During an interview for the TV station of the Architectural Association (TVAA) in 1975, architect and critic Martin Pawley explained the origins of his decade-long project, Garbage Housing. Though the undertaking had matured into a fully-fledged antidote to the housing crisis, Pawley conceded that it started as an exploration of the ambiguity of meaning produced by ‘combining a pejorative term “garbage” with a valued term “house”’ (TVAA 1975). In saying this did Pawley mean that housing was akin to garbage, just a disposable object like any other consumer product? Or did he mean to imply that a house should be constructed out of throwaway materials? Or did Pawley mean to say that public housing was in a state of decline, like other sociologists and housing workers of the time (Cupers 2016)?