Miles Dean

Embracing the boring, Miles' ambition as a designer focuses on overlooked economies within architectural practice. With experiences at both ends of built environment professions – carpentry and fabrication through to architectural design, Miles wants to combine these perspectives to put forward an agenda defined by economics and practicality.

Miles won the RIBA West London student award last year for his project Framework for Occupation developed in ADS5: Camping in a High-Rise. This project focused on designing an intensely formal, generous and open superstructure that could be appropriated by occupants by using readily accessible materials from hardware stores. It kickstarted his interest in restructuring practices of control, authority, labour and creativity in architectural practice. These themes have been tested once again in his thesis this year.

Growing up in the UK and returning after five years of studying and working in Sydney, Australia, Miles is looking to operate in settings that work directly with the people and materials that make our spaces. He currently works with his brother in Manufaction, a furniture, joinery and fabrication studio which operates across domestic and commercial environments.

Starting off as an investigation into mass house builders in the UK, I have developed this work into a provocation that interrogates the structures, limitations and opportunities in our suburban landscapes. By looking at the existing mechanisms of housing provision in the UK, I am searching for ways to reform rather than revolt against a system that is so obviously problematic, but where the very structures that render it unsuitable are also those that mean it’s not likely to change. In some ways, this project is a collection of small acts that hope to redistribute housing control away from the large speculative builders.

Having seen these developments spring up since I was a kid all around where I live in the Midlands, the more I learnt about architecture, the less I understood about these developments. Who built them? Why? How? If this was the answer, what was the question?

These peripheral landscapes sit in a grey, unattractive middle ground between urban centres and open countryside. This is where we live. How long can we remain in quiet submission or subconscious ignorance of the challenges and hence the opportunities rife in this vast midfield of architecture? Reacting to an investigation into the structure, practices and products of Persimmon Homes, this body of work can be read as an attempt to deconstruct rather than eliminate the control of housebuilders and in doing so create conditions that support agency and action.

I hope it asks larger questions about who holds power in the creation of spaces? Recovering the ideas laid out in John F.C. Turner’s Housing as a Verb, I want to test the notion of whether we should be housed or whether we should house ourselves. With the UK’s speculative housing industry as the container for this ambition, is housing in its most economic form susceptible to the democratisation of choice and control?

PITCH VIDEO — Produced at the start of the project to express my interest for the year ahead, this short video captures the atmosphere under which this work began; frustration, scepticism, curiosity and anger. These developments are everywhere in the UK but we don’t want to talk about them in architecture school. Why?

PERI-URBAN FRONTIERS [GIF TBC] — These developments form the most maligned of typologies, the suburbs. In peri-urban landscapes around the uk, new streets are being laid out in our name as citizens and as architects. As Will Collins wrote in his 1854 novel Hide & Seek "How mighty the devastation which follows in the way of these tremendous aggressors as they march through the kingdom of nature, triumphantly bricklaying beauty wherever they go".

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Launch Project

TWO PIECES OF TOAST - REPORT — Research and Project Portfolio

WHO IS PERSIMMON HOMES? — Persimmon Homes builds the seconds highest number of homes in the UK Each year (15,000 in 2019) at the lowest average price (£230,000).

WHAT DO THEY BUILD? — The homes they build can be read as form of economic conservatism. They are the least offensive, least expensive, and subsequently the most attractive to the largest section of potential buyers. These homes have no problems selling and customer objections are seldom based on stylistic grounds.

HOW DO THEY DO IT? — I mapped out how they’re built, how they’re purchased and essentially how the system functions. I get why they are the way they are. Diving to the depths of the process of procuring, building and purchasing these homes has yielded something worth unpicking.

Rather than existing in a physical site, the work positions itself against the industries involved in this form of housing delivery.

In the UK we have a small group of dominant companies that deliver the lion's share of our homes. They face little threat from others resulting in a unique and challenging lack of distinction and quality. The conditions that allowed these companies to grow to where they today show little signs of changing. What good would it do to envision a world where housing was delivered without them?

I want to connect the industry's high-level thinking with the physical reality of its houses. Written into every wall, product, component, appliance and detail is the DNA of the company that built it. The company-wide policies and processes employed to deliver these homes need attention too. What does Persimmon ask of itself? How does it engage with customers, contracts, and councils? The research was conducted from a broad range of sources, from academic papers to Youtube new house tours by everyday people and bloggers. I found valuable information on the Burnley FC fans forum and in stranger places still. Understanding how these companies are reported on in the news was illuminating - much less was said about the architecture than the profits these companies make. Persimmon’s own marketing collateral as well as their in-depth annual reports offered up an insight into how the industry sees itself.

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— The civic aspects of these developments are strategically protected. What happens around and behind these thresholds is opened to the resident community to act on and arrange. Rear quarters, gardens, driveways and boundaries walls move to a primary role in forming this landscape.

— Building on Persimmon’s ambition to build half its houses from timber frames by 2030, i’m suggesting building half of each house form this way. The structural detailing and materiality pre-empts certain future change and supports a more diverse relationship with the building in these areas. Working within the existing core house types, the two principle street facing walls are left alone.

— It has been important to re-construct these homes through the same catalogue of materials, actions and details that the industry has available to it currently.

— Currently, the houses are of a complete block and brick construction. What I want to do is dissect this structure - from the permanent and public elements to the adaptable private ones.

— Uninhabited Permission template house.

— What Persimmon would do with it based on how they finish their show homes.

— A permitted development extension to the rear frees up the floor plan to allow for an additional downstairs bedroom.

— A permitted development extension to the side takes over one parking space. Primary access is moved to the side and the bathroom to the rear.

Thinking about how these homes will increasingly be relied upon by first time buyers and growing families looking to get on the property ladder, what kind of potential could or should these houses support?

— In between two homes in an emerging Persimmon development.

— In between two homes in an emerging Permission development. One car parking space has been relinquished to allow for a side extension, creating a bigger living area for a growing family.

— A typical street corner on an emerging Persimmon development.

— A typical street corner on an emerging Permission development. Boundary walls, gardens and adjacent spaces diversify as their authorship is decentralised.

— Downstairs in a 2 bed Persimmon Homes ‘Morden’ house type.

— Downstairs in a Permission Home early on in an occupants possession. Prior to internal fit out, the occupants plan on installing a deck over extended foundations to the rear with a large opening to the garden.

— Upstairs in a 2 bed Persimmon Homes ‘Morden’ house type.

— Upstairs in a Permission Home early on in an occupants possession. A loft stair cassette has been installed accessing the attic space for a third bedroom.

What I want to provide is choice. Currently, the way homes are finished not only suggest a certain way of living, but they also explicitly discourage people from acting. If someone wanted or needed a home to be a certain way these days, their need to re-do work. Take out the kitchen, remove a wall and so on… This is wasteful, time-consuming and destructive. Can we cut out that refurbishment and create a context where things are done for the first time right? Could each house become a home - fulfil some kind of penitential - and depart from the standardised world that created it?

Persimmon, and others like it, are notorious for their build quality. Extensive structural and cosmetic defects are almost industry standard. Rarely is a home occupied without a long list of snags and defects coming between the housebuilders and the homeowners. So why don’t we pull back on this over-provision and ask of our housebuilders to commit their efforts to the parts of a house that need to be done well?

Part of my criticism of these homes is that the legacy they create is problematically short-sighted. They offer a relationship with the house where you move in, hang a picture and get busy living.

Whilst this model works for some, what about those that want more? With the housing market in the UK short on options for people wanting to get on the ladder, increasingly we will need to ask more from companies and the homes they build. By looking into these short and long term futures, can we start to ask for homes that support some kind of positive legacy? Is it also right to ask for, or better still be given permission to house ourselves rather than be housed?

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Rendered Visualisations

User Defined Dwelling — A short video capturing the moments behind design and production. Home-owners can appoint, work with or seek advice from either trade professionals or the wealth of support online to finish their homes in a way that best meets their needs and available means.

— I am trying to tell the story of a new way of engaging with homes. Currently, they push an object-orientated mode of delivery where you buy a completed thing - a package. Can we move this towards an activity-based mode of delivery? What if you buy into potential?

— Why aren’t we telling people about their homes, what they’re made from, how they’re made and the many things they can do with them. I want to explore what could come out from giving people this template and letting them arrange for themselves what is appropriate.

This isn’t a solution to the problems this industry both creates and faces, but it represents a different way of doing things and asks if big business and individual agency can co-exist and thrive?

The strategy is to place late-stage building actions in the hands of trades appointed by occupants. Self-build practices, with their roots in the '60s, had high hopes but mostly they envisioned a total revolution. Each one creates for oneself kinda thing. What if we water that down a little and suggest the occupants do a little more than they currently can but not quite the whole thing…

Access to and quality of information is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was back then thanks in no small part to the internet. With DIY content flooding social media platforms with information on how to take control of your own environment and skilled professionals breaking down their practice on youtube, are we ready for the subtle democratisation of late-stage construction? The information to support agency is always at hand. Can we give people permission to use it?

I want to put this model to the test. Following on from the formal end of the project, I plan on exhibiting a model of a housing landscape that has undergone this process of starting with less and finishing with more. 8 potential occupants will finish and inhabit 8 Permission homes with respects to their own aspirations and available means. Will the hegemony of these landscapes be broken? Will people embrace the opportunity to arrange their homes for themselves? The project explores how one process finishes and another begins, and in just the same way I am excited to see how these templates of potential are appropriated by different people.

Miles Dean

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Royal College of Art