Mass Housing: Brunel House,Portsmouth

A mass housing project with the focus of providing tenants with alternative garden spaces, better air quality and a fresh food through the use of interior hydroponics and green walls.

This project focused on:

• Modern architectural heritage and Adaptive Reuse

• Social agenda and housing crisis: overview of the global and national facts

• Housing (typologies, regulations, etc.) and domesticity (the place, the domus)

• Different scales of intervention which involve the meso and the micro: Building design principles and co-living design.

• The collective: Co-housing, sharing spaces

• The space and the objects: Furniture design

My proposed designs can house between 7 and 14 people per single 3 story cluster and between 4 and 8 in the two story clusters. This provides the building with an over-all max capacity of 100 people, with space for flexibility within the clusters to increase capacity.

With the expansion of agriculture and research conducted to create vertical farms within the city, the implementation of growing beds within a building is not a new or untested concept and is becoming very popular within countries such as tai-wan where high density populations are resulting in a lack of housing as-well as low resources of food. This is all possible with the introduction of hydroponic plant bed systems. Shown below is a diagram as to how this would work within my design. Hydroponic systems use less water and no soil, however the water reused from re-circulation gives the plants the nutrients they need to grow. It also results in less mess and instances of spillages of water within the home.

​The introduction of these growing beds also resolves one of Portsmouth’s main issues with not having a lot of allotment space. It will also provide the children living here with a deeper understanding of how food is grown and also for them to develop an interest into growing their own food.