John Long, director of Igloo Regeneration, reveals how buildings that react to changing needs and conditions can benefit both residents and cities alike.
Adaptability is key to making homes more responsive to occupants' dynamic lifestyles while encouraging more environmentally conscious ways of building. Created collaboratively with Fragile, FRAME's latest white paper, Design for Life: Building the Adaptive Home, outlines why homes need to become less rigid and offers action points on how to design more flexibly, keeping sustainability front of mind.
As the second installation in an interview series exploring domestic adaptability, FRAME founder and director Robert Thiemann and Fragile founder Lukas Kauer sat down with John Long, director of Igloo Regeneration (see the first interview with Marc Koehler here). Long discusses how a more agile building approach can lengthen buildings' lifespans, promote more sustainable practices and preserve tangible and intangible heritage.
John Long.
ROBERT THIEMANN: We are living in an age of uncertainty. How can we prepare our housing stock for that and build in a more resilient way?
JOHN LONG: You're never very well prepared for the future. One change that we're currently thinking about is the ageing population. We need to ensure that the homes and places we deliver are capable of allowing people to age in place; you shouldn't have to move out of your community because you get old. I'm not very keen on the separation of young people into student accommodation and old people into retirement homes. Where there are frictions, I think it can often be attributed to the separation of different age groups, not the inclusion.
For one of our current projects, we've partnered with the housing association behind the development and the local authority to create a genuinely mixed-use, mixed-tenure and mixed-age community. You can buy, rent or live in affordable housing.
Photo: Courtesy of Igloo Regeneration
This community-led development designed by Bell Phillips Architects in London, United Kingdom, was codesigned with its residents. Igloo Regeneration acted as the development manager for the project, encouraging occupants to customize their flats.
LUKAS KAUER: How can housing respond to these demographic shifts?
JL: You shouldn't need too much bespoke product. Homes should consider a wide variety of lifestyles and life stages. We've thought about what happens when you get older and your mobility decreases. Could that home easily be adapted? Has it been designed with the idea that someone might need to change it and make that easy?
We're also looking at aspects that are difficult to change, like circulation space. If corridors are too narrow, then that's a major problem. Designing elements like passageways, doors and stairwells with future adaptability in mind is very helpful, as it's difficult to retroactively change that.
Some homes that we have designed are specifically for someone to buy when they're a bit younger, say in their 50s, but with an eye to the fact that there's going to come a point where they're old and may need help. We've designed one house type, where you could move your living space from the top to the ground floor, and the top floor could be separated for care. It's been designed to have that adaptation made in the future, and that could be a professional caretaker or a family member.
We're looking at a new scheme in Winchester where we've thought about adaptability in terms of use. It's a mixed-use scheme that will be a combination of homes; some for sale, some for rent and some affordable, and it includes creative workspaces, maker spaces, little retail spaces for entrepreneurs and some overnight accommodation. We are thinking about how a certain element of the ground floor can be adapted from retail to residential use or vice versa.
Photo: Courtesy of Igloo Regeneration
Located in London’s Bermondsey neighbourhood, United Kingdom, and designed by Munkenbeck+Marshall, East, Atelier ten, Buro Happold and Gleeds, a mixed-use development by Igloo Regeneration cultivates a sense of community, developing the square’s marketplace character.
RT: What do you need to make that happen? How can you transform a retail space into a residential space?
JL: That's probably the easier way around. The harder way is transforming something that's been built as a residential space into a commercial space because the ceiling height is often a limiting factor; they often require slightly larger floor-to-ceiling heights. We'd be looking at delivering the ground floors with a much bigger floor-to-ceiling height, more akin to commercial space, which actually creates lovely living spaces. The other thing is the structure. You want a robust frame that's adaptable within that frame. Particularly when frames are made of materials like concrete, you don't want to be knocking them about very much.
Photo: Courtesy of Igloo Regeneration
Designed by Brady Mallalieu Architects and developed by Igloo Regeneration, the 400 Caledonian Road scheme in London, United Kingdom, is sensitive to the city’s existing urban fabric, combining new structures with refurbished listed buildings.
LK: How can these approaches make the construction industry more sustainable?
JL: One of the things we're interested in is the circular economy. Are we designing buildings that can be changed? You can do this in a way that minimizes waste. The greenest building is the one that's already built. If you can't reuse it as it is, can you use the materials? In a lot of places where we can use the building, we do, and where we can't, we might disassemble it, keep the bricks, put them aside and then reuse them. You can't do that in many modern buildings because the cement that housebuilders use is like glue, and you can't take the bricks apart. Once they're set, they're set, and the only way to remove them is to destroy them. That's not the way we used to build.
Photo: Courtesy of Igloo Regeneration
The Maryhill Locks, designed by McGinlay Bell and JM Architects, sits on a brownfield site in Glasgow, United Kingdom. The mixing of tenure types allows a diversity of residents, from first time buyers to families, to share the same neighbourhood.
RT: Why is it important to extend buildings' lifespans from a broader urban and cultural perspective?
JL: Buildings have survived the test of time not necessarily because they were perfect but because they were adaptable, and people enjoyed them enough to keep them. There has to be a desire or value to the building to want to keep it, which I think is partly about beauty and design and partly about stories. Places ingrain themselves in our psyches, and they become important to us beyond bricks and mortar.
The places we work in, being in city centres with rich heritage and history, have years of culture and history behind them. I think we've become very aware that we're curators, so we get to hold these things quite lightly in our hands for a short period of time in the scheme of things.
So much time has gone before us; so many stories have been told before us, and so many people have been involved in these places and will be after us. You've got to hope that what you do is right for the present and that you leave behind something that will become as much loved as other parts of those cities. You're essentially trying to set up a platform for a place, not the place itself. It's not possible for us to know exactly how those places will evolve. You want people to live life and to form, own and shape them. If we've done our job right, then those places change, shape, morph and mould over time.
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