The house that screams 'Arsehole'

If ever I saw a house that tells me it was built by an Arsehole, this is it. Predictably its FTW approach has put it on the shortlist for the 2018 RIBA prize. This piece of crap is exactly why appointing Roger Scruton to chair the new building quality commission is exactly the right decision.  

Where to start. A terrace of Edwardian houses is an architectural whole; typically the two corner houses, the bookends, are slightly quirky, possibly slightly larger than the rest, often with dual facades. Somewhere along the terrace will be one or more passages to the rear gardens, narrow and inconspicuous, sometimes only 2'9" wide, often gated. Door and window openings in the facade are enhanced by composite stone or terracotta detailing, robust enough to allow even plastic replacement doors and windows to be less visible. The design is in fact strong enough to allow considerable variation in roof covering, fenestration, door and window paint colours all to be accommodated without compromising the essential integrity of the terrace.   

The traditional terrace reflects quite well both British culture and society, with plenty of room for individuality but within constraints of a unifying commonality. They afford privacy while allowing communal security, bay windows in particular allowing mutual monitoring of the entire street outside. London terraced housing is far less susceptible to burglary than wonky, cranky little modern developments pushed like crooked teeth into small building parcels. 

The terrace also affords the illusion of a sort of egalitarianism that serves to bond residents to a locality as limited as a particular road, despite disparities in income, education, culture and class that would rarely bring them together outside of the street. 

All of which of course is well known to Dr Scruton;

In Chapter Seven of The Classical Vernacular, Dr. Scruton dares to enumerate a number of propositions, which lovers of beauty may adopt, as “Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism.” For example, there is the fifth proposition: “Architecture must respect the constraints imposed on it by human nature.”

This means that vertical windows and doors, mirroring the human form, are more appropriate than horizontal shapes that run in the opposite orientation for no other reason than a desire to deliberately transgress the quaint notion of mirroring nature. Dr. Scruton observes, “As animals, we orient ourselves visually, move and live in an upright position, and are vulnerable to injury.”

The importance of the visual analogy cannot be underestimated. If we do not take our bearings by anatomical nature in architectural design, our constructed habitat will hardly condition us to seek harmony with nature in other spheres. “As persons we live and fulfil ourselves through morality, law, religion, learning, commerce and politics,” writes Dr. Scruton. And yet how can we build a world worth inhabiting in those larger domains, if we cannot build homes for our bodies that are no more beautiful than sheds?

Consider his twentieth proposition, which attends to an apparently small point: “it is necessary to use mouldings.” And yet do not great errors result from a careless attention to something that seemed negligible in the beginning? Sir Roger argues, “Without mouldings, no space is articulate. Edges become blades; buildings lose their crowns; and walls their direction”.

The example illustrates a more general principle, which Dr. Scruton usually expresses as an aesthetic paradox: It is the useless that makes something truly useful. Mouldings may be considered “useless” from a utilitarian design point of view, and yet, as Dr. Scruton observes, without mouldings, “Windows and doors cease to be aedicules and become mere holes in the wall.”

The red excrescence at the end of this charming little terrace does itself no favours. The arsehole who built it will only ever be able to sell it to another arsehole; it will be liable to burglary, those sheer windows that can't open will fry the inhabitants in Summer, the flat roof will leak and rot, the hidden internal gutters and downpipes will block with leaves and soak masonry, that fashionable Farringdon brown-grey (almost indistinguishable from the grey-brown which is the only other powder coating colour in these people's palette) will chalk-up and fade and that blank flank wall of pretty London stocks will be defaced with graffiti in no time. In short, in fifty years when the rest of the terrace is still thriving, this decrepit wreck will be ripe for demolition.  

But the utter pretentious arseholeness of its creator is in terming it 'Red House' - as if this ugly hubristic stain on our urban fabric could offer even a simulacrum of comparison to the genuine house of that name, by Webb and Morris, whose genius produced a dwelling entirely antithetical to the jejune delusions of this nasty carbuncle.