Negotiating the Modern Cross-Class “Model Home”: Domestic Experiences in Basil Spence’s Claremont Court

Abstract

This article investigates the spatial articulation of architecture and home through the exploration of current domestic experiences in Basil Spence’s Claremont Court housing scheme (1959-1962), Edinburgh. How architecture and home are both idealized and lived is the backdrop for a discussion that draws on the concept of “model home,” or physical representation of a domestic ideal. The article reads Claremont Court as an architectural prototype of the modern domestic ideal, before exploring its reception by five of its households through the use of visual methods and semistructured interviews. Receiving the model home involves negotiating between ideal and lived homes. Building on this idea, the article contributes with a focus on the spatiality of such reception, showing how it is modulated according to the architectural affordances that the “model home” represents. The article expands on scholarship on architecture and home with empirical evidence that argues the reciprocal spatiality of home.

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

“…Claremont Court is a relatively modest, low-rise housing scheme, which features original designs including radical layouts that depart from the expected spatial structure of the working and middle-class home. Via open-plan living, landscaped courtyards, open-access decks, balconies overlooking shared gardens, communal laundries, drying greens and pram stores, Spence & Partners hoped to produce a scheme both functional and ‘classless’, encouraging a better way of life, including social interaction between neighbours (Costa Santos, 2019; Costa Santos & Bertolino, 2018).…”

“The feel of the place”: Investigating atmosphere with the residents of a modernist housing estate

“…The Court sits in an architecturally mixed area, alongside Georgian housing, tenements and more traditional local authority homes and so, for some, its modernist aesthetic makes it stand out from its surroundings. According to the Scottish Government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (2016), Claremont Court is one of the fourth most deprived areas of the country by decile, with its housing stock ranking amongst the “most deprived.” Originally designed to foster better community and welfare, through features such as deck access, courtyard gardens, cottages for older people and maximisation of light and space, Claremont Court was intended to promote sociability, mixing of different classes and household types, care of ageing residents and personal welfare as part of local authority housing provision, something of an unusual project in the context of post-war Scottish housing (Costa Santos and Bertolino, 2018; Costa Santos et al., 2018; Glendinning, 2008). The open-plan layout of the homes and the connection between the kitchen, living/dining area and balcony were all features that suggested a modern way of life and one that “questioned the received social hierarchies of class and gender that were normatively inscribed into domestic architecture” (Attfield, 2002: 249), although, as Koch (2018) notes, it is important to remember here that post-war housing estates also subjected their tenants to “paternalistic forms of rent and housing management that required them to live up to state-sanctioned – that is, classed – standards of ‘respectability’ and ‘decency’” (15).…”