Nadia Bertolino

Home and Community: Lessons from a Modernist Housing Scheme

This book explores the connections between architecture, home and community. It is based on the empirical examination of domestic experiences in a post-war modernist housing scheme: Claremont Court in Edinburgh, designed by Basil Spence. Offering a novel cross-disciplinary approach, it broadens our understanding of home and community by showing how residents create homes and articulate a sense of belonging, which is inescapably bounded by architecture. The first part of the book explains the relevance of Claremont Court through a cross-disciplinary reading from both an architectural and a socio-cultural perspective. The second part explores the domestic experiences of the current residents. The final part further develops the relationship between architecture, home and community, offering valuable insights for current debates on housing, home and community. A must-read for researchers from architecture, urban studies and the social sciences with an interest in housing. The book also provides ideas for conducting interdisciplinary research using a combination of text-based and visual methods.

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

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.

Researching the home using architectural and social science methods

This article explores the possibilities of using innovative, interdisciplinary methods for understanding home-making. Drawing on a study of Claremont Court (1959–1962), a post-war social housing scheme designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, we discuss the methodological potentials of combining architectural and social science methods to study the home. Claremont Court was built in the post-war era as part of Scotland’s social housing drive. It was designed following the principles of ‘cross-class’ living in order to foster a sense of community. In subsequent years, inhabitants of the court have adapted their dwellings in numerous ways and the population of the court has changed dramatically. But, while meanings of home and understandings of the division between public and private have been reconfigured, the spatial layouts of the dwellings continue to shape residents’ sense of home. To explore how residents make home at Claremont Court, we use ‘facet methodology’, which opens up new ways of thinking about the research process through a ‘playful’ approach to epistemology. In doing so, we develop an innovative approach which combines architectural methods (including survey drawings and visual mappings of both dwellings and communal areas) with social science methods (including ‘traditional’ interviews and walk-along interviews). To conclude, we discuss the possibility of widening the scope of qualitative research by bringing architectural and social science methods into dialogue through visual methods, in order to attend to spatial and material aspects of the home. We argue that our novel cross-disciplinary approach broadens understandings of home, by bringing attention to the unspoken dimensions of physical space, embodied elements of home and what people said about their homes, all of which are central to home-making.