes of production. These communities would care for each other in a greater, more concrete way, through organising food, shelter and care for all those within the community, whilst fostering variety and freedom within personal and community space (Bookchin, M, Post Scarcity Anarchism. 1974).
Although many of these radical ideas are far outwith the scope for this project, they suggest at an angle for work/live housing in rural spaces which, although utopian, provides a positive vision for living and working for all people. The ideas of a tight-knit community, which helps provide and care for itself on a voluntary, solidaristic basis, nestled in the midst of the historic Forres town centre. The homes themselves must be malleable; they should change not only with the needs of the residents, but also with their wants and desires – homes cannot be just machines for living, they must be places of comfort and joy for people who work some of the hardest, most insecure jobs in the town. It is evident that many of the residents' lives will not be fixed by these homes; the injustices they face in the world, at their work and elsewhere, will not be magically cured. But perhaps the best an architect can do is provide a refuge, a place to convalesce and feel safe and happy, provide a simple framework for a community to grow and flourish, to tend to its own needs in the ways they need tending to, and to let people live and work in their own ways.
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In prehistoric and pre-industrial epochs, working people almost invariably lived alongside or within their workplaces – the merchant above their shop, the farmer amongst their fields, the day labourer in tents and shanty towns that followed the roads and railways that they were constructing. However, with the advent of a more advanced capitalist mode of production, labour forces were concentrated in factories and urban environments like never before, meaning more and more people could not live where they worked. Instead, they were forced to join an ever-expanding class of commuters, one which in the 20th century came to define our urban spaces through the car and the road. Now, the vast majority of people in Scotland commute to and from work by car and public transport, and most of them travel distances further than 5km (61.4%, Census data).
One new method of bridging the divide between work and living is the work from home, or WFH, movement. WFH was popularised during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many people and employers discovered that whilst being at home, they could continue much of the same labour that was previously carried out in offices, and that they could spend much less time on said labour. While this could potentially speak to the pointlessness and inessential nature of much of these white-collar jobs (Graeber, D, Bullshit Jobs. 2013), they allowed people to spend more time with their family, cut pollution from the daily commute, and improved the efficiency of labour in many cases. Nice work, if you can get it. While this was happening, nurses, shop clerks, binmen, janitors, industrial workers, farm labourers, line cooks and the millions of other working-class people who grease the wheels of our modern society had to continue to work the same or more hours, doing harder work in a much more precarious situation where any interaction with another human could give them a serious respiratory illness. While the WFH phenomenon was widely covered and discussed, the people who actually did the physical labour of maintaining society throughout a global pandemic went severely underappreciated, despite the periodic clapping from doorsteps.
Throughout the past decade, architecture has mainly explored the live/work relationship through WFH (Holliss, F, Beyond Live/Work. 2015, & Yudina, A, Home Work. 2018 ) . This is in perhaps quite a selfish manner; after all, despite much of the big talk about collaborative practice and studio culture, much of the day-to-day work of the architect can be carried out on a laptop in a home office or in bed, as it was during the pandemic. Furthermore, as WFH remains the domain of the “professional”, middle and upper classes, those who work from home also have the necessary capital for private architectural work, much more than the rubbish collector or furloughed factory worker. Another potential reason is that although there is much fertile ground to be covered in the work from home space, much of it also sticks to very simple, easy to manifest typologies; the home office; the extension/ shed for working; the bedroom-cum-study. Creating a domestic space that addresses the work of inhabitants who happen to be fruit-pickers, or binmen, or shop clerks potentially involves much more complex, personalised typologies and adaptations that are more subtle and encompass the whole of a space. This perhaps necessitates developing a set of typologies and practices which do not place the architect at the centre of the design process, instead pushing forward residents and other spatial practitioners and stakeholders.
The brief of this project asks us not only to address the live/work tautology, but also the site and area of our terraced housing. And whilst the broad task to “address live/work”, paired with a relatively short project timespan, may naturally lead to thinking and designing for WFH, is that what Forres really needs?
