When a group of council houses in Norwich won the UK’s most prestigious prize for architecture in 2019, it seemed to herald a step change.
The previous year, the RIBA Stirling prize for the best new building in Britain went to Foster + Partners for its billion-pound Bloomberg headquarters in London. But this highest of industry accolades had now been awarded to the relatively unknown architects Mikhail Riches, for Goldsmith Street, a development of 105 terrace houses and flats in Norwich.
“It’s amazing that we even made it to the shortlist – it’s a modest, quiet project, of the sort that often doesn’t even get recognised,” says Annalie Riches, who with her partner David Mikhail and fellow architect Cathy Hawley, designed the development. “It wasn’t just the achievement of it, but the hope that it brought by thinking of social housing as architecture rather than just as a problem to be solved.”
This prize-winning development comprises impressive craftsmanship in pale brick, with black pantiled roofs and communal gardens and walkways. It was built to the ultra-low energy, Passive House Standard (also known as Passivhaus), which means that household heating bills should amount to only about £150 annually.
Goldsmith Street, Mikhail Riches’ award-winning low energy housing development
By orienting the homes southwards, making them super-insulated and air-tight against winter draughts (even letterboxes or cat-flaps in doors are a no-no), a comfortable interior temperature can be maintained without any heating even on cold winter days. This is achieved by harnessing waste heat from appliances such as the cooker and fridge, as well as from occupants. Designing to the Passive House Standard is estimated to have cost just 8% more than constructing to minimum building regulations. Goldsmith Street is said to be the UK’s largest social housing scheme built to this standard to date.
Mikhail Riches has a track record in the design of social housing with high environmental credentials. The partners’ conversion to green architecture occurred some 15 years ago, when, in collaboration with Hawley, they won a competition to design 26 rural homes in Suffolk. “The brief, from the Council for the Protection of Rural England, was for housing that was rural, local and appropriate,” says Mikhail. “When we read the brief, our eyes were opened to the whole low-carbon argument. That’s when we really understood the link between carbon emissions and global warming.”
The resulting development, Clay Field, in the village of Elmswell, is built from carbon-negative materials such as timber and hemp. The timber-clad homes are designed to make the most of the warmth and light of low winter sun. A biomass boiler burns wood chips for heating. There’s a wildflower meadow and apple orchard.
Now, emboldened by its Stirling prize win, the practice – which employs nearly 20 young architects and is based in Clerkenwell, London – is aiming for new projects to be “zero carbon” if possible, though, as Riches concedes, “there’s not an exact definition of what that means”. Even if a house is “zero carbon” in its use, tonnes of carbon dioxide has been emitted in the manufacture of conventional building materials such as concrete and brick.
“In a new project, with an ambitious client – another local authority, the City of York – we want the buildings to be low-carbon in use as well as construction,” she says. Over the next five years, the project will deliver 600 new homes, built to Passive House Standard.
“Ideally, it’d be great if every new house we designed from now on was to that standard,” says Riches. “The more it is adopted, the more affordable it becomes.”
Mikhail concurs: “What sets the Passive House Standard apart from everything else is that it’s fully testable. Before the keys are handed over to the new owner, the house can be tested and certified.
“But there’s much more to the design of a home than carbon emissions,” he continues. “How do you make a great street? How do you make a place where people aren’t going to be lonely and children are going to be able to play safely? How do you make the best of the views?”
It is this holistic approach, putting residents’ intrinsic quality of life above more prosaic needs that results in such liveable homes. And it’s an approach that doesn’t only inform their work on new homes. “Reusing existing buildings and making them perform better is absolutely something that we should be doing,” says Riches.
In Sheffield, a brutalist housing complex, Park Hill, is undergoing its second phase of renovation. Mikhail Riches has been chosen by the developers, Urban Splash, to retrofit 200 apartments in this 1960s behemoth, Europe’s largest listed building. Constrained by the building’s concrete frame – “which gives it its character” – it’s not possible here to achieve Passive House Standard.
“We’ve been able to ‘patch it up’ and make it as hard as possible for the building to lose heat,” says Riches. “There are limited opportunities [to make it green] but we’re doing our best with what’s there. We’re internally insulating brickwork that’s being repointed with lime mortar. It’s light-touch conservation. We’re being as deferential as we can to the building: small interventions rather than big ideas as – for heritage reasons – we can’t do anything like wrap the beams and columns in insulation,” she says.
As the caretaker of the building, Grenville Squires, told the architects: “Park Hill is an elderly lady who just wants to wash her face and put on a new frock.”
If an architect-designed makeover means cheaper heating bills and lower carbon emissions, too, even better.
Going greener
Find out how Nationwide Building Society is embodying its mutual status by supporting a greener approach to housing at nationwide.co.uk/guides/buying-and-owning-a-property/going-green
