All tagged Crawley
Factory House, Crawley
'Housing providers often talk about advances in industrial building techniques being utilised in their industry. But there appears to be little evidence of this in the market with most low to medium density housing still being produced using traditional materials and trades, and extensive sub-contracting. Yet one area of small-scale building provision, the commercial factory building, does show signs of the advances in industrialised building techniques. Why? Because the commercial imperative allows one to ignore history, style and aesthetics, and to concentrate on buildings as physical systems expected to have certain measurable outcomes. However many of the current topical issues in housing are measurable in some way. Issues such as affordability, sustainability and flexibility of use are essentially quantitative topics and warrant rational attention. '
This house in Crawley is an example of Professor Anderson's research into developing alternative housing prototypes in low-to medium-densities, 'through systematically utilising the current techniques of the commercial factory building.'
Source: Geoffrey London and Simon Anderson, TAKE 7: Housing Australia: How Architects Can Make a Difference, (ACT: Manuka, Australian Institute of Architects, 2008), 16.
Varsity Walkups
The Varsity flats was cleverly conceived as an appearance of a two storey ‘mansion’ that successfully concealed eight flats within it’s large mass. Comprising as a domestically standard mansion with a low slung tiled hip roof, the eight flats are not obvious from the street scape.
It is noteworthy here to point out the preference for house ownership that well exceeded flats in Perth at the time.
What is remarkable though, is how Howard Krantz had successfully broken through this hard pressed culture and advocated to realized such a prolific portfolio of shared dwellings under one roof to resemble a standalone mansion.
The adjoining properties feature the similar ‘mansion’ typology or perceived as a oversized or "swollen" mansion.
Krantz’ maisonettes along Stirling highway exerts an ability to execute the typology of the English mansion while succeeding in establishing a higher density of housing along a major arterial road, while benefiting the economic returns for each unit.
