Flats and houses 1958 : design and economy.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
Date:
1958
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Flats and houses 1958 : design and economy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/164 (page 5)
    Fo rewo rd by the Minister of Housing and Local Government BETWEEN 1958 and 1970 in the towns and cities of England and Wales new homes are likely to be built on sites where no less than half a million older houses now stand or stood. Many local authorities, in consequence, are facing what to them are novel problems of building at higher densities: densities where houses will need to be intermingled with maisonettes or flats. The purpose of this book is to help in meeting these problems. I certainly do not mean it to encourage the use of higher densities or multi- storeyed buildings where they are not really necessary. It sets out methods whereby remarkably large sums of public mofiey can be saved if high building is not used except to the extent that it must be. It illustrates also the wide differences in capital cost between dwellings built in blocks of different types while providing just the same accommodation. Those are the two aspects of the relation between design and cost which at the present time are the most rewarding to study. High-density building is frequently essential but never cheap, and I believe that local authori- ties will find some of the suggestions in this book indispensable to them if they wish to get value for money, as I am sure they do. I should also like to see much more attention given to the treatment of space around buildings. Of course no book can of itself show how to achieve the complete combination of attractive buildings, a happy variety of form and skyline, a satisfying massing of blocks, and a sense of space pleasingly planned. But perhaps this one will help. There is a simplicity in its approach to the achievement of economy in the design of layout and buildings—a simplicity which may, for example, help to free the creative energy of architects from oppressive anxiety about overall cost, an anxiety that can be deadening. At any rate, my hope is that all who have these problems of high- density building to face, whether as elected members of councils or as local government officers of as professional men, will find something in this book that will interest and stimulate them. Reasonable cost and high architectural quality can both be secured, there is no doubt, if only one takes enough trouble to study how. Newry Bremer