The design is aimed at meeting a growing niche demand in the housing market. The proposal is an opt-in community for individuals and families who want to take the next step in sustainable modern living. The Social Ecology is organised through the collective ownership and management of a community freehold, with private leaseholds for dwellings. There are shared car pools, rather than private car ownership, and instead of roads, a network of cycle routes and footpaths cross the site. There is an ecology of green spaces – from public to private. There are a range of dwelling types, clustered into groups of twenty units, organised around a linear public park, a permaculture based community school, a market hall and democratic billboard mediaspace. Each co-housing cluster overlooks shared garden, organic food growing and playground spaces. The individual dwelling units are organised around private courtyard gardens, which are treated as an external living rooms.

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We have been working on a number of architecture projects in and around East London’s up and coming Homerton area. These include a new build eco house on Fenn St, which will be going on site later this year, an eco bar in Bohemia Place, currently in planning, and the remodelling of a house on Kenworthy Road. One other project, which has thrown up lots of interesting local London history, is a feasibility study for a housing developer, for the former Convent of the Sacred Heart, on the corner of Kenworthy Road and Hassett Road.

This triangular site contains two main building blocks, with gardens and a courtyard. The square shaped building near the centre of the site, which is Grade II listed, was built around 1800 by Leny Smith, a local silk manufacturer, as Sidney House and Estate. The house was bought by the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century, to be used as a convent. The original house was extended with a new wing to the north west, and a new block was added to the east at this time. The complex has remained intact and in excellent condition since then, with the exception of a lift block added to the south façade of the original building during the nineteen eighties. Particularly notable, are the main staircase, and some hallway plaster moldings.

The main entrance to the original Sidney House was from the north, accessed by a driveway from Sidney Road, as Kenworthy Road was called until 1939. Sidney Road was itself previously the northern section of Wick Lane, an ancient Hackney route leading from the mills of the Knights Templar’s estate to the north east (on the site still known as Temple Mills), down south along Kenworthy Road, crossing the Hackney Brook (which presumably now runs culverted below Wick Road), across what is now the eastern edge of Victoria Park, before finishing along the only stretch of road that is still called Wick Lane, in Old Ford.
The gardens of the Sidney House extended west of Sidney Road for almost a mile, and were one of many luxury estates that existed in Homerton from the Tudor period, formed out of the extensive lands of the Knights Templar in this area. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the village was the home of Homerton College, which still exists within the University of Cambridge, if not any longer in Homerton itself. Eton College too, had a presence here. The construction of the North London railway in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the now long demolished Victoria Park station near the southern end of Kenworthy Road, turned the area into something of a leisure destination among the north London middle classes for a while. However, the spread of Victorian developer housing, and the construction of two workhouses, which would later became Homerton and Hackney hospitals during the various fevers that hit London in the mid nineteenth century, meant that the middle and upper classes largely left the area. However, in recent years the gentrification of the areas around Victoria Park, have lead huge increase in local property values, and the Olympic Village site, less than half a mile to the east, promises a major revival in the areas fortunes.

In our approach to developing the site , we sought to reestablish the importance of Sidney House within the site, by clearing away minor ancillary Victorian buildings in front of the old house. We proposed that the eastern Victorian block be developed as 4-6 affordable housing flats, whilst the Sidney House building, together with its west wing extension, contained 11 luxury flats. These have been organised so that the most important architectural spaces and moldings stay coherent and intact. All flats would have a garden or balcony space, and the roofs had courtyard gardens incorporated into them. It is possible to have a site wide environmental strategy. Solar Heating panels could be sited at roof level, as might a wind turbine. There is space at ground level to store the plant required for energy distribution, rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling.

WAG are currently nearing completion on site for this domestic extension and remodelling.

The proposal is reinstating the garden and emphasises the connections between outside and inside. A series of different transitions have been created, ranging form a small courtyard between living room and kitchen to a completely open front connecting the garden and the dining area.

Internally the historic layers of the Victorian house have been uncovered and carefully framed within the modern finishes.

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WAG personel: architects, landscape architects and urban planners

Project description: Ecological scheme for two blocks of 50 dwellings and new urban park

Estimated contract sum: £2 million

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Architectural Ecologies is a term that we have developed to define our overall approach. The root term of ecology, Oikos, suggests that ecology is the study of making homes the study of and making economies. We are interested in pursuing a broad theory and practice of architectural ecology, that positions architecture as a system within systems: simultaneously social, economic, environmental, spatial, and psychic. Systems that range from the weather to information technology, that encompass the space of the body of the user or inhabitant in its immediate environment to the space of multiple, social bodies within the building and the city, and on to the global space of capital and informational flows. Architecture exists simultaneously within these various contexts. Its task is to make us feel at home here – to allow for a modern dwelling.

