Dr Philip Graham
Architect and Researcher
Philip is an architect at Cullinan Studio and a postdoctoral ‘Innovation Scholar in Design’ at the University of Cambridge (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI). The output of this three-year secondment will be a handbook for designing, delivering and promoting adjustable housing, as well as knowledge transfer partnerships with experts in industry, practice and housing research. Alongside, Philip is a Bye-fellow and Director of Studies at Homerton College, Cambridge, and a visiting teacher of sustainable housing design at Tampere University, Finland.
Philip’s PhD (awarded 2023) spans the fields of housing architecture, real estate and economics. It concerns the need for a more adjustable housing stock to help households to manage economic shocks and changing needs, despite the UK’s illiquid housing market. Before splitting his time in the practice between teaching and research, Philip spent over a decade designing housing and urban regeneration projects, both in the UK and in housing-led city and heritage masterplanning in Libya.
Project Thinking
The housing ladder simply isn’t working
When their needs change, UK homeowners tend to adjust their housing by making a series of house moves or building alterations. In the UK’s low liquidity housing market however, people on the edges of homeownership lack both choice and the funds to trade-up. Meanwhile in higher density areas, alterations are hard or impossible to make. In an age of longevity, precarity and episodic changes in housing needs, these factors mean some households experience inappropriate housing for longer. To meet this urgent but largely unacknowledged demand for real choice over time, my practice-based research develops a three-part, transdisciplinary framework for improving adjustability, from a capabilities perspective. My findings suggest that adjustability is not only about space (normally the primary consideration of architects), but is also a function of tenure and the shared housing environment.
Disarming Gadaffi, house by house
Petrol, media and land were three things the Gadaffi state could provide for free. Four-lane suburban roads and giant, square house plots had fostered a dependency on the car and therefore, the regime. Housing had been weaponised by making it long on state fuel and expropriated land, and short on chance street encounters where treasonous ideas might spread.
This gave us an opportunity for subversion on a city-wide scale. We proposed a different sort of ‘Green Revolution’ – one characterised by an empowering, decarbonising design agenda and walkable streets. With only subtle changes to the rules, we created a pattern book of long, thin, terraced plots that doubled the normal density. Secretly though, we knew this would double again when sons married and built new homes at the mews ends of the family plot.
Home-buyers are ‘design-takers’
UK housebuilders are ‘price-takers’- at the mercy of a suite of development, financial and policy risks. Quite reasonably they seek control through a conservative product whose value is derived from private floor space alone. However, standardisation, whilst attractive to cash-ready investors, makes owner-occupiers into ‘design-takers.’
This was true of Bristol Harbourside - a speculative housing-led regeneration where semi-private space was limited to parking. However, the balconies straddled two flats at a time and we saw our chance to experiment. Instead of solid balcony dividers, we designed demountable fabric screens. Post occupation, we noticed the screens coming down as neighbours sought to maximise their outdoor space by sharing.