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One of our latest projects has just been granted planning approval by Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council. The design responds to tight site constraints and a brief calling for an exemplar, environmentally friendly scheme.
Carefully orientated to make the most of the south-east and south-west sun, the saw-tooth layout and innovative roof plan create an animated, interesting street scene.
* the images shown are taken from the initial 3D modelling work - the wind turbines shown were subsequently removed due to concern about cost and their likely poor performance in an urban area
A full copy of the design and access statement is available as a PDF: Saw-tooth housing
Street elevations are also available: Street elevations 1
Click on the following image to see ‘fly-by’ animation:
This project was developed in collaboration with Kier Homes and Black Country Housing Association.
March 14, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Filed under housing, notes
Notes from a recent trip to the Ecobuild conference:
It goes like this: DETR figures state that for a neighbourhood to be served by a viable transport network you need 5000 dwellings. To design a ‘walkable’ neighbourhood we should provide all key facilities within a 10 minute walk. This defines an area contained within a circle of 600m radius. Take away the space recognised as necessary for communal facilities and roads and you’re left with a dwelling density of 50 per hectare.
Cue a series of images showing potential layouts at 50 per hectare, which MacCormac admitted himself was barely the beginning of any qualitative judgement of the resulting spaces. His key point, touched on throughout the presentation, was how this qualitative judgement is dependent on an improved understanding of the net vs. gross density - or, crudely put, the houses vs. the spaces.
He’s absolutely right and there’s a thread across this entry that moves from the CABE audit I mentioned earlier (which has much to say about better highways integration), to the car free environment of Trystan Edward’s terraces (whose high density probably land back at about 50 when you introduced parking), through the Span story of quality landscape better mediating the Radburn car/pedestrian divorce, to the shifting tessellations of MacCormac’s houses and gardens.
Full notes on all the speakers can be found on Rob’s weblog: no2self.net
