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Architecture versus Housing
comprehen-
sively cataloged the failings of modernist housing
initiatives, and provided a biting critique of bureau-
cratic policies and insensitive designs (Pawley, 1971).
Two years later, in 1973, the RIBA Journal published a
short article by Richard MacCormac entitled ‘Housing
form and land use: new research,’ which demonstrated
that the desired densities of 250 persons per hectare
(approximately 38 dwellings per acre in American
terms) could be achieved by interlocking courts of ter-
raced houses. All the homes had private gardens, and
the density targets were achieved without recourse to
the publicly despised high-rise flats. Built projects
using MacCormac’s approach, such as Pollards Hill, in
Merton, South London (1977), by the Borough of
Merton Architects’ Department, bear a strong resem-
blance to the influential American plan of Radburn
New Town in New Jersey of 50 years earlier by
Clarence Stein and Henry Wright. In both cases, cul-
de-sac vehicle courts bring cars to one side of the
houses which open up to parkland and pedestrian
greenways on the other, all organized within a large
‘superblock’ of major roads.
The extensive influence the design of Radburn had
upon subsequent developments is discussed further
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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in Chapter 2, but for our narrative here it is impor-
tant to observe its effect in other British public hous-
ing schemes of the early to mid-1970s. Typical of this
design ethos, for example, are large residential areas in
the new town of Runcorn, outside Liverpool in north-
west England. Here we can see clear Radburnesque
principles in the layouts of vehicle cul-de-sacs and
pedestrian paths along greenways leading to local
schools, bus stops, a day care nursery, an elderly per-
sons’ home, community centers, and shopping areas.
In contrast to the crisp white modern terraces of
Pollards Hill, the neighborhoods of Palace Fields and
The Brow at Runcorn are built in a low-key brick
and pitched roof aesthetic, a stripped-down vocabu-
lary derived from traditional housing forms.
Vernacular imagery also provided the impetus
behind many other designs in the public and pri-
vate sectors in the UK during the early 1970s.
Housing schemes were designed once more using
traditional streets and closes and an architecture
that specifically recalled the regional vernacular.
Typical of this kind of development was Oaklands
Park in Dawlish, a seaside town in the southwest of
England, designed by the now defunct firm of
Mervyn Seal and Associates, where the architect
author worked for part of that decade. Oaklands Park
drew inspiration from the townscape examples of
Gordon Cullen, combined with an appreciation of
the local vernacular architecture found in the fishing
villages of southwest England. Although many archi-
tects regarded this use of vernacular imagery as a
betrayal of modernist ideals, ‘neo-vernacular’ housing
performed well in the marketplace, and before long
earned professional recognition – in the case of
Oaklands Park, by winning a national design award
from the British Department of the Environment
(see Figures 4.13–4.15).
These pioneering projects of the early 1970s often
met official opposition from planners, but it was not
long before these very design principles and imagery
became ensconced as the prevailing wisdom in local
authority design guides. The most famous of these
was the pioneering 
Design Guide for Residential Areas
,
published by the County Council of Essex in 1973
and discussed further in Chapter 3. A very clever
variant of this townscape-based approach – one that
has largely faded from professional memory – was
illustrated by Ivor de Wofle in the pages of the
Architectural Review
in 1971, and published later that
year as 
Civila: the End of Sub Urban Man
.
This project created a vision for a new town on
industrial wasteland in the English midlands, and it
stands out for a couple of reasons. First, it was
designed entirely in three-dimensional perspective
vignettes, comprising artfully composed photo-
graphic collages of existing buildings. Second, 
Civila
included many ‘heroic’ modernist structures, but
instead of standing isolated in space, here they were
juxtaposed closely with their neighbors. As Figure 1.8
illustrates, this created a dense urban fabric of almost
medieval complexity, but rendered without recourse
to romantic or nostalgic urban imagery. But this
powerful polemic attempt to marry the spatial com-
plexity of the townscape approach to urbanism with
contemporary architectural aesthetics – a poem to an
invigorated modernism – failed to affect British
urban development proposals. At the very time of its
CHAPTER ONE
●
PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND