Had our meeting with Knott during the week. Instant coffee. Big A3 folder full of pictures of other people's houses. Then drawings of ours...
The main hang-up during the meeting was he was proposing to give us a house with the front third dropped into the ground by a metre or so (imagine a standard house with the gable end at the front, slice the front third and wedge in into the ground). The rationale being it would give a big house, but one that doesn't look that big from the front, massing in the context of the streetscene being a big issue with the Council.
This was innovative and took a bit of thinking about before coming to terms with. It was one of those 'oh I see, that's clever; I'd never though of that' moments that we were looking for.
Trouble is, those moments stopped there.
We left the meeting agreeing to cost up what had been produced but, instead, the more we looked at it the more we were surprised, shocked, and appalled at everything else. Given we had tasked them with 'making best use of light and space' (isn't this, essentially, longhand for 'good architecture'?) they had not just given us a house with four bedrooms at each corner (we were looking for more than just conventional, but it's not a hanging offence), but given us rooms with no natural light, and with the sum total glazing on the south elevation of two slit windows. Unbelievable.
Seriously, I may try to rework the spaghetti of cables to get the scanner to work and post the south elevation.
We've been working on a written response for the last few days. I'd like to give them another chance to get it right, but this is so far wide of the mark that we're beginning to wonder...
The main hang-up during the meeting was he was proposing to give us a house with the front third dropped into the ground by a metre or so (imagine a standard house with the gable end at the front, slice the front third and wedge in into the ground). The rationale being it would give a big house, but one that doesn't look that big from the front, massing in the context of the streetscene being a big issue with the Council.
This was innovative and took a bit of thinking about before coming to terms with. It was one of those 'oh I see, that's clever; I'd never though of that' moments that we were looking for.
Trouble is, those moments stopped there.
We left the meeting agreeing to cost up what had been produced but, instead, the more we looked at it the more we were surprised, shocked, and appalled at everything else. Given we had tasked them with 'making best use of light and space' (isn't this, essentially, longhand for 'good architecture'?) they had not just given us a house with four bedrooms at each corner (we were looking for more than just conventional, but it's not a hanging offence), but given us rooms with no natural light, and with the sum total glazing on the south elevation of two slit windows. Unbelievable.
Seriously, I may try to rework the spaghetti of cables to get the scanner to work and post the south elevation.
We've been working on a written response for the last few days. I'd like to give them another chance to get it right, but this is so far wide of the mark that we're beginning to wonder...
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