ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a combined effort made by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to develop a scheme for old people's housing in the new town of Stevenage, outside London. The Ministry's recommendations on the design of grouped flatlets were published in 1958 and 1960. In the winter of 1963-1964, when the flatlets had been occupied for some 18 months, as many tenants as were willing were interviewed by a team of sociologists and architects. Architectural design has been described as a process of successive approximation in which the architect proposes a series of tentative hypotheses stating a reasonable fit between the shifting needs of building users and the environments they plan to inhabit. At the outset, in 1960, the sociologist carried out a survey of the first six blocks of flatlets built by local authorities in different parts of the country.
