Woke up all covered in cold sweat last night after dreaming that a 2 wooden boxes had appeared in my back garden...
What an awful piece of design.
PS: 1st class woodwork though - I'll have him custom make my kitchen any day (New Yankee Workshop eat your heart out).
From neighbours' gardens, looked like a badly organised container yard to me!
kitchen
Call me old fashoned - I probably am - but I don't see what the problem is building houses that are in keeping with their surroundings. If he wanted an ultra sleek minimalist interior it could still have been achieved using conventional bricks and mortar under slate or tile on the shell, and wouldn't have looked like the carbuncle that those houses were. He wouldn't have had his problems with the glass either !
The trend towards wood cladding is going to end in tears. 500 yds from us, an Edwardian house has been pulled down and a block of up market flats built in its place. The central stair well exterior is cedar clad. Looks very good, (if you like that sort of thing) but already within a month of completion, there is marked discolouration from around the fixings, and creeping in from the exposed ends of timber.Gawd knows what it will be like in 20 years
AWEM
"clot" wrote
Good job he had the gift of the gab to keep 'em sweet.
Phil
Outside. They were super inside, and I loved the way he'd done the windows so the the neighbours couldn't see in.
But the outside was horrid. Every wooden clad house they've had on GD looks like a shed. Awful.
Yer but it give Mr McCloud a chance to prattle on about inspiring architecture. Even my wife now agrees he's a Prat.
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Sorry to disagree with all you philistines but I thought they were outstanding architectural concepts. Maybe they didn't look enough like Wimpy houses for you. The solution was a great solution to the problem of overlooking and, in any case, there were no views worth having around him so it was right to have the internal courtyard and place windows in such a way that he would see only his own garden.
I agree here. Everything on this program is either "brilliant" or "interesting". We consider it a "great success" - budget £400k, actual cost £800k - not bad for what was essentially a business venture...
I am no expert on the matter, but I would like to think that the geniuses who approved this creation would not have had a problem with them using one-sided glass or something similar... Would have also helped them from not having to sleep in a wooden box with a hatch...
Don't get me wrong - I am all for embracing new technology, materials, designs, etc, but this was not a successful attempt in my opinion...
in any case, there were no views worth having
I agree. A However I thought that a design like this with no 'distant' views from the windows apart from sky will be rather claustrophobic inside: lots of light but nowhere to look except inside. It must feel a bit like an art gallery.
Robert
The overlooking problem was described at twofold
1) not being overlooked by the neighbours 2) not overlooking the neighbours. One-way glass wouldn't solve 2, their solution did (kind of).I wasn't very thrilled with the houses at all. "Badly organised container" yard is a very apt description.
I though McCloud was rather hypocritcal in this programme. He always says that great architecture fits with and enhances the surrounding. This clearly did neither.
Not true. I seem to remember the guys that built his own wooden house in the woods (chap who made charcoal for a living) was a stunning building to behold.
This one, yes, horrific looking building.
It didn't _need_ to be that ugly.
Ugly is OK when you have to, but for their design brief of, "Make it wooden, make it look inwards and we've money to burn on the budget" I could point you at half-a-dozen framers I've worked with personally who could do a far better job of both design and build. An abomination that looks like two sheds shagging has no excuse.
The reason that most of the projects are "brilliant" or "interesting" (euphemism for him not being crazy about them) is that they are selected from a, no doubt, huge range of possibles. The fact that he went over budget is hardly something unheard of. The London Olympics are also going to go over budget, by a much greater margin and the building has not even commenced. At the end of the day, it was quite inspired to build 2 houses, the sale of one of which, would defer the costs of the other. Now, a URL showing the Montreal 'Habitat' building that I still remember after all these years and that was extremely well received and consists of 'stacked boxes' for its inspiration.
But if he does sell one for £700K+ he's ended up with a £700K house for a net outlay of £100K. Not bad, even if there is no relation to the original budget.
I'm very much for the (appropriate) use of wood. Context is important, as you allude to. In this instance it was not appropriate! The design of the houses to avoid overlooking neighbours (and vice versa) was well done.
That's what it should have remained a concept
The brief was to build two dwellings one of which when sold would pay for the complete build. At 400K a unit it was a disaster, due manly to bad architects who lost the plot along with their calculator. Granted the overlooking problem was always going to be difficult on that site, but a great solution it was not, good architecture even cutting edge modern design can come in on cost and be pleasing to the eye both for the builder and the onlooker. This one IMHO failed woefully on all three counts. Or are you going to tell me you have contacted Bill Bradley to offer him
800K for the other wooden container down an alleyway in north London. -
It seems to be a coming thing, so be prepared to be awful'd even more. Maybe it's because the planning app can keep using the magic words 'energy efficiency'.
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