House Rules - From The Archive

House Rules - From The Archive

WATCH AGAIN ON YOUTUBE

For the Architecture Fringe Festival in 2019, we explored the current state of volume house building in Scotland. Our thematic provocation that year was In Real Life, (IRL).

In 2019, high roller private house builders accounted for 70% of new homes built in Scotland over the previous decade - creating vast swathes of new development and shaping our built environment to their own ends. Meanwhile the disconnect between the aspirations of the design community and the reality of housing being built had never been starker.

IRL, urban decisions made 50 years ago were beginning to catch up with us. Life expectancy was dropping for the first time in a century as people lived an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. The car had been woven into the everyday functions of our lives, and the built environment had stretched and expanded to accommodate it.

We asked how we could up the ante and have a say in the way our houses are built? The accompanying exhibition held at Custom Lane, revealed the intersection between our health, the design of our built environment and the profit-driven economy that underpins the way we build our homes as a society, while offering an opportunity for critical thinking to challenge the house rules on the table.

In 2026, what's changed?

To support the exhibition, we also hosted a wonderful and fiery panel discussion exploring these questions, with Andy Wightman MSP, then member of the Scottish Green Party and Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Lothian region and a writer and researcher best known for his work on land ownership in Scotland; Nicola Barclay, then Chief Executive of Homes for Scotland, with a career spanning over 20 years in the home building industry and stretching over sales, land acquisition and planning; and Kate Macintosh, a retired Scottish architect and designer of several renowned social housing projects in London.

Project Concept & Creative Direction by Sam Comrie
Project Assistance by Raina Armstrong, Shona Common and Eilidh Izat
Animation by Chris Bain
Photographs by Suzanne Heffron

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