The £6 House

Welcome to the hottest competition of the year, as the country’s gamest architects and housebuilders compete to find the answer to the UK’s (miniature) housing shortage. We deliberately kept timescales short to make it more realistic – our three teams had just over a week to design their houses and acquire the materials before the on-site assembly and judging. Building decided not to be too prescriptive, but we did set a few rules to make comparison possible …

Dimensions

Houses may take any form, but they must have a front door for Building’s 100 mm high John Prescott-as-Santa cardboard cut-out to pose proudly for the obligatory photographs.

This should provide a rough guide to the size of contestants’ finished structures.

Materials

Anything goes, so long as contestants don’t spend more than £6 – full costings and till receipts will be required by the judging panel. And to fulfil the forthcoming Code for Sustainable Buildings, at least 10% of materials must be recycled. Extra points are given for use of edible materials, Hansel-and-Gretel style – this is the panto season after all.

Specifications

We’ll keep this simple: each house needs to have two bedrooms, cooking facilities and some kind of living area. In line with Building Regulations, it must also have an accessible downstairs loo. And for a bit of seasonal cheer, there absolutely must be a Christmas tree – additional decoration, the more tasteless the better, will receive bonus points.

Vegetable chopping has intensified to a near-frenzy and Chris wonders aloud whether off-site technology could have taken some pressure off

Melon House

The BPTW consortium

Kathryn Elphick BPTW Partnership Helena Leung BPTW Partnership Isabel MacAllister Cyril Sweett Debbie Setterfield Benton Setterfield Partnership

Structural engineer Debbie Setterfield is elbow-deep in melon pulp. “It’s the structural envelope we’re after here,” she says, eyes fixed in quiet determination as gobbets of melon spill out onto the table. Her teammates seem equally focused: Isabel MacAllister, an associate director of Cyril Sweett, is cutting celery into tiny strips; Kathryn Elphick, from BPTW Partnership, is busy transforming a pear and holly berries into a Christmas tree; and Helena Leung, also from BPTW, is doing something fiddly with a walnut. John Prescott would surely be proud of the attitude, if not necessarily the results.

The BPTW team has clearly decided that the way to build cheaply is to head for the fruit and veg counter. For just £3.20 the group believes it can build a roomy two-storey family home with garden. Jamie Oliver could learn a lot from these people.

With such a tight schedule (about an hour and a quarter – Building is a very demanding client), good project management is of the essence, and the way each person is hacking away at their allotted fruit/nut/salad vegetable suggests this is a well-honed unit. So it’s surprising to hear that the planning phase of the project was fairly fast. “Does it look like I’ve done this before?” asks Debbie, as a tide of melon juice pours onto the floor. The design stage, it quickly transpires, occurred “over lunch”. Was alcohol involved? “Yes.”

Still, construction is continuing apace, with the melon structure almost complete. The first of the judges, engineer Chris Wise of Expedition Engineering, wanders across to cast an eye over proceedings. Isabel, for one, is not fazed by the presence of the man who engineered the Millennium Bridge. “Are you famous?” she asks politely. “Are we supposed to know who you are?” Standing, somewhat poignantly, at a window overlooking his famous creation, Chris quickly turns the conversation to the project in hand. “Is it all organic?” he asks. Kathryn feels duty-bound to admit that the melon could be genetically modified … “It is totally round.” Debbie tries to salvage some eco-points: “I did actually look for a rotten melon. This one is probably highly unsustainable. It came from Brazil. But we’ll offset it.”

Chris is joined by a second judge, former RIBA president George Ferguson, and the pair mutter anxiously about the amount of site labour involved – the “site” by this stage is beginning to resemble a sweatshop as run by Gordon Ramsay. There is a slight delay caused by a design hitch (“The melon is so much smaller than visualised in meetings,” laments Debbie), which has intensified the vegetable chopping to a near-frenzy. Chris wonders aloud whether off-site technology could have taken some pressure off the construction schedule: “Is there any way to genetically modify a pre-scooped melon?” he ponders. George suggests that a coconut might have been better, and Isabel concedes ruefully that “coconuts do have an excellent whole-life performance”.

But then, as with all architectural triumphs, it all begins to come together. The hollowed-out walnut shell is installed as a stylish downstairs toilet, and Isabel’s celery pieces are used to make a picket fence, ensuring plenty of points for external private space. Creative use of Ryvita creates dividing walls and an elegant mezzanine. To top it off, a box of cress creates the last word in green roofs.

Two more judges walk over. Quantity surveyor Simon Rawlinson of Davis Langdon expresses scepticism about the costs and queries the ethics of nabbing materials for free from the office. But Gus Alexander, an architect so arguably more of an aesthete, seems won over, merely murmuring “most beautiful”. He notes the influence of Paolo Solari and, oddly, Old Mother Hubbard, and then wanders off reciting a nursery rhyme about melons.

