Social Power of Architecture

The social power of architecture. A story of the right to affordable housing Benedikt Hartl What do we have in common? We all need a place to stay! We all need a roof over our heads! In times of persistent social inequities and social an ecological uncertainties, affordable housing for everyone is one of the most important architectural and social issues of our time!

In deed, the affordable housing crisis is not a new phenomenon of our time. In the debate of the 19th century housing crisis that was facing workers’ living conditions in the industrial cities, the French socialist and first anarchist1 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, called for the outlawing of private landlordism. He wanted to turn tenants into owners by turning the rents into purchase payments for home ownership. He thought that ownership amongst the proletariat would solve the housing crisis by itself.

As response to this theory Friedrich Engels, the famous German socialist and philosopher, answered in his pamphlet The Housing Question, which was published in various articles for Der Volksstaat. According to Engels, the housing crisis is ‘not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes.‘ 2 Engels argued that there is no housing crisis in itself but rather a crisis within capitalism.

Engel’s fear, was that if the workers and former tenants would get homeownership they would become capitalists themselves which wouldn’t liberate them. Instead, the system of capitalism will constantly generate new dependencies and new housing crisis due to its very nature. Engels comes to the conclusion that the only way of solving the housing crisis is an

1 Merriman, John M. (2009): How a Bombing in Fin­de­Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror. New Haven, p. 42 2 Engels, Frederick (1936): The Housing Question, ed CP Dutt, Lawrence and Wishart. London

overcoming of capitalism and an abolition of private property. Engels represented the ideas of Karl Marx, who described as early as 1867 how everything in capitalism becomes commodity. The excesses of capitalism have cut deeply into our society. In the USA, in Europe, Asia and all cities worldwide, we can observe how the question of housing as commodity shapes the socio-political discussion.

The French artist Gustave Doré imagines in his visual report of London the city’s ruinous destiny with a focus on the proletariat. Together with the journalist Blanchard Jerrold he draws a picture of London, where they show the dark side of the largest, most fashionable, and most prosperous city at that times.3 The 19th century-city was characterized by smoke, dirt, inequality and the promise of progress. Due to industrialization more and more workers were looking for jobs in the urban factories. They lived in rented apartments built by the capitalist factory owners. This enormous growth and the population shift from rural to urban led to urbanization and housing shortage! The trend of urbanizations of the Industrial Revolution still continues. ‘Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.‘ 4 Of course you cannot compare our cities with the cities of industrialization, which were architecturally too crowded, and under very poor hygienic conditions but we are again producing our own pictures of an enormous housing crisis worldwide. The lack of affordable housing in cities puts our society for major problems.

Affordable housing? This type of housing has long been a scarce commodity in major cities such as London. Nowadays, flat hunting is by no means a problem reserved to low-paid workers, but also concerns average wage earners and families in which both parents work full time. In other words, this includes the middle class, whose prosperity and social satisfaction are considered to guarantee a stable democracy.

Once, buildings were home for people, but also staging community life. Today, housing has become an investment. In our neoliberal approach of housing as commodity, house prices went up and ‘caused an untold misery for millions across the world in recent decades.‘ 5 Housing is the main business of our architectural work. So we should have a strong unwillingness of accepting the world as it is. But how can we respond to these challenges?

You might think that architects have very limited control and influence on the affordability of houses. Policymakers and developers and investors have the control and shape the framework of our housing system. So are we architects helpless? I would say no! We just have to get involved!

At the moment, many architectural competitions dealing with this topic are being advertised.

We also participated in an open international competition for ‘Affordable Housing’ in London.

Our answer to the competition was an architectural story: A speculations for a better future.

What is real? We tried to tell a story of an untold architecture which brings present, past and future together. For many of the younger generation, home ownership is a distant dream.

Furthermore, it is even impossible to finance an apartment through ‘honest work‘. So I have to inherit to own something! Seriously?! Is a society based on inheritance still contemporary in a time of self-determination? Shouldn’t we have left the pre-industrial society behind us?

Under these, as it is, fickle conditions of live, we sought to contribute to the topic of architecture as a medium for political discussion through our design. To what extent can architecture change the thinking of private property? Can we rewrite the rules of our reality and think of real affordability for the whole society? Do we have to consider social housing as homes for ‘the poor’? We asked ourselves these questions as we interpreted the task ‘Affordable Housing’ in London as ‘Affordable Palace’.

3 Blanchard, Jerrold (1868): London: A Pilgrimage, London 4 United Nation (2018): Revision of World Urbanization Prospects 5 Kubey, Karen (2018): Housing as Intervention: Architecture Towards Social Equity, p.24

With its 775 rooms and 79 bathrooms, Buckingham Palace’s room supply is not representative of London’s rental housing. The rooms are decorated with sparkling chandeliers, sumptuous carpets, marble columns, sculptures and expensive artwork. So why not use this existing structure to tackle the housing shortage and treat Buckingham Palace as social housing? We redesigned Buckingham Palace and turned it into an social palace that was later called by the press as the ‚People's Palace’ We enlarged the existing palace by extending the roof. Affordable living space is created by a very efficient system of spatial sequences. The focus of our design lies on affordability and community. As a stylistic divide we chose the enfilade, which was historically used in mansions and castles. The enfilade is a sequence of spaces, that is created by interconnected rooms without any corridors. A visible connection between the rooms create a sequence of non-hierarchic rooms which can be filled multifunctional. The most effective way to reduce building costs is to reduce circulation area and to overlap functional areas. To strengthen this concept, we reduced circulation to only eight staircases, that were necessary due to fire protection and building laws. These eight ‘dramatic staircases and lift cores [that] descend through the historic palace’6 connect the apartments with the existing palace and the exterior.

6 https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/17/opposite-office-buckingham-palace-co-living-housing-affordablepalace/

Our project was published in daily newspapers and television around the world. The Daily Mail, asked for a ‘Royal solution to Britain's housing crisis?‘ 7 Reactions – positive as negative - provoked by our project, showed that the architectural image - the architectural story has still an explosive power of sociality. No matter how fantastic it may be, it is always about the very present moment in our society. It tells us were we have to improve and shows a way into a better future. So coming back to Engels, who told us that the housing crisis will

7 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6622611/German-design-firm-unveils-plans-convertBuckingham-Palace.html

never be solved within the system of capitalism, we architects shouldn’t give in because we still have the power of imagination. ‘The imagination is both an active agent - a way of constituting something - and also a transformative faculty. When the imagination is at work, what is produced is not an image that bears no relation to the existing world, but rather a reworking of some image that already exists. In other words, there can be no imagination without a past; no conception of what is to come without what has already been;’ 8 and also the other way round: No future without imagination! Imagination, no matter how unrealistic it is, always grounded the way for innovation and future. In rewriting the rules of what is accepted as reality, we want to go one step forward and pushing the limits of thoughts into future and prepare the ground for a real transformation of our society. In the article ‘50.000 Londoners‘ about our project Will Noble has ‘a feeling this is more of a marketing/pointmaking exercise than it is a genuine pitch to overhaul the Queen’s London residence‘, but he ends the text with: ‘Perhaps Opposite Office’s proposal isn’t as far-fetched as we think‘9 I have to admit: There is nothing to add.

8 Dobraszczyk, Paul (2019): Future Cities. Architecture and the imagination. London, p.11 9 https://londonist.com/london/housing/buckingham-palace-redesigned-50-000-people