Paul Humphries Y4
The Letchworth Achievement. The quantity and speed required to deliver affordable housing in the UK; imposes a homogenous architecture with an irrelevance of location. Thousands of cheap red brick housing estates are popping up on the periphery of our towns and cities, lacking the civic infrastructure to make them work.
Conversely, Letchworth ‘The Garden City’ is the epitome of the civic British town. It was an urban experiment based around the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, to combine the best of town and country living. Using Letchworth as a key reference the project sets out to explore the embodiment of British ‘civicness’ in architectural form.
The proposal is therefore a design for a new community hall that attempts to explore this idea. A space frame structure holds a series of elevated spaces that aim to replicate and intensify that which is British. For example a series of experimental gardens that are characterised by the polite and conservative cultural traits of the English.