The problem of commuting and transport to work in rural areas like Forres is even more enhanced; the lack of public transport means people need to spend longer travelling, walk further or spend more to own a car. However, Forres faces perhaps more important issues for working people. Housing in the area is more expensive than the national average, and there is almost no social housing provision for the town’s most vulnerable. With a 3000-person waiting list across Moray council area, applicants for housing in Forres are told “With such a small supply of housing, you will have to wait a very long time to be allocated a property...” on the council website. Although around one in five households in Forres are in a form of social housing, demand still far outstrips supply. The houses in Forres are a mix of Victorian terraces and detached houses near the centre, and swathes of new-build properties sprawling away from the town on all sides. Very little social housing is currently being built in the area, and what is there is of low quality, and still separates the domestic from work in a very clear and stark way, most being car-orientated detached houses with little or no public transport provision.
On a more anecdotal level, talking to residents and students of the nearby GSA campus, the town is perceived as lacking new buildings with ‘character’, that work well with the traditional Scottish architecture of the town centre – the new build schemes are widely reviled by locals. Furthermore, there is very little accommodation for younger or single people, with the few homes for rent being occupied quickly, often by students at GSA H&I. Housing provision for working class people near the centre of town and Greshop estate, where many of the retail and light industry jobs are located, is almost non-existent, those areas traditionally being the most expensive in the area.
A radical, utopian solution?
The precedent of Hertzberger’s Diagoon housing in Delft provides a source of inspiration. The home is designed to be ultimately malleable; the very entrances, stairs and boundaries of the building were changeable, intended to be designed and completed by the residents. Although the scheme was built for upper middle-class residents, the houses provide a flexible, comforting home that pays great attention to the wants and whims of its inhabitants. A further precedent of practice would be the work of the experimental architecture collective Raumlabor Berlin. Raumlabor creates interventions in urban space using interdisciplinary teams of specialists and spatial practitioners, centering the residents as the ultimate situational specialists, creating temporary interventions for and with residents of the urban realms. The projects use simple structural frames which then are added to by residents to define the programme of the space; openings, partitions, coverings and the very use of the space is defined using simple, recycled materials. This community based spatial practice makes the architect take a back seat as a designer and act as a facilitator and organiser of ideas. A temporary, changeable structure on site in Leask Road could provide a focal point to the natural space, and broadly expand the possibilities for live/work.
Many political theorists and philosophers of the 20th century understood the need for housing improvements as a part of the emancipation of working people, and dedicated much of their studies to understanding the City and how its inhabitants live and could live better (Tafuri, M, Architecture and Utopia. 1976). Much of this led to the introduction of social housing along with other parts of the post-war welfare state in the UK, and maintained much of its socialist, utopian characteristics; as Nye Bevan famously proclaimed his dream of classless social housing for all: “... the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer will all live on the same street...” This belief in a classless, solidaristic form of living was taken further by thinkers such as Proudhon and Kropotkin, who proposed that a dwelling and its surroundings are a vast massing of the labour and energy of hundreds, if not thousands, of working people who cut the timber that becomes beams, formed the clay roof tiles, made the bricks, chiseled the stone, assembled, painted, wired and waterproofed the structure, as well as built the pavement, the parks, the plazas, cafes, museums and reputation of the neighbourhoods and areas which provide value to the land upon which a house sits (Kropotkin, P, The Conquest of Bread. 1892). As such, it is illogical and immoral for one person to claim ownership over and place in perpetuity, and that land and homes should be held in common, as much land in Scotland was and remains today (Proudhon, P.J, The Old Society and The New. 1851). They believed that as part of a much greater social upheaval, the reorganisation of housing would be taken upon by the local community, one which itself was greatly re-organised away from capitalist interests and modes of production. These communities would care for each other in a greater, more concrete way, through organising food, shelter and care for all those within the community, whilst fostering variety and freedom within personal and community space (Bookchin, M, Post Scarcity Anarchism. 1974).
Although many of these radical ideas are far outwith the scope for this project, they suggest at an angle for work/live housing in rural spaces which, although utopian, provides a positive vision for living and working for all people. The ideas of a tight-knit community, which helps provide and care for itself on a voluntary, solidaristic basis, nestled in the midst of the historic Forres town centre. The homes themselves must be malleable; they should change not only with the needs of the residents, but also with their wants and desires – homes cannot be just machines for living, they must be places of comfort and joy for people who work some of the hardest, most insecure jobs in the town. It is evident that many of the residents' lives will not be fixed by these homes; the injustices they face in the world, at their work and elsewhere, will not be magically cured. But perhaps the best an architect can do is provide a refuge, a place to convalesce and feel safe and happy, provide a simple framework for a community to grow and flourish, to tend to its own needs in the ways they need tending to, and to let people live and work in their own ways.
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