Hasta La Ideas

Keir Starmer’s newly elected government has made big promises about increasing housing supply in England without properly explaining why it wants to do so, writes Peter Apps.

Last week saw the UK’s new government spell out its priorities in the King’s Speech, with housing grabbing most of the headlines. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the general election with a manifesto generally light on specifics, but it did make one very clear promise in this regard: 1.5 million new homes will be built in England over the course of his first term.

This is a tough target. It would represent a 50 per cent increase on today’s output at a time when the numbers are trending down. A stodgy housing market, a major skills shortage, an MMC [modern methods of construction] industry that appears dead in the water, a financial crisis in the social housing sector, a highly volatile global supply chain and half a dozen other macroeconomic factors will make it very hard to achieve.

Amid a lot of debate a more fundamental question is rarely asked: why do it at all?

But amid a lot of debate about whether and how the new government should best approach the challenge, a more fundamental question is rarely asked, namely: why do it at all? There is a political consensus about increasing house building, but far less agreement about what we want an increased volume of house building to achieve.

In short, and to use slightly annoying business lingo, 1.5 million homes represents an output, not an outcome. Building 1.5 million homes is not the same as solving the housing crisis.

Study the political rhetoric around house building and you tend to find three separate outcomes politicians have in mind when they talk about building new homes.

The first is growing the economy. This – you can argue with some justification – tends to be the primary objective of chancellors, including the current one.

It isn’t hard to see why: a long chain of people are employed in the process of building each house, and the growth continues when someone moves in and fills it with flat screen TVs, fridges, IKEA furniture and babies. Each new unit of housing is a growth generator, and the economics of this are pretty well made out.

But building homes is sold to the public as more than just growth generation. We are also told it will make it cheaper for younger people locked out of the housing market to buy, and (even more nebulously) end the housing crisis overall.

Houses in our big cities are priced according to their value as investment assets

The actual contribution of a binary new build target to either of these outcomes is a lot harder to track. Yes, there is a significant degree to which high house prices in the UK are a direct response to constraints on supply, in particular the inability to provide housing around key cities due to the green belt designations. Research by the academic Paul Cheshire showed that the real price of houses has nearly doubled in every decade since the supply of urban land was frozen by the introduction of green belts in 1955.

But rising house prices are about a lot more than that.

They are also about the low-interest-rate world that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s and the sudden surge of investor capital into fixed assets that resulted from it. Houses in our big cities are priced according to their value as investment assets (to buy-to-let landlords or huge funds like Blackstone) and that price will move up or down based on how that value changes, not on the overall number of supply.

And they are also about mortgage availability and demand-side policies, including Labour’s own mortgage guarantee scheme. I haven’t seen any convincing analysis on it, but it could even be the case that the net effect of building 1.5 million homes and introducing a comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme is to put prices up.

House prices are currently either stagnant or falling at a point when supply is at a very low ebb, which should tell us that this is a more complex question than it is sometimes made out to be. However many homes the current planning reforms deliver, prices will rise again when the Bank of England finally cuts the overall interest rate. That, I’m afraid, is the economy, stupid.

New supply in a market dominated by private house builders will also have a limited impact on overall house prices because volume builders operate a business model that actively seeks to keep them high.

The housing crisis, as it manifests in Britain in 2024, is about human suffering

This is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple statement of how their business models operate. They will have a calculated “absorption rate”, which considers how many homes can be released per site without reducing the value of their product, and release the homes in accordance with it. Their objective as businesses is not to solve the housing crisis but to deliver value to shareholders and again, that is not a conspiracy but a pretty straightforward statement about how private businesses work in a market economy.

The best that could really be hoped for in that context is that hitting the 1.5 million homes target helps keep house prices stable – or at least more stable than they have been in recent decades – and wages grow at the same time, which reduces the affordability ratio a bit.

Now, that isn’t a bad thing to hope for. But when a young, desperate generation hear Starmer promise to make buying a home more affordable, they probably take that to mean a rapid and sustained fall in prices, and that simply won’t happen with new supply alone. In fact, the catastrophic economic fallout and political blowback that would result if it did would almost certainly cost Starmer his job.

Finally, we have to think about whether any softening in house prices would really represent an end to “the housing crisis”.

My answer would be that this could only be the case if you view the housing crisis through the very narrow lens of a young person who is close to being able to afford a home, but coming up slightly short.

But the housing crisis, as it manifests in Britain in 2024, is about much, much more human suffering than that.

