Outside the box

The shows will be uncomfortable viewing for housebuilders. The first episode, showing on Channel 4 tonight, begins with an unshaven Luxton cruising around an executive housing estate in an Audi TT. "We love to talk about new cars," he says. "So why don't we ever talk about new housing? To put it bluntly, it's crap."

Luxton does not pull his punches. He says developers offer dreadful products, the government has abdicated responsibility and architects have turned their backs after their experiments with mass housing in the 1960s.

To show how things could be done, he takes viewers on tours of schemes across Europe, notably in the Netherlands and France. Very little in this country is deemed worthy of inclusion, with the exception of the work of London housing association the Peabody Trust.

Most architects bemoan the poor design of housing in this country, but few get their own TV series to take their message public. "Channel 4 headhunted me, so they must be desperate," he laughs, wolfing a huge fried breakfast in a Soho greasy spoon one Tuesday morning. "There aren't a lot of people talking about it in an accessible yet polemical way."

Luxton, 27, launched his media career last year when studying for his architecture part two at the Royal College of Art. He responded to a notice on a board asking for wannabe TV presenters; impressed by his fluency and appeal, Channel 5 hired him up to present Modern British Architects – a series of profiles on bigwigs such as Rogers and Grimshaw.

The series led to Luxton being christened architecture's Jamie Oliver, sharing with the chef a cheeky delight in mixing it with the establishment while dressed in a T-shirt. Opinionated and streetwise, his favourite adjectives are "brilliant", "amazing" and "crap". He spent his childhood in Australia, which perhaps explains his windswept look and his passions for surfing and mountain-biking.

"I cycle everywhere. I can't really deal with public transport in this city because it's crap."

It’s easy to blame the developers, but they’ve got no competition. They don’t have to try

Since leaving the RCA in July last year he has set up a practice – called Make Architecture and Design – with a loose collective of friends, taken his surfboard around the world and fallen into a career in television. However, he is more than your usual TV frontman. Luxton proposed, wrote and presents the three-part series, called Not All Houses Are Square.

The series has nothing in common with the style-obsessed fluff of mainstream home shows such as Changing Rooms. Instead it is a highly personal plea for sophisticated urbanism, tackling issues such as density, sustainability and flexibility.

"We went to a generic housing estate in Essex," he explains. "It's amazing. There are whole hillsides disappearing under stuff. Whatever it looks like – I think it's atrocious, but that's just my opinion – it's just so stupidly laid out. None of the houses are orientated for solar energy, there's miles of tarmac that is draining water straight into rivers and streams. You just think, come on guys, you're making a lot of money."

Rather than demonising housebuilders, he hopes the series will raise the public's expectations. "It's easy to blame the developers and they've got a hell of a lot to answer for, but they've got no competition. There's such a demand for housing, they don't have to try. They could build anything and it'd sell."

Inevitably, the programmes distil TV soundbites from complex arguments, but in person, Luxton has a lot of explanations for why things are so bad. Lack of quality staff in planning departments, shoddy government policy and the fact that the UK market is far more speculative than other countries all contribute, he says. This is a refreshing change from the usual moan about how conservative the tastes of housebuilders and the public are.

Luxton is not that interested in aesthetics; his concern is how housing functions. "The shows focus on orientation, density, drainage, energy use – things that aren't considered here but are considered in other countries. And flexibility: why do we have internal walls holding up the roof?"

He readily admits his own profession has failed to house the nation properly. "Architects kind of walked away after the 1960s and 70s. You just have to see what's happening in schools of architecture. When I was studying in the 1990s, hardly anyone was doing housing."