In the favour of a debative polemic, the last few months in the context of the UK’s sizeable architectural legacy and its built environment have been specially charged. This kind of dialogue especially holds elevated relevance for its future because of its dynamic, and quite honestly tumultuous and radically divisive current socio-political order. Housing has to, and in most cases, does, sit at the spear end of this conversation, especially as the questions of dignity in living, and the sheer need to house the most unprecedented numbers—emigrant and otherwise—that the UK has seen since the post-war period appear at the forefront. The RIBA Sterling Prize shortlist for this year, on the other hand, paints a differently coloured but parallelly themed picture. Despite drawing some valid criticism over a sharp concentration of projects in the capital city, its decidedly deliberate focus on housing as an aspect—total or partial—of its best architecture is quite telling of the need to house more people in dwellings that were above minimum prescribed standards. The aspect is as opposed to a strict and siloed typological classification, operating more in a programmatic capacity. In the context of added constraints of land, capital, and new regulatory policies that are yet to reveal their full scope and impact, these incorporated aspects stand to be blueprints and models—instantly disarming as beacons of a farfetched hope, scalable to a cause, and replicable, evading the finality of a solution to a problem as gargantuan as housing. If it shows it’s possible, and how it can be done, there should be no qualms in admitting that the topicality of the UK’s best architecture as it were has moved beyond the extraordinary to something delightfully ordinary, perhaps measured in real lives, modernist 'blandemic' or not.

On a visit to the very inspiring A House for Artists by APPARATA, I got an opportunity to mull over these increasingly dense contexts—spatial, judicial, especially financial and political—that social architectures such as these and other housing projects must navigate in the proverbial pursuit for change. The visit, planned on a subzero December morning and led by APPARATA founders Astrid Smitham and Nicholas Lobo Brennan, was marked by an overcast, grey sky that seemed to merge with the greys of the unassuming structure’s exposed concrete. Located a brisk five-minute walk from the Barking Tube station, the initial approach to the structure is marked by a sense of discovery even in its stark directness. The eyes unmistakably traverse vertically as opposed to horizontally, and the effect is propounded by its geometric form of a crown atop the structure, a large open forecourt that serves as a welcome break from the relatively tight streetscape, and a glass-walled community hall that doubles up as a space for display of art and other social activities. Twelve units stacked across four levels form the small but contained community of creatives housed at the eponymous A House for Artists.

The project picked up the Neave Brown Award for UK’s best affordable housing project earlier this year at the Sterling Prize ceremony in Manchester, which begets another musing on the criteria and parameters against which the perceived success of a housing project may be measured. While the Sterling and several other prizes across the fraternity in the UK award honours after a certain period and occupancy by its intended residents has elapsed, the temporal aspect of livability, of which architectural longevity is a subset, certainly assumes more crucial proportions when it comes to housing. Accolades in housing—material or immaterial—cannot, and should not, be accorded to the architectural bare shell or the promised visual, as is increasingly common in practice. Constructed in 2021, A House for Artists, now armed with resident testimonies of at least two years, exemplifies that, along with lending not completely novel but timely explorations on the success of architecture. As Brennan stressed during our interview with the APPARATA duo, "Housing is a process," which begets an understanding of it as a verb, as a continual process, as the act of housing people, and as a fundamental right more than a commodified entity. It merely begins after the building is constructed and delivered. It is also a rumination on one of the other RIBA displays, The Architect has Left the Building by Jim Stephenson, that impressed me greatly this year. In the case of this building, the architect(s) dutifully stayed and observed.

Two years on, not only has it swept the juries and critics, A House for Artists also has a host of delightful residents for whom the building has proved to be a sustainable housing model along with catering to their unique needs as creative professionals in urban centres such as London. The testimonials on the ground too were nothing but positive, with one of the residents exclaiming how they knew they had found their forever home and wished to grow old here, how they had never felt as secured and protected as they did here, and how they were all just noticeably happier since their stay here began close to two years ago now. A particularly piercing resident testimony stated how they simply hadn’t lived in an apartment with as much natural light all their life, which is more a pointed comment on the state of British housing than it is on the building’s offsetting of traditional circulation space. In this way, not only has the extended period of occupancy allowed for a more extensive documentation of the structure—not as built, but as lived in—it has also proved to be a testing ground for several aspects of design that the APPARATA team handpick from cohabitative models across the world, especially Brazil and India, to apply to a subversion of quintessential modernist council housing, but done with the right intent.

Chief among those subversions and the most outward of those successes is the shared verandah outside the apartments, which is as much a climatological respite that helps with shading and natural ventilation, as it is a planned space for unplanned encounters. A wider spin on the ‘streets in the sky’, A House for Artists’ "shared balcony" works because its stretch clusters together only three units—a sweet spot for the formation of a mini-neighbourhood with actual shared activities that supercede the occasional niceties between adjacent residents. Smitham and Brennan have toyed with the possibility of loading a fourth, even a fifth unit, to the ensemble across a single stretch, but the model remains nonetheless replicable and scalable through multiplying the number of access cores and steering away from the endless linearity thought to be the demise of modernist social housing.

Flexibility is key to the overall schema at A House for Artists, another yardstick for measuring its success as a scheme for future occupants, the implied user, once the architect has indeed left the building. All apartments have a versatile layout to allow for the residents to carve spaces within for working from home, for the display of art, or removing and adding walls to create a new room altogether that can accommodate an elderly parent or a friend, rendering the house as growing with the resident. The kitchen too—assembled but robust and impressively space efficient—can be entirely dismantled and moved to another spot in the house. The top floor of the settlement serves as a large hybrid space with a similar blueprint, but able to support living arrangements beyond the nuclear family, including extended families or arrangements with shared childcare. With fully dismantlable partitions, the floor may also serve as an optional extension of the community hall on the ground floor.

The way in which the brief for the project developed, and differed from traditional housing briefs, allowed the architects to further re-evaluate a housing scheme such as this which is as much programmatic and process-oriented as it is architectural. On the other hand, while the social context has always been quite prominent in British social housing, the physical context of A House for Artists plays a distinct part in why it works, both as a standalone and as a future model. The project was commissioned by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, which has historically seen some of the lowest levels of cultural participation all across Britain, coupled with extremely high levels of youth unemployment, racially driven hate crimes, and high rates of demographic change. Art and housing intersect then in more ways than one, as the project recognises the gap between the economic standing of artists in contemporary trade which places them in the same income bracket as ideal for social housing, and an affiliate marketing of the newest gentrified joints in the city (Battersea Power Station being a recent example) targeted towards them. The artists in residence thus pay a third below market price in return for hosting community activities and workshops on the building’s ground floor, not having to worry about their ‘space’ in a constantly shrinking city.

Not too far from here, the Mardyke Estate towards Dagenham—now revamped into the Orchard Village—served as the setting for British social realism filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and the histrionics of its troubled protagonist, Mia. The redevelopment followed nearly the same blueprint, and has been derided years since its construction over complaints of leaky sewage channels and balconies, and rampant crime in the area. While I am certain an intervention such as this could have averted Mia’s fate in the film, as an idea, A House for Artists is resilient enough to inspire the belief that things can, and should be done differently.