It is about the 145,800 children in dreadful homelessness accommodation and the drastic impacts that is having on their future. It is about the tens of thousands of social-housing tenants enduring desperately inappropriate standards of disrepair.

Ending that housing crisis should be one of this new government’s fabled missions

It is about the 300,000 households who present as homeless to their local authority every year (80 a day). It is about the rapidly ageing population with no suitable housing to age into.

It is about the vast generational discrepancy between those who gained property wealth in a different era and those who now cannot, and how that transfer of wealth will open up chasms of inequality as it is passed down and inherited. It is about those trapped in unsafe buildings which were created – ironically enough – in part by previous pushes to increase supply at all costs.

It is about all this and dozens of other factors as well, which bake ill-health, inequality, lost potential and human misery into the fabric of our society.

Ending that housing crisis should be one of this new government’s fabled missions. But a plan to do it asks for a lot more than a simple plan to increase supply.

Peter Apps is a London-based journalist specialising in social housing. He was formerly the deputy editor of Inside Housing and his book on the Grenfell Tower fire, titled Show Me The Bodies, won the 2023 Orwell Prize for political writing.

The photo is by Michael Tubi via Shutterstock.

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Acts of mending and maintenance are the subject of the Fix: Care and Repair exhibition in Helsinki, Finland. Here, its curators share five works that shed light on a rarely celebrated topic.

The Fix: Care and Repair exhibition brings together objects and artworks that tell a story about shifting social attitudes towards repair.

“The way we treat broken objects reveals something about us and our society,” said co-curator Kaisa Karvinen. “Do we consider repairing real work? Do we consider a repaired object beautiful? Do we prefer to repair something, or do we throw it away and replace it with something new?”

The exhibition is the first to bring together curators from both the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum Helsinki, which merged at the start of this year and will soon share a new building on the city’s South Harbour.

Karvinen told Dezeen that the curators’ thinking during the exhibition development was influenced by the work of two writers, Shannon Mattern and Hilary Sample.

Mattern argued for the need to make care and maintenance – instead of innovation – our dominant way of thinking about the world, while in her book Maintenance Architecture, Sample made the case for maintenance as a part of architecture.

However, choosing what objects to display to explore these ideas was not straightforward, and the curators had to take some unconventional approaches.

“When you are working with practices like work and labour that are not only about materials and objects, we have a challenge of how to bring these ways of doing into the museum,” said Karvinen.

The curators’ approach has involved commissioning several new artworks to frame the topic. They have also sometimes exhibited objects that are not just mended but broken or dirty.

“We wanted to question this idea of only exhibiting things that are clean and bright and novel,” said Karvinen. “We have things that are broken or dirty or full of patina.”

Karvinen and her co-curators Jutta Tynkkynen and Sara Martinsen share their insights about five objects from the exhibition below:

Alvar Aalto’s Chair 65, restored so that the varnish has come off, 1935

“In 1935, Alvar Aalto designed the Chair 65. Aalto used it in various buildings he designed, for example in Vyborg Library, completed that same year. Looking at this chair from the 1950s, one can consider what the critical point regarding the wear of such a utility object may be.

“Is the tactile sensation of a used chair different from that of a brand-new chair? Is the goal of restoring a mass-produced chair to return it to its former state, or is some imagination allowed? Will the incomplete restoration and unsanded paint chips spoil the design classic, or does ‘accidental art’ make the chair unique?”

Plaster copy of the decorative volute of the main door from the Museum of Finnish Architecture building, 1980s

“The Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum Helsinki, with their internationally unique collections, merged in early 2024. The Museum of Finnish Architecture, established in 1956, has a long history of recording the creative process of architects’ work.

“The museum has extensive collections of drawings, photographs and scale models. It is, of course, not possible to store entire buildings in collections due to their large size. Nevertheless, the museum owns some building fragments.

“These parts come from the current Museum of Finnish Architecture building at Kasarmikatu 24, which was completed in 1899. Before becoming a museum, the building housed the University of Helsinki’s Department of Physical Education and, before that, the original user, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Some of the pieces are plaster spare parts made in connection with the renovation of the museum building in the 1980s. They were cast in case the decorations were damaged during the renovation.”

Cleaning cart used to clean the facilities of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, designed by Ilkka Pilto and Petri Rekola, 1994

“From the outset of the curatorial process, we recognised the critical importance of engaging in dialogue with maintenance and repair professionals. Consequently, we collaborated closely with the museum’s cleaning staff.

