Tessellar > update

This week, in my new blog, I looked at homes, small , and beautiful in their own special way.
Sheds versus Monuments
Tiny Prefabs
Small is beautiful in Viet Nam
Urban Design Award for Garden Shed
Small and Cozy in Hong Kong
Truly Expensive Very Low Cost Flats

In the Tessellar website, are two new pages:

The Mosaic Alternative to the Honeycomb Layout
The rectilinear Mosaic layout - a less radical form of tessellation planning - should be considered when the hexagonal Honeycomb layout with triangular shapes is a bit too radical for the client, or where the shape of the site is more suited to rectangular forms.
The basic Mosaic neighbourhood tile comprises a cluster of houses within a rectangle or square. Tessellating this cul-de-sac neighbourhood creates a rectilinear layout. Mosaic planning generates new building types, including:

• The Mosaic shop house
• The Mosaic garden-apartment
• Duplex and quadruplex faux bungalows.



Faux Bungalows in Ipoh
Attaining the dream of living in a detached house is not only tough on the pocket, but can also strain the environment. In the Mosaic layout here are detached houses along the main road. In the cul-de-sacs, there appear to be bungalows too, but they are actually duplex and quadruplex units. The duplex is a semi-detached house - linked to another at the back.
Even though there are four units in the corner quadruplex block, viewed from their respective entrances, they each look like a detached house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s quadruple houses in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, had the same effect.

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Truly Expensive Very Low Cost Flats

In some parts of Malaysia, owning a flat is now extremely affordable. The auction prices come as low as RM 12,000 (about USD 3,500). This is a fraction of the original subsidized selling price (RM 25,000), which is even lower than the construction cost (excluding land cost, about RM 30,000). It might cost more to demolish them!




These are blocks of flats in dormitory suburbs. The bricks and mortar would have met the very stringent design standards set by the government. The provision of roads, drains and other services can be said to be much too generous.

They fail because they are in the wrong location, far from sources of employment, from public transport, devoid of people and life. They were specifically planned to be isolated from the higher income residential zones, rather like leper colonies of yesteryear. Low-cost flats for low-standard people; slums from the day they were first occupied.

Whilst people in the medium or high income group have gained from the generally appreciating value of residential property, most of the buyers of low-cost flats, hold stagnating or depreciating assets.

No wonder low-cost housing is makes up a high percentage unsold property in the country. Developers are being forced to build low-cost houses that people don't really want!


Typical spanking new low cost flat, still many units available on the 3rd floor and above, more than a year after completion

Cheap houses indeed, but not for the buyers who were not able to repay their housing loans.

More....

A Mixed-Use, Mixed-Income concept for low-cost housing

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Small and Cozy in Hong Kong

Welcome to my humble abode!



In 1953 in Hong Kong, was a teeming refuge for millions of recent migrants from mainland China. Then on Christmas day, at Shek Kip Mei squatter colony, a fire broke out that made 53,000 people homeless. In the next year, more fires brought the total to 100,000 (1 in 20 of the urban population).

The colonial government quickly launched a housing scheme nearby, and this became the beginning of public housing in Hong Kong, which now houses half of its population.

There are still a few blocks left from the 1950’s, called Mark I and II. These H-shaped 6-story buildings have 11 square meter rooms placed back to back on the long arms, with no amenities. The flats have external access corridors where cooking was supposed to be done. Flush latrines, running water, laundry and shower rooms were provided on the cross piece at each level. These cubicles were designed to accommodate 5 people!.




This is an intimate glimpse into the lives of the present day residents of Shek Kip Mei Estate in a series of photographs called "100 x 100" by Michael Wolf. You can see all his 100 photographs here.

Minimalist housing should perhaps be less about technology and aesthetics, and more about the men, women and children who will live in them.

References
Magnus Hammar, “IUT, 50 years of Public Housing in Hong Kong”, The Global Tenant, The International Union of Tenants Quarterly Magazine, April 2004
Mirage Studio 7

Urban Design Award for Garden Shed

Over in Atlanta, a husband and wife team of architects lovingly designed and built a 7' X 10' garden shed for their garden tools and bicycles. "We knew that it would be visible from the street," Jeff Morrison says. "We wanted to add something to the streetscape."



Picture from Garden Shed Hall of Fame

"Taking their cue from their 1905 Victorian cottage, the couple created a delightful little house that looks as if it has always stood in the corner of their vest-pocket backyard in Candler Park.

It's the big, bold visions that usually get the spotlight in the history of city planning. But it's the small moves - even a....potting shed - that give a city its grain, texture and character. The Morrisons' project is among the little guys to get their star turn when the Urban Design Commission bestows its Awards of Excellence...."

