Project 35 won second place in an international housing competition to generate contemporary housing solutions in the visionary context of Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City. Our proposal operated principally at two scales: the domestic and the urban. We developed a detailed design for a prototype family home in conjunction with wider masterplan-scale propositions for how this home might form part of a new neighbourhood, borrowing from Garden City ideals but entirely 21st century in spirit.
 

In early 2007, Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation and North Hertfordshire Homes announced an international ideas competition with the ambition of delivering high-quality, groundbreaking housing in Letchworth, a development which itself has long been seen as a paradigmatic moment in the history of urban planning, based on the revolutionary zeal of Ebenezer Howard.

Project 35’s response was the design of a family home based on the principles of long-term sustainability and affordability. The design of the house makes reference to the language of the garden city and the suburban home, but also to more urban archetypes such as the mews house and the terrace. The curtilage of the home incorporates all the accessories of modern life, including a water collection tank and a covered outdoor space suitable for use as a yard, garden, storage or parking space. Comfortable features such as chimneys and front doors are employed but re-imagined to suit current and future needs.

Our proposal confronted the challenge of maintaining the distinctive and once-vanguard garden city character of Letchworth whilst achieving the density and lifestyle standards of the early 21st century. Our strategy for the public realm of Letchworth adopted oft-contradictory reference points. ‘Hard’, high-density mews streets, encouraging neighbourliness, and urban intensity are off-set by large green avenues entirely given over to pedestrian and recreational use. Formal and informal routes intertwine in a patchwork tartan of scales, materials, and green landscaping. The character of the home within this setting alternates from that of an urban mews to a rambling, informal rural dwelling.

The design of the prototype dwelling draws upon archetypal elements of domestic life (inglenook, garden shed, porch…) and reinterprets them for the contemporary context. For example the house is organised around a central ‘chimney’ piece which forms a focal point at all levels with an external barbeque at ground floor level, a living room fire at first floor and recessed closets on the upper levels warming clothes in winter. This ‘chimney’ provides passive stack ventilation whilst also providing centralised trunking opportunities for the multifarious cabling of modern life. To complement this exercise of reinterpretation, the built character of each home would be aimed at maximising the potential for customisation by individual residents without losing the integrity of the group, an approach which included the ground floor external areas which could host a wide variety of alterations and usage types. This approach takes multiple income levels into account.
This house design, and the urban-scale proposals that accompany it, stand as an example of a core Project 35 belief: that it is right to make a generous and site-specific offer, through design, without ‘over-culminating’ or restricting future users.

Urban-scale proposals similarly refer to both urban and suburban ideals, and incorporate wide and generous green belts alongside tighter boulevards (the focus of public car-parking) and even tighter mews. In this way the ideal of garden city urbanism is reformatted at higher density without sacrificing the key principles.