Diversity is Good & Uniformity is Bad

By Eric Kigada, Director at B & A Studios

A low level intensive fight is taking place in the Kenyan architectural community. The fight is about the size of homes, housing densities, ornamentation, orientation, materials, even the role of the architect…all part of a long time argument involving architects, planners and governments worldwide.

Recently in an article in the Daily Nation (DN Nov 8, 2012 Article: Tiny is the New Huge), the chairperson and the vice chairperson of the AAK were both quoted encouraging the use of smaller but decent housing and the use of the new building regulations that also stipulates “small” living quarters for housing. An argument put forward for this route is that there is no land. The tiny house argument is in line with what most developers would want: small, from the article: “near claustrophobic but classy” and affordable units since it gives them the impetus to cram more units per square meter and sell them off quickly.

This has lead to more pressure for the City Council of Nairobi to relax the zoning laws for most parts of Nairobi to allow much higher building densities. The move to re-zone certain areas has been met with stiff resistance from certain parts of Nairobi, especially the affluent North West (Gigiri, Runda and Muthaiga). The residence associations argument has been that the re-zoning done so far, in Upperhill, Lavington and Kilimani, was not met by an improvement in the infrastructure, leading to shortages in electricity, water and traffic jams because of the narrow roads thus resulting in a lowering of the quality of living in those areas.

Of peculiar interest is that Kenya is larger land wise and has half the population of Germany, a western developed country. In Kenya, the new building code defines a habitable room as having 7.5 square meters while in Germany, social housing (mostly built or sponsored by the Government which sets the minimum bar for housing), requires that the smallest habitable room be 12 square meters. Why would a country with half the population of another and more land want smaller houses? Sustainability? We have a better climate. This I do not understand.

Despite the small, classy, affordable houses movement, Kenya has not been able to meet it’s housing demand. Current construction methods take too long and are expensive. Lately, this has led to the introduction of pre-fabricated construction methods by various companies and government agencies.

The Government reaction to the housing problem has been very interesting. The Kenya Bureau of Standards at one point wanted all new housing to have a KEBS stamp as they considered them “manufactured”. A Construction Authority has been launched to regulate, train, and ensure quality and license contractors, materials and professionals involved in the industry. This will ultimately lead to the introduction of Standards, Classes and Formats in the industry so as to benchmark and assess quality.

In architecture today, that means being in line with the mass-produced architecture similar to the ones of the 50s, 60s and 70s…a taboo! The experiences of the 1960s and 1970s in mass-produced architecture have apparently been so traumatic, that it has led to the creation of a dogma in architecture and urbanism that translates as diversity is good, uniformity is bad.

We must consider the past mistakes, especially the Soviet one, as a key to make good design available to more people. In the processes of design, production and marketing, the use of standards actually enables innovation and diversification.

Let us look at what happened in the Soviet Union. In 1950, as head of the Communist Party in the Moscow region, Nikita Khrushchev began a large-scale housing programme for Moscow. A large part of the housing was in the form of five- or six-story apartment buildings, which later became ubiquitous throughout the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

In Romania, driving along a highway, one might think they have double backed and got lost. Three towns in a row, one after the other, look exactly the same! Khrushchev had favoured the use of prefab reinforced concrete panels, greatly speeding up construction. These structures were completed at triple the construction rate of Moscow housing from 1946–50, lacked elevators and in some cases balconies. The blocks were nicknamed Khrushyovkas by the public. Almost 60 million residents of the former Soviet republics still live in these buildings today!

Khrushchev, gave a speech in 1954 just as the first pre-fabricated housing units were coming up and in it were elements of the problems that would later come to dog the housing units: Some excerpts from his speech:

They [architects] all agree that use of standard designs will significantly simplify and improve the quality of construction, but in practice many architects and engineers too aspire to create only their own one-off designs… Led on by the example of the great masters, many young architects hardly wait to cross the threshold of their architecture institutes before wanting to design nothing but unique buildings and hurrying to erect a monument to themselves…If an architect wants to be in step with life, he must know and be able to employ not only architectural forms, ornaments, and various decorative elements, but also new progressive materials, reinforced-concrete structures and parts, and, above all, must be an expert in cost-saving in construction. And this is what comrade Mordvinov (president of the Academy of Architecture) and many of his colleagues have been criticised for at the conference – for forgetting about the main thing, i.e. the cost of a square metre of floor area, when designing a building and for, in their fascination with unnecessary embellishment of facades, allowing a great number of superfluities.

It’s difficult not to agree to a certain extent with the basis of Khrushchev’s critique, if we realise that the issue under discussion was building houses by the thousands for a population that were living almost in barracks after the Second World War end. Typical apartments of the K-7 series have a total area of 30 m2 (1-room), 44 m2 (2-room) and 60 m2 (3-room). Not big really, but that was not their greatest defect.

Construction was really bad: issues of water penetration, excessive air permeability and low acoustic insulation between apartments (due to thin internal non structural partitions) have been constant complaints among its users. The main problem though was to be the incredibly low thermal insulation, both at the concrete walls and at the metal windows. These gave the Khrushchyovkas a bad reputation almost since day one.

Back to the Kenyan situation, where the Ministry of Housing has decided to acquire a factory to build pre-fabricated panels to construct houses so as to get rid of the slums and provide mass housing. Judging by what the Ministry of Housing has put up so far using conventional construction methods, there will most certainly be one standard design and ALL new housing will look the same whether in Kibera or in Lodwar. I do not want to stoke up fear of the mass produced houses or ask architects to surrender to them because of the lure of money. Since many Kenyan Architects are in love with individual expression to the point of gaudiness – see the Kenya Pipeline Headquarters or the new Parliament Interiors as a few examples, the fear is a call for uniformity.

Citing some lessons learnt for future mass housing projects that can be applied to Kenya: We should care less for absolute equal repetition of the model like the need to wear school uniforms: that is not standardization, that is Social realism in its whole crudeness. Camper shoes, Ikea furniture and Zara garments tell a different story: they are recognizable products, mass fabricated, affordable, but we want to have them. Houses could be made as well designed, mass consuming products and we would love them as well. We should care more about performance, relevance and usability when designing and building affordable mass housing. Lastly, we all must not live in Lavington.