“The nature of cleaners’ work places them at the immediate intersection of architecture and design. Maintenance and upkeep processes, including the cleaning of spaces and objects, are vital for the preservation of our environment and material world. They are intertwined with crucial questions of sustainability and, as such, deserve the same recognition and respect as design work.

“To symbolise the cleaning personnel’s simultaneous presence and invisibility in our daily lives, we selected the humble cleaning cart. Its functional design serves as a reminder of our colleagues who diligently maintain the tidiness of our shared spaces. Moreover, the abundant equipment of tools and chemicals the cart carries acts as an emblem of the vast knowledge their profession entails.”

Inheritance by Takao Momiyama, 2006–2023

“Textile artist Takao Momiyama uses the Japanese sashiko technique in his work. Sashiko is a traditional sewing and mending technique where different fabrics are sewn together in layers with needle and thread.

“The fabrics are quilted together with running stitches that form geometric patterns and cover the entire surface. The air trapped between the fabric layers makes the textile warm. The edges are often left unturned and raw.”

“Mariyama says: ‘The technique carries with it an understanding of how important it is to take care of items and things. Care takes time, and it is done by sewing with slow stitches. Repairing and patching layer by layer is the opposite of disposable culture.'”

Inventory installation by Liisa Ryynänen, commissioned by the museums, 2024

“While creating this piece, architect and artist Liisa Ryynänen collected building parts from buildings that are under demolition in Helsinki and assembled them into an installation. Together, these mundane and shabby ceiling panels, electrical conduits and curtains build a miniature temple in the Design Museum’s small exhibition hall.

“In the exhibition, Liisa’s work represents a space at a realistic scale that visitors can enter. The office aesthetics of the piece create a contrast with the architecture of the museum building, which was originally designed as a school in the late 19th century.

“Ryynänen’s work poses a question regarding the valuation and repair of buildings: Why do we see the mundane building parts added by users themselves as ugly waste that destroys the original building? How could we learn to approach familiar and everyday material parts of buildings as materials that embody energy and work? Could we learn to see a dropped ceiling as beautiful?”

Fix: Care and Repair is on show from 26 April 2024 until 5 January 2025 at the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum Helsinki. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Architecture studio Between the Walls invited artists from across Ukraine to create a collection of chairs, which was raffled off to raise funds for a foundation supporting displaced people in the war-torn country.

Local practice Between the Walls asked eight contemporary artists to transform its design for a simple flat-pack wooden chair into a unique art object to raise funds for housing charity District#1.

Each artist was responsible for developing one chair and was given complete freedom to express their creative vision, resulting in nine different outcomes including one produced by Between the Walls.

The chairs formed the prizes for a raffle in support of District#1, which helps to restore and construct housing for people impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Alongside the fundraising objective, Between the Walls founders Andriy Anisimov and Viktoriya Kareva wanted to elevate the profile of Ukrainian contemporary art within the architecture and design community.

“Firstly, for us, this is a way to raise funds for the District#1 fund to cover the primary needs in the construction of housing for displaced people,” said Anisimov and Kareva. “The second priority is to start a discussion in the world of design and inspire artists and designers to creative collaboration.”

Creative duo Arthur and Igor Spaskyi of experimental art and musical performance practice SOC.I.A used their signature spray paint technique to give the chair a vibrant graphic makeover.

Kharkiv street artist and illustrator Gamlet Zinkivskyi painted his chair black and decorated it with miniature drawings of chairs in white.

The inscription “there is always a place for you” promotes a message of inclusivity and diversity.

Tamara Turlyn, artist and co-founder of Kyiv’s Depot 12_59 art space, left the chair unadorned and placed it in a local bomb shelter during an air raid alert. A photograph of the chair in situ was entered into the raffle instead.

“I believe that when a thing is really good, I have nothing to add to it, except that it fulfils its function,” said Turlyn. “A lot of shelters are still not suitable for long stays, so it would be good to leave it where it is needed.”

Multidisciplinary artist Vitaly Kokhan drew inspiration from Ukrainian applied art when decorating his chair with geometric shapes and symbols that are carved into the chair’s surface.

Similarly, Kyiv-based Anton Sayenko referenced Ukraine’s heritage and traditions with his chair, which he painted a shade of sky-blue associated with rural life in the country.

Artist and fashion designer Yaroslava Khomenko used a thermal compression technique to cover her chair in a wrinkly skin.

