The Brooklyn Rail

Cities everywhere are in peril and under attack by gentrification, ecological disasters, safety issues, cost of living increases, plummeting quality of life, and the evaporation of public spaces. Loud among the urgent cries for affordable housing are the voices of artists and creative professionals, who are being pushed to the periphery. Parting the fog of disillusionment for a moment, a recent project in London emerges as an alternative to the isolating, cheaply built, and minimal blocks typically associated with social housing.

On a quiet block in Barking, East London stands the charming structure: A House for Artists. At first glance it is grounded in its site: visually related to the buildings around it through its height and gray materiality. As the eye tracks upward from street level, light-hearted geometric punch-outs and triangular projections appear. Completed in 2022 by Apparata architects, this plain but playful building points the way toward social housing that can live up to the ideal.

The project is a collaboration between Apparata, an architectural studio founded by Astrid Smitham and Nicholas Lobo Brennan; the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham; and the arts organization Create London. The six-year design and construction process was deeply impacted by the Grenfell Tower fire and the COVID-19 pandemic. The apartments are available to their artist-residents at 65 percent of the market rate, with the caveat that residents participate in community engagement through the large, street-facing public room on the ground floor. Much of the design is intended as a framework for collaborative living and working.

Though aesthetic decisions were not the primary driver of Apparata’s design, they are considered, pragmatic, and impactful. A House for Artists plays by the reductive rules imposed on social housing developments by budgetary constraints, but elevates the quality of the lived experience through sun-filled residences and spaces that facilitate social interaction amongst the tenants. Building performance is advanced in terms of thermal conditioning, fire safety, and carbon footprint reduction. The interior and exterior both have a pleasing neutrality full of possibility, rather than heterogeneity. This makes the project successful as a domestic and artistic backdrop for the House’s whole range of residents.

With the status quo of new housing being conventional, uninspired and clad in cheap materials, it's remarkable that A House for Artists was even built, let alone that it is subsidized housing. The project occupies an uncanny valley of architecture: its neatness and tidiness, sharp corners and circular and square punch-outs make it look like a playful rendering more than a physical structure. There is a “cute” factor that edges the House toward trendy. But in reality, viewed at a distance, the twelve-unit concrete structure blends in with its surroundings, having a prosaic conversation with the brick clad Williams Street Quarter (2015) nearby. On closer investigation, the building shakes off its neutrality and stands oddly proud, its thoughtful materiality, visible structure and unique textural qualities revealed. A House for Artists is constructed in GGBS-cast in place concrete and exceeds the RIBA 2030 goal of reducing embodied carbon in construction by 50 percent by 2030 (although the original timber design, scrapped after the Grenfell fire, would have been considerably lower than the current construction). The structure is pushed to the envelope, giving an impression of sturdiness while opening up the floor plan.

The facade that looks toward Linton Road comes down to the ground floor on three concrete flange-like pillars, making the set-back crystal enclosure of the community space light and airy. Through this bit of visual trickery, the threshold between the street and the community space is blurred and the transparency enhances a feel of invitation. The community room is divided in order to house public facing programs, and also provide collaborative and collective work spaces for the residents. Flexibility with regard to the occupants’ needs is key to the design. The ground floor has few partitions, defined by two perpendicular shear walls that extend up throughout the building which allow the occupants to determine how they organize their work space. Occupied now for two years, the building is well into an informal transformation. When I visited, temporary cardboard walls were erected in the messy shared studio while curtains and rails had also been installed throughout for privacy when needed. The street-facing community space is activated daily through workshops and after school programming.

What is truly pleasing about the building is the creativity in designing the circulatory spaces around the residences. Circulation is pushed to the two long edges of the building: in the front there is a generous semi-enclosed “veranda,” and a narrower corridor to the rear of the units provides additional egress. The veranda does a lot of the heavy lifting towards Apparata’s experimental social and sustainability goals. Removing an interior corridor allows the units to have larger footprints. Almost seven feet in depth, the primary veranda is a social experiment, allowing residents to extend their units into the outdoor space and promoting encounters among the inhabitants. The verandas are floored with matte terracotta tiles whose warm tones break with the muted palette that dominates elsewhere. One enters the living areas of the units from this veranda. Through well considered placement of floor-to-ceiling glass fenestration on the units, and doors swinging inwards, the veranda becomes an extension of the living area while mitigating temperature fluctuations in summer and winter.

The twelve housing units are designed for flexibility and they change over time. The majority are traditional two-bedroom units, but walls can be added as needed. Atypical units, like a double height one-bedroom, or a unit with a private terrace, are sprinkled throughout the building, introducing a welcome variability to social housing, where standardization is usually enforced. The walls dividing the second-floor apartments are punctured by double doors that can all be opened to connect the living areas across the entire floor. This can expand the living area to host theatrical productions or facilitate joint child-care. A favorite detail of mine is the shadow gap between the walls and the high ceiling of each unit—allowing the stacking of forms and materials of the structure to become literally visible, letting each surface of the apartment float as on a canvas. The units are a manifesto of diverse and transformable living situations.

The idiosyncrasy of the building is made clear by the circular, rectangular, and diagonal punch outs, and the extruded triangular forms on the roof. On further inspection, each of these moments directly correlates with a moment in which the architects chose to break with tradition—creating a formal language to highlight distinctive moments.

A House for Artists should be considered a prototype, or an attempt, to create a new vernacular. The affordability crisis in housing makes being an artist that much more difficult. A House for Artists, while not a house at all but a community, provides an inspiring example of what we can do for art. This is a model that can and should be replicated, elevating the standards of living in social housing. It is an elegant balance between the constraints of social housing and pleasant, liveable design, imbued with a moral sensibility and clarity about what should be expected in new construction. This is a flexible and comfortable living space which supports community-building, wrapped in pragmatism. The project hints at what can be done when social housing is approached with foresight and intention by its designers. In the midst of persistent crises and an atmosphere of despair, A House for Artists stolidly rejects the pessimistic narrative and asserts itself not as the answer, but instead the cracked-open door to possible futures.