City's architecture celebrated in new festival

BUILDINGS, according to Frank Lloyd Wright, “are children of Earth and Sun”. 

Looking around Liverpool, you would be forgiven for thinking that some developments were the bastard offspring of Uranus. 

But for every bit of bad architecture there are ten more eye-pleasing “wastes of space”. After all, this is the city with more Grade I and Grade II listed buildings than anywhere else in the UK outside London. 

Over the next week or so these are celebrated as part of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ new festival, Love Architecture, which runs nationwide from 15 – 24 June 2012. 

Equator

Here in Liverpool, the festival will be launched, interestingly, at The Equator - one of the controversial Mann Island buildings which, depending, on your point of view, has little to relate it to either the Earth or the Sun. 

The Equator is also the venue for A Place to Call Home: Where We Live and Why, a major exhibition on transfer from London, curated by TV presenter and developer Sarah Beeney. 

It looks back over the last 250 years of the everyday British home  – from the first Georgian terraces through to today’s housing developments and flats.

Through over 120 images and drawings from the RIBA collections, along with models and advertising posters, the exhibition explores why they look the way they do, who they were built for, how they were sold to us and the impact of our home on our day to day life and sense of identity.

 The UK has one of the oldest housing stocks of any country in the world.  Via a time-line the visitor will be led through the many events and developments that brought about changes to our housing including the industrial revolution, the garden city movement, changes in travel, slum clearances, changing patterns of ownership, the aesthetics of modernism and its impact on high-rise housing, the role of nostalgia, urban mixed-use buildings the role of market forces in the production of contemporary housing developments. 

The story is illustrated with images by some of Britain’s most significant photographers social and architectural photographers such as Eric de Mare, John Maltby and Tony Ray-Jones.  

The exhibition reveals how mass housing was often based upon high quality social or design ideals that were sometimes woefully lost in the final outcome. It tells us how our houses were sold and marketed to us and explains why we have gone from being a nation in 1908 when only 10% of houses were owner occupied to one in 2008 where 66% of houses were. It also tells of how enduring the ‘traditionally’ designed house is to the British public and poses the question - are we really a nation of traditionalists or are there other factors? 

Beeney says: “We spend more time at home than anywhere else. So inevitably our home has a major impact on how we live and feel about our lives.  This exhibition tracks the evolution of Britain’s housing to explore how over the last two centuries our homes have given us ways to express who we are.” 

The exhibition coincides with a major new inquiry from the Future Homes Commission. The RIBA has tasked the Commission, chaired by Sir John Banham comes at a time when the RIBA is working with the Future Homes Commission to examine the future of British housing and asking why the UK has some of the smallest homes in Europe and whether the homes we are building today meet our needs.  

*A Place to Call Home: Where We Live and Why, 15 June – 9 September 2012 The Equator, Mann Island, Liverpool L3. Free entry.