“By using my traditional compression technique, dominated by sculptural texture, I deliberately concealed beneath it the imperfections that could distract attention from the object’s form,” said Khomenko.

Artist and urbanist Anastasia Lelyuk paid tribute to her home city of Luhansk. Also known as Lugansk, the city is referred to by its residents as Lugangeles, which is emblazoned on the chair as a slogan.

Tara Hutsol, artist and workshop leader at the inclusive bakery Good Bread from Good People, painted his chair in primary hues of red, yellow and blue, while the final chair designed by Between the Walls aims to break down the cliches associated with the colour pink.

“This particular shade of pink is about freedom, about freshness, about unusualness,” said the designers. “It can be both by itself and dilute the interior, becoming its element. If you like this pink or something unusual, then why not?”

Between the Walls is more typically involved in designing interior projects that reflect the interests and personalities of their users.

Other design projects that have aimed to raise funds for Ukraine include a series of lamps made from salvaged air-raid shells by local studio YOD Group, with proceeds going to Ukrainians fighting on the front line.

The photography is courtesy of Between the Walls.

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For many people, the dream of a home gym often gets snagged on the harsh reality of limited space. Traditional rowing machines, with their long frames and bulky builds, can feel intrusive in a compact apartment or cluttered living room. Rowing machines, although the perfect example of a healthy, full-body workout, aren’t really designed to be space-saving, or even good-looking, to be honest. They’re designed to be used, and then hidden away, which makes their large, cumbersome design unsuitable for most homes (not necessarily just smaller apartments). In comes the JOYSONG Cube Rower, with its IKEA meets Pottery Barn meets Planet Fitness approach. Designed to be compact, multipurpose, aesthetic, and highly effective, the JOYSONG Cube Rower gives you the full rowing machine experience in a space-saving form factor. Its unique design is perfect for rowing, but also lets you do more than 80 other exercises (so you aren’t restricted to just one boring workout), and when you’re done sweating it out, the JOYSONG Cube Rower folds down into a form factor no larger than a side table, with a wooden exterior that allows it to perfectly blend into apartments without looking as obnoxious as a Peloton.

Designer: The JOYSONG Team

Click Here to Buy Now: $649 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 466/500 left! Raised over $222,000.

The key feature of the JOYSONG Cube Rower lies in its name – the cube. This ingenious design allows the machine to fold up into a compact cube after your workout, taking up minimal floor space. At just 55cm in height when folded, the JOYSONG Cube Rower practically disappears into your home, occupying a fraction of the space your conventional home gym would. Besides, a leather seat on top of the cube means your rower actually doubles as a stool when not in use, giving you a multipurpose piece of furniture that you can exercise with. When it’s time to exercise, the Cube Rower unfolds in minutes, transforming into an extensive rowing apparatus complete with an app as well as real-life training videos you can watch on TV as you row, creating a simulation-like experience that has you feeling like you’re really on a lake with a boat. For users who prefer not to use an app, the rowing machine includes a digital display screen that enables them to track and record their workout data.

Under the JOYSONG Compact Cube Rower’s hood lies a powerful Water & Magnetic Resistance system that provides the resistance required to facilitate your exercise. The dynamic duo of ferromagnets and fluid allows you to experience the smooth feel of magnetic resistance while simultaneously enjoying the realistic dynamics of rowing on water. Combined, they provide up to 30 kilograms of resistance, which can be easily adjusted through a digital panel, making it suitable for beginners who are just starting their fitness journey or seasoned athletes looking for a challenging workout.

Once you’ve set the rower up, strapped yourself in, and set the resistance level of your choice, an app lets you transform your mundane exercise into something truly adrenaline-pumping. JOYSONG’s rowing app boasts a catalog of more than 40,000 real-life training videos that let you visualize rowing in a way that truly feels immersive. Designed to be compatible with large screens like your television, the app lets you broadcast real-life PoV rowing videos that put you in the driver’s (rower’s) seat quite literally. The videos act as a simulation while encouraging you to follow along, while the app captures your workout progress for you.

However, if you want to do more than just rowing, JOYSONG also has a variant of the Cube Rower that also packs a home gym in its design. Exactly the same size as the Compact Cube Rower (and with the same foldable format), the ‘Home Gym Cube Rower’ has a few more modifications that lets you do rowing along with 80 other exercises from crunches to bench presses, chest flies, stretches, or even yoga. To facilitate this, the Home Gym Cube Rower ditches the Water + Magnetic resistance system for pure magnetic resistance, along with the ability to simulate up to 40 kilograms of weight, adjustable to 24 different levels for novices and experts. From yoga to pilates, strength training, and other core exercises, the Home Gym Cube Rower lets you switch things up, focus on specific body parts, and frankly do more than just row all the time. Whether you’re looking to improve your cardiovascular health, build muscle strength, or increase your flexibility, the Home Gym Cube Rower brings an entire gym to your home without those pesky membership fees, sweaty people, or bulky equipment.

