Современная архитектура. Гусева О.Г - 19 стр.

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18
Consider a few non-architectural facts: 58 per cent of heads of households on the
estate are unemployed; 38 per cent of school leavers still living at home have not yet
found a job; 38 per cent of all the households on the estate are single parent families, and
that proportion is rising rapidly. Half of the families that moved into the estate in
1987 had only one parent. Of a total of 376 children, 131 have only one parent. The
child density is very high. That is a ratio of only 1.9 adults per child.
Overcrowding is common. Almost half of the families say they have not enough
bedrooms. Almost 78 per cent of tenants are in arrears with the rent.
None of this has anything to do with architecture, Modernist or otherwise. It
does, however, describe the kind of social conditions likely to give rise to crime and
vandalism on the one hand, and fear and isolation on the other.
But let us pay attention to what the tenants themselves say. 80 per cent of tenants
are dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estate. This problem is, indeed, design re-
lated. It has to do with the system of rubbish collection, which has never worked
properly. The local authority collection service decided from the very first day that access
to the estate was inadequate. They simply refuse to provide a service. The rubbish has to
be collected by the caretakers who try to remove rubbish from the estate with
inadequate materials and out of date plant. Tenants leave rubbish in the wrong places.
Another design-related problem is the provision, or lack of provision, of car
parking. But here again it is not simply a matter of design. Underground parking bay:
are provided, but they are not used. Can litter the estate (and obstruct the access for
service vehicles) partly because the under ground bays are not considered to be safe
places to leave cars. There is, however, an other reason: the rent for these spaces is high
and a tenant in arrears is not allowed to begin renting a garage.
The individual dwellings also come in for criticism. Curiously it is not the flats
and maisonettes that are most disliked, but the two-storey houses with gardens. They are
beset by technical problems, including damp, leaking roofs, poor sound insulation,
problems with drainage, solar heal gain, breakdown of heating systems and poorly
designed windows.
John Thompson proposes to set up a maintenance programme to solve these
problems - rubbish collection, car parking and technical failures, which are certainly
design related. The report also proposes a radical reorganisation of space, reversing the
orientation of the houses, putting bedrooms on the first floor rather than the ground
floor and providing pitched roofs. These radical proposals are in line with current
theories about space syntax.
This is an important report. Its main general conclusion is that for a community
to live in harmony with its environment, there must be both physical and social balance.
Architects should take account of the latter as well as the former.
_________________
Vocabulary:
a tenant
a headquarter

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