In this project we were tasked with designing for those whose vulnerabilities have been exposed during the covid crisis. One of the worst hit groups from covid has been the BAME community. We found one of the causes of this to be the large number of multigenerational Muslim families living in cramped housing conditions, increasing spreading of viruses, and leaving those vulnerable very exposed. Within this project we set out to explore this issue further, researching one of the hardest hit areas, Toller, Bradford, and exploring how through architecture and design this issue can be tackled.
We aimed to create a community co-housing site comprised of individual homes each set towards different multi-generational families, ranging in size from families of 4 – 10. We aimed to make our designs as inclusive as possible, ensuring all ground floors were wheelchair accessible to cater for older generations. We realised that traditional UK homes were not build for multi-generational houses, and thus aimed to make our design as tailored as possible towards larger and more diverse families. As we were focusing on Muslim families, we also did a lot of research into traditional Islamic architecture and tried to take a more contemporary approach on it, marrying traditional UK housing with Islamic architecture to make the homes an amalgamation of both.
The final designs of the houses turned out to be very flexible with many considerations towards Islamic architecture, ensuring certain elements were in the correct orientation towards mecca, and spaces within the house were designed in mind for different activities and levels of privacy.
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Oscar Francis Henery