Both variants of the Cube Rower (with and without the Home Gym) come with the exact same folded size of 618 x 454 x 555 millimeters (24.3 x 17.8 x 21.8 inches), although the Home Gym Cube Rower weighs a little more at 65 kilograms (143.3lbs) as compared to the Compact Cube Rower 52 kilograms (114.6lbs). This is also where the built-in wheel system helps, allowing you to move the Compact Cube Rower around to any part of your house. The outer body for both are crafted from Quercus Rubra or Northern Red Oak, with a strong yet lightweight aluminum alloy frame on the inside. Finally, a leather seat puts you in the lap of comfort while you exercise, and pops right on top of the Cube Rower when not in use, allowing it to double as a nifty stool that you can easily place anywhere around your home!

Click Here to Buy Now: $649 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 466/500 left! Raised over $222,000.

The post This Compact Folding Rowing Machine gives you an All-in-one Gym the size of a Side Table first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sure, your iPhone can show you the time or the game score or even photos of your holiday when it’s docked horizontally during charging… but can it give your laptop HDMI and LAN connectivity? Can it track crypto prices? Does it let you code your own apps/widgets? And hey, can it play DOOM? Well, Vobot can. A compact desktop display that doubles as a multiport hub for enhanced productivity, the Vobot puts fun and function together. It has 7 ports for enhanced connectivity and charging (up to 90W), but its magnum opus is the display on front, which does everything from being a clock, weather forecast indicator, Pomodoro timer, Todoist task tracker, Crypto or stock ticker, or even a screen-mirroring display. The best part, you can code your own apps for it, so unlike the iPhone’s Standby Mode, the Vobot can be exactly what you need it to be.

Designer: Mocreo Pvt. Ltd.

As the folks behind the Vobot say, it’s first and foremost a mini dock. With 7 ports to supercharge your laptop/desktop, the Vobot offers connectivity and power to your device. It sports a 4K@60Hz HDMI port, a Gigabit LAN port, one USB-A 3.0 port, and two USB-C 3.0 ports. There’s one single USB-C input port that powers the Vobot (the Vobot comes with its own adapter, and doesn’t have a battery of its own)… so in essence, it’s every bit a multiport USB hub… but the screen on the front is what radically changes things.

Think of that screen on the front of the Vobot as a dedicated secondary display. It’s split into two parts – the part on the left is a dot-matrix seven-segment LED display that’s dedicated to showing the time and day, while the right half is an LCD IPS screen that can be controlled using a knob and button interface on the right side of the device (reminiscent of a watch’s crown). When plugged in and running, the Vobot’s screen becomes your custom control center. The left half shows you the time, while the right half unlocks productivity in a variety of ways. The Mini Dock has its own built-in app gallery, including a weather widget, a Pomodoro timer, a Todoist task manager, calendar, stock/crypto tracker, PC monitor, indoor air detector, game emulator, WiFi status checker, screen-mirroring applet, and a lot more.

The vast app gallery means the right half of the Vobot mini dock’s display becomes your work and your life’s control panel. You can track productivity, review the stock market, watch YouTube videos on the side, check your PC’s performance or thermals, or even code your own IoT apps. With MicroPython programming, you can add new features to the dock that serve your needs, from doing things like monitoring cameras around your smart home, to checking your home’s power consumption. Create games that you can play using your laptop keyboard or a game controller (which comes along with the mini dock), or just build something as simple as a subscriber counter or notification center for your phone.

The Vobot Mini Dock boasts compatibility across Windows, Linux, and MacOS machines, but there’s also support for Android and iOS devices. Each Mini Dock ships with a 100W power adapter, and a tiny gaming controller that lets you play games on the dock’s built-in emulator. A quick-start guide briefs you through the dock’s features, and an online app store lets you access apps by other creators, or make your own to boost productivity… or should I say, pro-dock-tivity!

The post iPhone Standby Mode on Steroids: The Vobot gives you a Multi-Hub Display Dock for Widgets and Tools first appeared on Yanko Design.