When answering this brief we decided to work with the project sites as defined by the existing masterplans (the HAT and the Alsop masterplans). However, we believe that it would be possible to use the principles and values set out in this proposal to respond to the needs of the brief on the basis of very different relationships of the park to housing, or indeed on other sites.
We interpreted the masterplans as defining a need for a strong urban figure in the park, with two blocks of housing defining a park as such a figure. We also considered that the masterplan as a whole was based upon terraced housing along residential streets, as a way of guaranteeing a certain level of life in the area. Whilst we broadly supported this analysis and framework, we did not feel that squeezing the required schedule of accommodation into formal copies of traditional terraced houses would offer the best solution.
Our proposed dwellings are organised into two housing blocks, defining a strong park. Many homes on both sites are entered via ground floor front doors with small front gardens from the street, in the traditional way. Inside the housing schemes we have developed organisational systems that reproduce these basic values. Dwellings that are not accessed directly from the ‘park – street – pavement – front garden’ system are organised internally according to the same logic. We have tried to fold into and recombine within the housing blocks the elements of park, street, pavement and garden.
At an early stage of thinking about the housing for this project we developed the idea of the Perforated Unité as a thought model that embodied much of our thinking about social housing. The original Unités of Le Corbusier offered at least as diagrams well organised and generous accommodation with two dual aspect balconies, double height spaces in each apartment combined with other dwelling programmes (nurseries etc). The units have proved easy to reorganise and recombine, as any visit to one of the buildings will show. The biggest problems with the originals are the dingy corridors/streets and ill defined and ill used shared spaces. In many ways it seemed that other architects such as Gaudi, Hertzberger and van Eyck had developed ideas about occupiable space that could be usefully added to Corbusier’s model. Furthermore, it seemed that bringing a contemporary environmental knowledge to the schemes, including opening it up to bring light and gardens into these inhabitable shared spaces, might be interesting.

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The two housing blocks are perforated with a semi open corridor/street in the north block, and courtyards in the south block. In both areas, small front gardens and areas of planting and ’social morphology’ or playscapes are similar to those in the main park. The north block terraces up away from the adjoining back gardens, and terraces back down to the park. The south facing terraced gardens and grass roofs of the north block make it appear that the landscape flows down the front of the building, and then down across the park into the courtyards of the south block, and on through to the water. As there are no adjoining gardens, the south block uses its whole footprint to form a large volume, which is then perforated with lightwells, courtyards, balconies and gardens.
The north block contains a small retail unit facing onto the park. We have tried to minimise the problematic effects of excessive parking around the park by holding a significant amount of it within and below the housing blocks.

The park is an intricately crafted urban object and tool. It is conceived as a social landscape, as a field of more or less defined places: some are as small as a ledge to sit on, others are large areas of open use. The park is defined by an axis that leads from a semi public shared space in the middle of the North Housing Block, across the road and through the middle of the park, down steps, ramps and terraces, leading across the southern road and through the South Block Housing to the water. Along this axis are organised terraces for sports and events, and casual use. In the SW of the park terraces define a small amphitheater focused upon the Alsop nursery. This is a space where mothers might wait for the children, and view the spectacle of the nursery interiors. At other times this area might be used to watch projections (World Cup etc) on a screen which will be fitted to unroll down the side of the Alsop building.
Along the southern perimeter of the park, perpendicularly crossing the main axis, is a field of menirs, plinths and benches, approximately occupying and referring to the area marked out in the Alsop masterplan as the ‘Boulevard’. This forms an extended filter between the southern pavement and the park, and provides areas that can be occupied by different activities at different times- from children’s games to Sunday markets. Some are organised to focus on the sports pitches. There might also be shared BBQ facilities here, ping-pong tables and concrete pool tables! Mixed within these plinths are archeological remains from the demolished towers.
The Stonebridge Skylon tower – a wind turbine and event generator – is the focus of park, and a counterpoint to the volume of Alsop’s nursery. At over forty meters in height, the skylon recalls the height of the demolished tower blocks – recycling this memory to provide a strong image of civic space and continuing community – both formally and programmatically.

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We propose a continuum – a scaled ecology – of serviced gardens, from small to large, private to social. The leisure programmes that they attract vary according to the scale of the garden fragment, its position on the private-social scale and according to other varying non-leisure demands made upon the spaces.
At the most private end of the scale of nature fragments is the personal garden. For many flats these take the form of balconies and wintergardens. These spaces are extensions of the lounge spaces of the home, and are fully serviced with media. For larger family dwellings these wintergardens open onto more traditional family garden spaces. At the other end of the scale are the larger spaces of the park.
However, what we are most interested in is the urbanism of spaces in-between these two poles. Creating more intimate areas within the park, and more social areas around the small defined front gardens: overlooked children’s playing areas, places that encourage social activity, shared inhabitable pavements in-between houses, shared bbq areas, public media projection amphitheatre.

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The architectural cybernetics theorist Gordon Pask stated that “the most cybernetic structure yet known to man” is Gaudi’s Parc Guell (rather than the computer-building ‘Fun Palace’ that Pask designed with Cedric Price). In saying this Pask was emphasising that cybernetics in architecture is all about space and communication: between environments and people, in environments that facilitate communication. Patterns in this sense work as cybernetic devices, and are psycho-socio-spatial phenomena: they help us to form cognitive maps – to locate and communicate, with ourselves, our environments, and our societies.

In this scheme, ecologies of patterns work across the site, as performative (environmental-sustainable), experiential and organisational (environ-mental) devices. At one scale, pattern surfaces act performatively to reflect light in some places, or filter light in others. In some places contoured surfaces act to diffuse sound. Elsewhere they store heat. At another scale, there are patterned spaces, landscaped (or spacescaped) environments that provide things to sit on, lean against etc, fostering identity, interaction and communication, providing places to play, meet, bbq..