The Housing Design Handbook

How well have architects succeeded in building housing and what lessons can be learned from their triumphs and failures?

The Housing Design Handbook will give you a complete understanding of what makes successful housing design. Through the analysis of work by Levitt Bernstein and a wide range of other UK practices, it illustrates good design principles and accumulates a wealth of knowledge in a readily accessible format for the first time.

Written by a recognised authority in the field, the book provides:

• a range of cases to illustrate the way that different issues in the design of housing have been approached and with what degree of success
• a review of the place of housing as the most significant built form in the urban landscape
• an understanding of the importance of achieving a sense of place as the bedrock of social continuity
• a discussion of how flexibility might be achieved in order to accommodate future changes in housing need, if wholesale demolition and replacement is to be avoided
• more recent examples which explore why certain social groupings are more resistant to design innovation than others and why there has been such an architectural breakthrough in market led, higher density urban living.

David Levitt examines the ideas behind the schemes and assesses how successful and sustainable those ideas have proved, making this an essential reference for professionals and students practicing and studying the design and commissioning of housing.