Transcriber: Emma Gon Reviewer: Anna Sobota
Good afternoon.
So, I want to speak to you today about architecture.
But not what it is, more what it can be.
Because architecture is important, right?
I mean, we all use it.
We’re using it right now.
And we love it when it goes well, but we hate it when it doesn’t work.
So it would be useful to start with an example
of what I consider good architecture to be.
And to do that we need to start with this man,
the late Cedric Price.
Now, in the 1970s, he was approached by an affluent, middle-aged couple
who asked him to design their dream home.
And like all good architects, he started with this period of discovery,
speaking to the clients to figure out
what do they mean when they said their dream home?
Now, soon enough weeks turned to months,
because he was struggling to get the same answer from the two of them.
But what he managed to do as a good architect is take these requirements
and put them together into a cohesive proposal.
And he arranged with the clients to meet with them and present that proposal.
And his proposal was that they get a divorce.
Now, to me, this is great architecture,
not because of any building or any lack of building,
but because of the honesty to provide the advice
to follow a course of action
that is suitable for the problem in front of him.
And this is something I think architecture needs to do more.
Essentially to stop prescribing just buildings,
but to prescribe whatever is best for the situation.
Now, it’s not just a case of honesty,
I would argue that today it’s a case of necessity.
And the reason I say that begins with this graph.
This shows the rate of unemployment of architects from 2005 to 2015.
Now, 10 points for guessing where the financial crash happened.
But if you look closely, you can also see something else,
which is the month I graduated architecture.
So I went into the profession at a time
when one third of architects were either unemployed or underemployed.
And, to add insult to injury,
the year after began a decade of austerity.
Now, things improved over those years for the employability of the architect,
but they didn’t for our cities.
In those 10 years, we saw homelessness reach levels
we had never seen before.
We saw more than 2000 public toilets closed across the country.
We saw more than half of councils sell off parks,
and we saw one in five public libraries closed.
Now, these were all really important things
in terms of how we live and enjoy in our cities.
But as for me, as an architect,
it wasn’t my job to do anything about it.
Because as an architect, you’re not asked what should happen.
You’re asked to design what is already going to happen.
Essentially, you provide a service for a client.
And every client brings with them three things:
a site, a budget and a brief.
If you’re an architect who only does buildings,
if you just miss one of these things, there’s not a lot you can do.
With no site there’s nowhere to put a building.
With no budget, there’s no money to pay for it,
With no brief, there’s no reason to do it.
So how can we hope to tackle the issues
that were happening in our cities all around us
when they weren’t being served to us architects
by clients with these ingredients for a building?
Well, this is a question I’ve been asking myself for over a decade.
And what I’d like to do today is to show a few examples
of how I’ve tried to work around these constraints
and work in areas where buildings wouldn’t tend to work,
where these things are missing.
And the first example I’d like to show you is what happens when there is no site.
Now, as I say, when there’s no site, there’s nowhere to build.
And as our cities become more dense,
it’s more and more difficult to find the space to build.
And this is especially the case if what you want to build or create
is green space, which is vital to our well being in cities.
But for something that's so vital, it's under so much pressure.
As I mentioned earlier, parklands are being sold off
and there’s so little space to actually insert it.
Now, London you might say, it does quite well.
About two thirds of London’s green space, but of all that green space,
a third of it is private gardens that not many people can access.
Two thirds of it are parklands.
But what kind of engagement with nature do you get in a park?
It’s a very spectating thing.
You're not allowed to dig up and start planting your own things
and tend to seeds and nurture growth.
Now, if you want to do that, you could try and get an allotment,
but the demands for allotments are so high in London,
that Camden Council’s waiting list is over 40 years.
So how do you actually start to increase the ability
to engage with nature in a city that’s already full?
Well, to answer that question,
I started with an adventure.
And it was a venture that I had taken a year before
because as an architect, my job is to understand the city
and that’s a responsibility I do take seriously.
And so that’s why a year before I’d spoken to two urban explorers
and tried to explore an area of the city that not many people get to see.
And that is the London sewers.
So we broke in illegally, statute of limitations is OK,
and we made two trips for four hours each
going through what was once the river Fleet.
And among the many memories I’d rather forget,
that was one that really stood out to remember.
And that was that underground,
we have a really fertile area flowing underneath our feet
that for obvious reasons, is kept apart from the above ground
where we want to actually experience gardens.
So I wasn’t going to propose a community garden in a sewer,
but what could I do to find a sanitized version of this?
And to that, I look to the other kind of underground, the London Underground.
Because the London Underground, began in the 1860s,
it was the first underground railway in the world.
And it was made by digging large trenches throughout London
that were then covered up.
And they had steam trains on these railways,
and so there was ventilation shafts required
throughout the length of the track.
So these huge gaping holes in London,
over 30 of them running through the city, all hidden behind high walls,
you might never even know if you’ve walked past one.
And here was where it brought together
the above ground and the underground,
the microclimate of fertile growth and the light and occupation above.
So I’ve proposed that we make hanging gardens,
that we hang gardens in these ventilation shafts,
these huge openings, these pockets of missing land across London.
And what we can do is we can start to make use of that microclimate
because it’s unique and incredibly fertile.
It’s moist, it’s warm
with the mechanical ventilation on the trains in the London underground.
