The perennially moribund Royal Institute belatedly weighs in on Britain’s acute housing crisis with a let-them-eat-cake exhibition of sickly home sweet homes, says Phil Pawlett Jackson

At Home in Britain: Designing the House of Tomorrow | RIBA & BBC

The RIBA’s playful summer exhibition, featuring speculations into the future of much-loved housing typologies, opened last week to coincide with a BBC series currently on air, fronted by the inimitably gestural Dan Cruickshank.

Across the walls of the Architecture Gallery at 66 Portland Place, three dwelling types are brought to trial. Three which, some might argue, ain’t broke: cottages, terraces and flats. These familiar forms are given an over-eager rejig, rather as if their ailing institutional majority shareholder felt these brands needed a gratuitous sprucing-up before the portfolio is primed for a sell off.

First up, Édouard François noted for the gingerbread socialism of his Urban Collage in Champigny-sur-Marne, brings a similar eccentric flourish to his British housing forecast. Inspired pointedly by Detroit gone to seed, François envisions Albion as a re-wilded landscape. Rendered the more expansive through a series of deftly arranged parallel mirrors, his models create the vision of an interminable green and pleasant land, extended to infinity, scattered evenly with his awkward verdant follies, initially at a tortuous arcadian density, the scaffolds steadily accumulate appendages until the ensemble is quite claustrophobic.

Jamie Fobert is coupled with François on this question that no one was asking about cottages, and the two share some delight in proffering organic metaphors for their natural idylls. Revisiting the Smithsons’ West Burton village infill scheme, whose vision for “new fruit on old twigs” Fobert resurrects as the banner to densify under. Setting themselves the low bar of bettering Taylor Wimpey’s approach to plot-to-tarmac ratios, Fobert’s team have sprinkled a dreamy neo-Segalian dash of gentrified loft living into the bucolic nooks of a conservation village. Politics and privilege notwithstanding, the charming scheme illustrates how a great cottage tradition might stagger on under the patronage of the self-build movement’s equivalent of glamping.

Second, in a narrative of recent history which the BBC series has also slotted its house types into, that rugged industrial mainstay, the terraced house, is examined through heroic archive photography of smiling Billy Elliots beaming in front of red brick squalor. The typology is then millennialised. For the BBC’s rendering, by a conspicuously off-screen Assemble at Granby, for the RIBA, by ominously digital off-site fabrication.

The brazenly escapist show looks back with a defensive irony and a pang of tawdry regret to a time when architects were employed to design make-believe fairy-tale follies as a form of housing

Mae’s beautifully tactile and interactive model of such a typology illustrates a surface-thin version of custom-build-by-numbers for the uninitiated. One dwelling in a terrace of neatly cut plywood model homes is de-face-able, the facade replaceable with a collection of jazzy variations on a theme. The cloying commodification of this terraced house for Barbie is egregious but the logic is impeccable. Proletariat accommodation in the second industrial revolution must play to the on-demand economy of novelty, surface and affect.

Approaching the terraced typology from quite another angle, but with no less prescience, vPPR takes a flamboyant approach, interrogating the constraint of the party wall through the swirly geometry of Voysey’s wallpaper prints. A seductive whimsical series of spaces ensues, blurring the boundaries of the public and private in a spaghetti social network.

Finally, the flat block is brought forward for untimely reinvention (although for Dan Cruickshank theatrically supping alone on a microwave meal of melancholy cliches in front of a television 14 storeys up above Bow, the rebranding of the flat type could not come too soon). Mecanoo has pored over the RIBA archives in search of a genealogy of British collective living, drawing the not-groundbreaking conclusion that our conservative island nation’s middle classes hold a widespread distrust of the life communal. Architectural benefactors among these chattering classes make exceptions for collegiate digs and those sheltered living arrangements to which they consign their older people. Catering to this curious mix of demographics, a mansion house mash-up is blended inside “village living with an urban conscience” the strongly gridded model for which is shown in their video here (Scott Joplin optional).

In stark contrast to the Home Economics pavilion at Venice, and its critical inquiry into the economic injustice behind the housing crisis, At Home in Britain is by and large reflective of the RIBA’s commitment to flogging mildly modified routes to property ownership for the privileged. The brazenly escapist show looks back with a defensive irony and a pang of tawdry regret to a time when architects were employed to design make-believe fairy-tale follies as a form of housing, a happier time when the emperor’s clothes were yet a little opaque. It is, at last, Studio Weave which clarifies the end point of the trajectory of the home’s financialisation, displaying the contemporary home in its purest form: an architecture completely without architectural form, pondered as a memory, flattened to an image, distilled as an essence, channelled via an app. Studio Weave recognises that “home” in Britain today is already for many a purely mental construct, the physical artefact having drifted beyond any affordability. “Home” is a lifestyle for hire, a choreography of contracts, a marketing exercise, a warm fuzzy feeling. But, in truth, perhaps it always was.