The Breadwinner

The Building Graduate Advisory Board

Tarek Merlin Alsop Architects Carolina Lameiras Adams Kara Taylor Vicki Burley EC Harris Andy Link Bovis Lend Lease

Tarek Merlin, architect of the “Breadwinner”, explains how the idea of duplex apartments was inspired by “Le Corbusier sections”. And he’s got beer-stained sketches and plans to prove it. “We feel strongly that a £6 house is not good enough, we wanted to build flats for the ‘bread and butter’ of society – the key workers.” It turns out the design was conceived in the pub.

Carolina Lameiras, the structural engineer, says she’s confident the baguette supports will mean that the building is structurally sound. “Also, the good thing about bread is that it can be moulded to a surface, and it has acoustic and thermal advantages.”

One of the judges, George Ferguson, strolls in, ignores all the activity and gazes out of the window at the Thames. “Now that would be a great place to have a party,” he says, pointing to a pillar of the old Blackfriars railway bridge in the middle of the river. “It reminds me of an enjoyable evening I spent in Checkpoint Charlie not long after the Berlin wall came down.”

Chris adds that bread is to be avoided in modern buildings because of its high carbon content

The graduate team exchange looks. George switches his attention to Vicki Burley, who is counting the drawing pins that will fix the bread cladding onto the shoeboxes: “Trust the QS to get on to that one.”

Chris Wise pops in just as Vicki is confronted with an overhang problem caused by some of the bread cladding panels being too big for the shoebox units. Her “on-site snagging” consists of some nifty work with the bread knife. Chris slips in a tricky question about coastal locations “given the obvious seagull problem”. Nobody volunteers an answer.

Simon Rawlinson walks past as the team discusses how best to use the discount baguettes as supports. He is concerned that “deleterious materials” could be involved. Chris adds that bread is to be avoided in modern buildings because of its high carbon content. Andy Link is having problems coating the roof garden with butter and questions whether “Butter me up” should have been specified. Simon isn’t impressed by the choice either: “It’s not even real butter, it’s one of those awful spreads.”

Tarek and Carolina discover two of the shoeboxes are not in the right position. This could be serious. Luckily someone finds a pair of scissors and some sticky-back tape and the problem is solved.

When Building announces that the teams have five minutes of extra time, last-minute alterations are mooted. Carolina suggests losing some structural columns. Tarek disagrees; the columns stay put. Vicki wants a wall to separate the bathroom and the living room, but Andy prefers the open-plan look.

As a final touch, Andy requests a visit from the Prescott cut-out to check he can fit through the front door and Vicki places the token Christmas tree beside him.

There’s no time to adorn the house with sweets, so the team decides to eat the two packets of jelly tots and M&Ms to celebrate completion.

Bellows House

The Piercy Conner consortium

Matti Lampila Piercy Conner Susan Carruth Piercy Conner Ross Cunningham Smoothe Tim Lucas Price & Myers

The Piercy Connor team bucks the trend by refusing to fashion a dwelling out of food. Instead, it arrives with what looks suspiciously like a well-prepared plan. The Bellows House, based on a concertina structure, is an inspired take on Prescott’s dream of mass-produced housing. “You simply stretch it out to make it bigger,” beams Susan Carruth. “We’re looking at a more holistic lifetime design – as your family expands, your house does too.”

The team exudes smoothness. Quite literally – team member Ross Cunningham is from a company that is actually called Smoothe, and was responsible for a beautiful mock-up board that has the judges purring with pleasure. “What a lovely idea!“ exclaims George Ferguson. Simon Rawlinson is very excited about the possibility of a leylandii that could grow with the house. And Chris Wise is enthralled. “You could make it tilt up, to go over hills,” he grins. “Or you could just use it as a slinky.” Unfortunately, Cunningham isn’t around to take the plaudits – he is so smooth, it seems, that he hasn’t even turned up.

The Bellows House is an inspired take on the Prescott dream of mass-produced housing. You simply stretch it out to make it bigger

The sophisticated approach extends to the team’s answer to how much the house would cost. “We can do it for £0,” says Lampila. “It’s made entirely from recyclable materials.”

But George isn’t convinced. “A zero cost house is about as likely as perpetual motion,” he opines. “It doesn’t happen.” The team seems ready to quibble, until Chris points out that the use of some state-of-the-art laser cutting machines at The Bartlett could count as a cost. A fair point – and surely modern methods of construction require an initial outlay to build the factories?

Despite the slick presentation, the team has clearly entered into the spirit of the competition. The mdf for the walls has come not from Rymans, but from the skip outside the Price & Myers office. And it isn’t just anybody’s skip – it belongs to a certain Jamie Oliver, who uses the downstairs offices to record Sainsbury’s commercials. “It’s usually full of dead fish,” explains Tim Lucas. “But we saw it this morning and thought it looked OK.”