And it’s also got its own pollinators, mosquitoes who got into the trenches
when they were first built that have actually evolved
into a completely separate species.
So I worked with botanists of UCL,
and we calculated we could have subtropical growth
throughout the year in this microclimate.
So we can start to create really unique community gardens throughout London,
where once there would be no opportunity.
And in this case, the absence of a site wasn’t a constrain,
it was a catalyst for finding something unexpected.
And the project, as fanciful as it seems,
actually nearly got to a pilot stage with TfL until, appropriately enough,
the budget was cut.
Which leads me on to the next thing.
What do you do when there's no budget?
Well, money is a driving force behind architecture.
It's why the profession is usually the first and worst hit economy,
or part of the economy in any financial recession.
Because when there’s no money to spend, nothing gets built.
What do you do when there’s not only not the money to build,
there’s also not the money to sustain?
Well, that was the case with libraries.
With libraries, there was no budget.
And so not only would they close,
but they wouldn’t even have the budget to keep the books.
So en masse across the country, libraries were getting rid of these books.
They’re being sold for pennies by bulk, or they were being pulped and destroyed;
taken away from the communities they were meant to serve.
So what I wanted to do was to redistribute these books back into the community,
to create a kind of micro library network across the city.
We could start to use the urban grain of the city itself
to become a kind of urban referencing system where books about the area
and about the history of that place could start to be kept there.
So these alleyways, for example, of Fleet street
where were we housed books about printing and journalism.
And the books were kept in a kind of weather-tight containers
that were made from the materials salvaged from the demolished libraries.
And they referenced kind of a part of libraries’ past.
Because before the 1960s, if there was a book that was considered obscene,
it wouldn’t be kept on the library shelves,
it would be replaced by a wooden block.
And as a customer, you’d have to take the wooden block
and sheepishly take it to your librarian and ask for your rude book.
But since the 1960s that changed and suddenly books can go on.
And so I felt that
that was a really fitting symbol for all the books in the country
that were being taken off the shelves
for those wooden blocks to start to house the books,
to put them back into people’s hands.
Now, libraries were fairly straightforward because the problem was clear.
There were protests about it, there were press articles.
But what do you do if there is no visible brief?
Now, this was the case when I came to look at homelessness,
because we all know the answer to homelessness,
it is to provide a stable home with wraparound support.
But when there was no brief to provide social housing and affordable housing,
there’s no mandate for an architect to actually do anything.
So could we start to find other ways to intervene,
start to use the expertise and skills of our architectural training
to find new ways to actually help with people?
And the only way to do that is to understand
what their pain points actually are.
And so, this is something I wanted to do.
So I spent a year going around the country speaking to hundreds of people
who are either in homelessness or had gone through it.
And this is what I found.
First of all, with the sheer scale.
One in 200 people in the UK today face some form of homelessness.
Now, we tend to think of rough sleepers.
But actually, the vast majority of people are facing situations
where they may have a roof over their head,
but they don’t have stability.
If you’re sofa surfing, you’re moving incredibly frequently.
If you’re in temporary accommodation,
you can be asked to move with as little as 24 hours notice.
So, when you face those things, the implications are severe.
The average age of death of a rough sleeper
in the UK today is just 44 years old.
That’s lower than any life expectancy of a nation in the world,
and the reasons for homelessness are not what we think:
most people tend to think it’s mental health or substance abuse,
but the vast majority of people
who face homelessness for the first time have no history of these things.
They’re fully capable of recovery
if given the right support at an early stage.
So what was the problem?
Well, this is what I found.
When you lose your home,
you not only lose your shelter, you lose an address.
And an address was a piece of information
invented in the late 18th century
brought into the UK to describe the location.
But these days, it’s shifted.
It’s now a de facto form of ID.
And so what essentially you end up doing is losing your home,
you lose your identity, and with it,
you lose access to all the fundamental building blocks
of a healthy, independent life.
Essentially, you get cut off from support at the time you need it most
because of the very reason you need it.
So what I did is, I created a secure digital database,
fake address data from existing sources, whether long-term vacant homes,
council owned properties, buildings in construction.
And take that address data and allow people who are facing
the instability of homelessness to borrow that address
and because it’s done in a secure way,
it means that that person can start to use it to access services,
everything from accessing post to library cards, benefits,
bank accounts, employment, health care, even just avoiding stigma.
Now, ProxyAdress is currently live, it’s live in London,
and we’re helping lots of people already.
One of the first people we helped was a guy
who had been sleeping rough for three years.
Within a month of getting his proxy address he had opened a bank account,
found a job, gotten a flat and just recently I heard
he’s actually moving flat to be closer to work because he’s got a promotion.
Now, one of the most recent cases we had, was a victim of domestic abuse.
It's very hard to escape that situation because when you do leave that situation,
you're basically told you don't have what you need to start again.
So we were able to help this woman set up a new life
as she can be safe in the knowledge
that the address that’s stored on those services
doesn’t disclose her actual location.
So to come back to the original question,
why architecture needs to change?
Well, if the last 18 months have shown us anything,
it’s that we need to be able to adapt to external circumstances.
And if our cities are going to actually be inclusive and accessible for everyone,
I think we need to adapt as well
because today’s problems don’t follow professional boundaries.
And so, in my mind, I don’t think we should, either.
Thank you.
(Applause)