Rethinking Housebuilding. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, April, 1998 by Colin Ward

Edited by Chris Bazlinton and Ken Bartlett. York: York Publishing Services for Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1997. [pounds]9.95

Since the War, British experience of prefabricated and system-built housing has ranged from expensive but good to expensive and disastrous, and the editors of this conference report remark that it seems as though everyone involved has lost confidence in innovation. Richard Best, director of the Rowntree Foundation, sums up the findings with the reflection that housebuilding in Britain is 'producing the wrong product in the wrong way, using outdated craft techniques which don't work', and that the industry 'spends more on litigation and defects than on research, training and product development'. It isn't even profitable since the money is made not in building but in land speculation.

Participants noted that the big names of the Japanese car industry were already busy adopting building systems for another huge potential market, while at the opposite end of the housing scale in Britain every year 'an estimated 20 000 people wrongly referred to as self-builders, carry out their own procurement.' Other contributors examined our failure to get environmentally friendly approaches like the use of solar energy adopted as the rule, rather than the exception in housebuilding.

COLIN WARD

s