Chris, meanwhile, is determined to pick holes in the design. “How’s it lit at night time?” he demands. “I don’t see any windows.” Matti Lampila tries to explain that the roof would be translucent, despite the use of paper that isn’t in the model itself. “But it would be in the real thing,” he asserts defiantly. Just like the Urban Summit’s £60,000 house – fine, except it was £90,000.

Simon, like a good QS, is concerned that the house passes energy requirements. “There’s an issue of waste here,” he remarks, eyeing unused cardboard. “And what about U-values?”

Finally, Chris succeeds in finding a flaw. “Prescott can’t get in!” he exclaims triumphantly. The door is indeed too low, and the Millennium Bridge designer almost decapitates the deputy prime minister trying to ram him through the front door.

The only solution is to put him down and then lower the house onto him – fine, except that then he can’t get out. Maybe no bad thing …

The moment of truth: The judging

The £6 houses are complete and it’s almost time for the judges to have their say. But first, each team gets to state the case for its design. The presentations are a masterpiece of sales patter over common sense. First up, it’s the Breadwinner House. Much emphasis is placed on the fact that the core element comes in prefabricated modules, or, in the words of Andy Link, “a loaf”. There is dangerous overuse of the word “Corbusian”. Andy adds: “It’s made out of 100% sustainable materials, it meets Part L and it’s prefabricated. And it’s high in fibre, low in fat …”

The Melon House team puts a great deal of store by the fact that “a sphere is the cheapest way to build a house” and “you can add any number of melon pods” – assertions that the judges seem to view sceptically. And the viability of the design seems to rest quite strongly on there being 200,000 giant melons to go round, with the attendent gallons of water to nurture them. “That’s all right,” says Debbie Setterfield. “There’s plenty of water in the Thames Gateway …” Indeed, they may claw some points back by addressing the inherent flood risks in the area: “You can always turn it upside-down and use it as a boat.”

The Bellows House team is just as confident. “It’s a family house and it can be transported as far as you like,” says Susan Carruth. “It’s robust and meets Part A – no progressive collapse there. And it makes a good musical instrument.” Chris Wise isn’t satisfied: “But what about the windows?” he asks. Tim Lucas has the ideal answer: “Who wants to look out of the window in the Thames Gateway?”

So, over to our learned judges. After a brief confab, they decide that the houses should be judged according to the Vetruvian values of firmness, commodity and delight, with price, sustainability and scalability taken into account and, of course, the Prescott dimension test. A maximum of five points will be awarded for each criterion. This is, after all, as George Ferguson points out, “probably the most valuable architectural prize ever given in proportion to the cost of the entries”.

George is taken with the Melon House, commenting that the architecture and structure are in union and it resembles a Gothic cathedral

The Breadwinner immediately comes under scrutiny for firmness, as George peers at the wonky top floor and notes “a slight structural issue”. Chris adds: “I think it’d be better made out of toast. I mean, you could easily turn that into toast.”

Another setback seems on the cards when Simon Rawlinson again casts doubt on its claim to be bread-and-butter housing. “It’s margarine,” he sniffs. Scalability is also felt to be an issue. Gus Alexander alerts the other judges to the fact that there is “a shoe box issue – have you seen how many shoe boxes there are? If we’re talking scalability, is this realistic?” Carolina Lameiras quickly responds: “You should see the number of shoe boxes in my house.”

Points are allotted at lightning speed, but the overall figure is not revealed at this stage – one of the judges mutters something about “fudging it at the end”. George merrily adds: “This is all a lot more open than the Stirling Prize.”

On to the Melon House. George is clearly taken with this, commenting that “the architecture and structure are in union.

It’s like a gothic cathedral”. “It isn’t really though, is it?” points out Gus, before Chris adds: “I think it looks like Bobby Charlton.”

George may concede this point, but there is no quenching the former RIBA president’s enthusiasm for the building, even though he is starting to show signs of having had a drop too much of Building’s cut-price Shiraz. On the issue of scalability, he says with utter conviction: “With GM, I’m sure you could grow a melon the size of a house.” The wave of momentum gathering behind this team is almost tangible.

Finally, the judges get to the Bellows House. Simon has concerns about the cost, pointing out that “there’s a lot of fixed capital that hasn’t been taken into account” – but Gus leaps to the house’s defence, saying that “a bakery is expensive, too”.

“It’s solved some problems very nicely and others not at all,” says Chris. “As a commodity you can change the shape of it – it’s structurally brilliant, a work of almost genius.”

“It’s the most pre-engineered,” observes Simon. “It’s very well planned. But from an energy point of view, it could be a disaster.”

This is clearly a debate that could go on long into the night.

It could, but it doesn’t. In the time it takes Gus to find and open bottle of wine, a winner is decided …