Affordable housing works

Affordable Housing Works is a privatisation hub for residents of the Byker Wall Estate area in Newcastle. The centre educates and assists social-housing tenants on the steps of how they can collectively come together and purchase their home off of their landlord, through a process called Collective Enfranchisement. 

The project is inspired by the manifesto and blueprint ‘Privatise the Mandem’, which intimately guides tenants through Collective Enfranchisement. The manifesto is acutely referenced to and reflected throughout the project.

The project takes this blueprint and manifests it both physically and spatially within an enormous parasitic piece of architecture on the Newcastle Tyne river-front. 

Affordable Housing Works is foremost a collection of interior co-working spaces that accommodate the tenants of the Byker Wall and educates them on how to achieve sovereignty as a home-owner by collectively enfranchising their estate. Along with education, the centre also provides all of the resources  and assistance required in order to achieve this.

The privatisation hub also facilitates a large-scale plywood factory that manufactures the future extensions of the Byker Wall Estate by utilising Wikihouse: an open-source plywood-CNC technology that provides easy-to-assemble flat pack homes and structures. 

This technology is also utilised within the building to accommodate all of the co-working spaces for the tenants to complete the process of Collective Enfranchisement and achieve Sovereignty.

The most important factor for the success of this project was that the final proposal was not perceived as ‘corporate’ to the social-housing tenants of the Byker Wall that would be the primary user of the space.

In order to avoid this, the project is designed in tandem with the principles of Social Empowerment. This is the projects’ strongest attribute, and is represented through specifically designed architectural qualities and experiences.

These architectural qualities are expressed and represented in a two-fold manner within the physical proposal of the building, through its structure and circulation.

The circulation is carefully designed to create journeys through the building for visiting tenants that follows the movement of plywood throughout the factory spaces. These journeys create an assosciation between the tenant and the raw plywood, as they both change through their use within the building to become the landlord and the Wikihouse parts and pieces respectively.

These intertwining circulations are expressed within an exploded axonometric drawing that shows the relationship between the plywood (yellow) and the (tenants).

The structure of the building is the second design tool utilised in order to create a specific architectural quality in tandem with the principles of Social Empowerment.

The structure of the building as a technical component is designed as a seamless 6-way timber joint, connected with a cross-sectional plate and dowels. 

This component is repeated throughout the building within an obsessive and visually-demanding structure composed of repeating posts and beams. 

The dense technical element creates an environment in which they can see the simplicity of the component, and relate the capability of constructing the privatisation hub themselves to the capability of achieving Collective Enfranchisement.