ABSTRACT
The broadcaster and designer Kevin McCloud founded Happiness Architecture Beauty in 2007. He was very frustrated with the quality of British housing and wanted to ‘challenge the way that identikit housing is built in the UK’. The collective aim was to produce an extraordinary ‘ordinary’ 21st-century vernacular that increases wellbeing and human comfort. Haboakus developed a housing scheme of 42 homes, 21 of which are housing-association provided, on a former caravan site in Swindon. McCloud chose Swindon to showcase his new approach to housing design because it is a very ordinary town. The ‘urban vernacular’ of terrace, or row, housing is associated with the arrival of the railways and factory-based manufacture. It was these railway cottages, with their large, four-pot chimneys, in Swindon that inspired Glenn Howells’ contemporary vernacular terraces. Though the project team have tried to make the development fit into existing Swindon, actually they have achieved a better Swindon.
