Peter Barber Explains How to Make Affordable Housing People Love

Peter Barber never expected to become the internet’s favorite affordable-housing architect. "My initial experience was in designing commercial housing," says Barber. But after spells with a couple major practices in the U.K. (Richard Rogers’s, Will Alsop’s), the British-born and trained architect followed his progressive political instincts, gravitating toward publicly subsidized developments for working people. Beginning with 2006’s Donnybrook Quarter—a white, almost early-Modernist housing development in East London—Barber has become known for low-cost projects that not only don’t look like low-cost projects elsewhere, they don’t look like anything else being built anywhere in the world. 

Sensitive in scale, thoughtful in detail and in materiality, Barber’s designs have struck a chord with extremely online architecture fans, popping up whenever online housing debates turn to questions of aesthetics. "I like that the work has broad appeal," says Barber—though as attractive as his projects are, he remains far more concerned with producing quality homes than providing fodder for memes. From his office in London, the architect spoke with Dwell about how he makes housing happen. 

Let’s start with the basics: In the U.S., building below-market housing is an amazingly complex process, involving government, private developers, and a lot of bureaucratic machinery. What is the system that you’re dealing with in the U.K.? 

What we’re doing is very often a mixture of different levels of housing. The days of totally subsidized housing are all but over—almost all of our projects, about 25 so far, are for-sale units with some affordable housing in them. A private developer might get permission to do 50 homes, and then 15 to 25 would have to be below-market. And that’s a pretty good deal for them, since those units get purchased right away by the housing association or by the local council involved. But it works differently with each commission. Donnybrook of course was our big break, and that was a competition led by the council, which we won very unexpectedly. With our McGrath Road housing block in East London, we were approached directly by the Newham Borough Council, who was looking to build 30 or so homes. They expected it was going to come out as a six- or seven-story apartment building plonked in the middle of the site; they were amazed we were able to get that many units on-site with houses rather than flats, using a design that was properly urban, pushed to the edge of the street. 

The hoop-jumping and log-rolling sounds a lot like the situation stateside—as does the assumption that low-cost housing means towers-in-a-park. How do you try to change expectations about what affordable housing can be? 

The urban dimension for me is everything—when we do our housing projects, we think of them as being pieces of the city. In a city like London, 70 percent of all buildings are houses and housing; cities are made of housing. So I like to think of these as being urban projects, and that’s definitely part of the reason we tend to favor houses over flats. We’ve found there’s a social benefit to having your front door facing onto the street, or onto a deck—a potential for neighborliness, for interaction. And there’s additional efficiency to that kind of construction: In a block of flats, 20 to 25 percent of the total area is common space—the circulation, lift, corridors—all that space which has to be both built and maintained, looked after and cleaned. Conjoined houses save considerably on that aspect. And then there’s simply the urban presence of occupying the edge of the street, as the old terrace houses did. The street is the basic building block of the city, and we don’t like compromising that. 

You mention housing models from the past, like London’s famous terrace houses. Your work seems to carry a lot of historical baggage, both in terms of the way the buildings work and how they look. 

A number of our projects have been reworkings of the old "back-to-back" type: This was a common worker-housing typology from the early Victorian period, a kind of terrace model without rear walls and with some homes facing out to the street and others into a central court. It was kind of discredited during the early 20th century, but some of it survives and it’s worth revisiting. Our projects in the London area of Barking and Dagenham borrow from that tradition, as does McGrath—that was supposed to have a central square that would be accessible to all, though the client ended up putting a gate up. As for the formal question, I tend to be pretty relaxed about that sort of thing. I like brick, since it often looks better as the years go by and painting isn’t a problem. It lends itself to interesting detailing too, like those arches we used at our homeless housing project in Camden. But I’m very indecisive about what architecture should be, visually speaking. Our Peckham Road project has no vernacular motifs at all. It’s kind of hard-hitting. 

You’ve certainly hit on something. Newham won the Neave Brown Award last year from the Royal Institute of British Architects; last month you were named to the Royal Academy. Moreover, while housing discourse these days is not (to put it mildly) characterized by a broad consensus, it seems like everybody—NIMBYs; YIMBYs; market urbanists; degrowthers—posts your work to Twitter or Instagram any time they want to say something positive about the future of social housing. 

It’s funny, because the work ends up championed by people with whom one doesn’t necessarily agree. People see in it what they will I suppose, and perhaps I should talk about style more often, but I really am more interested in the political dimension. In the U.K., 42 percent of us once lived in social housing. Nowadays that’s down to 15 percent. In the years after the Second World War, we succeeded in building 150,000 subsidized homes a year; today we manage a tiny fraction of that. And now here we are in London, the richest city the world has ever seen, with 160,000 people who are housing-insecure and another 8,000 living in the street. In the end, it’s about the decisions that government makes as to how to invest its—or rather, our—money. One of the things that needs to be said about architecture is it can help to influence things, but it can’t make anything happen. With some people, there’s this cynicism about social housing. So as an architect working in this space, you just have to try to have a variety of ideas, to not become too standardized, and to try to show people that affordability can mean many things. Beyond that, you just have to remain hopeful and optimistic.

Related Reading: 

Patrick Tighe Believes the Future of Los Angeles Is Affordable

How to Build an Affordable America