Quoted from AccessAtlanta.com

Small is beautiful in Viet Nam

One day we'll all live in these small houses, was one response to the Inhabitat "5 tiniest prefabs" article. Well, in Viet Nam, people are already living in such cramp conditions and making do with it.



The shop house above is really just one long corridor. During my trip there, I saw plenty of such houses. A property tax based on road frontage was one reason why people chose to build long narrow buildings.

Space is scarce in Hanoi; according to the Ministry of Construction, 30% of people in Hanoi live in very crowded and very small houses with living space per capita less than 3 square meters per capita (1). Google Earth the city and you will not see many signs of planned urban development. During the war and up to 1975, private enterprise in housing was not allowed. People self-financed ad-hoc extensions to existing houses. It wasn’t until the mid 80’s that the housing industry got kick-started.

Along the streets you can see tiny bookshops, cyber-cafes and other kinds of businesses lining their wares along small shop fronts, alleys and stairways - anywhere they can fit in. People sit themselves on little stools around toddler-tables to enjoy food sold by the hawkers.

Even uncle Ho (as Ho Chin Min is still fondly called), lived in a very modest house on stilts behind what is now the now Presidential Palace.



(1) Japan Bank for International Cooperation, “Urban Development and Housing Sector in Viet Nam, December 1999

TINY PREFABS

There are some fabulous photos from Inhabitat : FIVE TINIEST PREFAB HOUSES, and this is one of them,





MICROCOMPACT HOME

"This tiny residential cube packs a highly-functional punch, providing a double bed, bathroom, lobby, dining space for 4-5 people, and state-of-the-art entertainment technology, all for just 50,000 Euros. And size-wise, it measures in at a tiny 2.65 m cubed (roughly 77 sq ft), but incorporates everything a person needs in a home in its super compact design."

Nice photo, but practical?

There are many ways to save the economic and environmental cost of housing. One is to save space. The Japanese, for example, have become adapt at making use of every inch in their homes. They have smaller rooms, less bulky furniture, and use rooms for multiple purposes. Houses can be like high-tech gadgets, like the expensive Microcompact home. This house may be small, but looks highly desirable.

In the photos, most of the prefabs are in the countryside or in the wilderness on their own. One is shown on a rooftop. But can prefabs become an urban housing solution?

My answer is maybe, but not if:

• they remain detached houses that need space around them


• they are arranged in a way that wastes space

Prefab designs have to incorporate link walls to the units to allow them to become attached to other units. And then they have to be stackable so that units on multiple floors.

The prefabs can have attached common walls to become like the conventional semi-detached or terrace houses. Or they can become apartments. Still there are other alternatives which you can see in my tessellation planning website. Below is just one of the many possibilities.






In this layout you see detached single-family micro-houses along the entry road; as you enter the cul-de-sacs, you see more. But the houses there are not detached, though the visitor will not see this. The duplex does not have a back yard; it is linked to another house at the rear. And the quadruplex unit is linked to three other units which are accessed from separate cul-de-sacs. Because the houses here look like detached units, but are not, I call them faux bungalows!

SHEDS versus MONUMENTS

A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture

Nikolaus Pevsner

This was the first sentence I found in the "Outline of European Architecture", top of the reading list in my first year doing architecture in University thirty years ago.

This blog is more about the bicycle sheds of this world rather than cathedrals. I am interested in low-cost affordable housing solutions – aesthetics is important, but not really the most important. My belief is that if we work hard to solve the social, environmental and economic problems of housing, the result will not necessarily be ugly.

There is architecture that is created by architects; but also architecture created by non-architects. By ordinary people, all round the world. This is Vernacular architecture, and it is a fascinating study. Buildings built by people for themselves using the materials available to them in the best methods that they knew how, making it suitable their way of life, their needs, culture and climate. They used their limited resources in ingenious ways, achieving functional and beautiful forms. A by-product of this process of folk building through the ages is indeed a distinctive identity that communicates not only a sense of time and of place, but also a sense of beauty.


Kampong House, from www.malaysiasite.nl

But I am not an advocate of the “vernacular” style. Copying the look and visual details of houses from the past doesn't necessarily create beautiful homes, let alone solve the other problems of housing today. The lesson that I draw from vernacular architecture is that there is a role for architects that is outside the realm of “iconic” buildings and “signature” landmarks. Outside of working for the few who want to express their wealth and power, there is a place for architects who wish to build for the majority of people. Constrained as they are to limited resources, architects must use available materials and techniques in the best way that we can to create buildings that are functional and relevant to humble but urgent needs.

My conviction is that if we do it in an honest way, expending our best efforts, the architecture that we produce, will over time be recognized as having its own unique identity, rooted in its age and place, communicating its own sense of beauty, at least as meaningful as the palaces and monuments.

Reference

Nikolaus Pevsner, "An outline of European Architecture", Pelican, 1943