The Edinburgh College of Art have announced that they will be creating a ‘Domesday Book’ catalogue of every multistory post-war housing project in the UK. The project - called Tower Blocks - Our Blocks!- will contain over 3,500 publicly accessible photographs from the 1980s, documented "at a time when post-1945 high-rise housing is continuously under threat threat across the [UK]." All images will be made searchable in a digital archive.
This latest design by Architects for Invention, a development bid proposal for the Spelthorne Borough Council, presents a residential development in the United Kingdom with community at its heart. Situated along the Thames river, the structure unfolds itself toward the city, providing its tenants, and the public alike, with extraordinary views of the river.
In keeping with best practices, this update to the existing town aims to place the community at its center, inviting visitors to enjoy the space along with the residents. To accomplish this, the building employs an open scheme, physically encompassing the community to draw it in through easy points of access. Additionally, the building is meant to create a positive contribution to the local character of its setting while simultaneously acting as a central hub for the community through its placement.
London based practice Henley Halebrown Rorrison’s (HHbR) have unveiled a scheme for affordable housing based on a model inspired by Andrea Palladio's Villa Capra (1566-1571) near Vicenza. The Pocket Rotunda model hinges around their developer’s ambition to offer new two-bedroom accommodation that will help open up home ownership to couples with young children, joint buyers, and single parent families who earn too much to qualify for social housing but are, nevertheless, priced out of the UK market.
The latest competition entry, "Gate 2 Tower" from Pichler & Traupmann Architekten examines the relationship formed between a high-rise building and its local and global surroundings to create a cohesive design that bridges the problematic gap between these different scales. Employing unconventional methods, Gate 2 Tower features geometries that not only create unique interactions, but also inform each other.
Group8asia is nearing completion on a first-prize winning proposal that is meant to revive the concept of public housing in Singapore. The Punggol Waterway Terraces, so named for the river on which they’re set, will be a sustainable community that aims to echo the utopic exuberance of Singapore’s first housing developments in the 1970s. Arranged around central courtyards, these high-rise apartments hope to create a sleek, graceful skyline that contrasts with the verdant greenery of their landscape.