Housing families at high densities is the great Modernist problem that architects and planners in the second half of the 20th century never found one of their famous 'solutions' for. Whatever the aspirations of the designers, the sheer inhumanity of many of their experiments haunts our cities and the reputation of the profession today. We might want to love the authors, but we hate what they made. The question of what to do with families is the skeleton in the closet for the government's ambitious housing targets of 3 million new homes in England by 2020. The Tarling Estate scheme by London-based housing specialist Stock Woolstencroft and Anglo-Dutch office Studio 333 is an attempt to deal with those demands, providing accommodation for the large families of East London's Bangladeshi community at a density of 769 habitable rooms per hectare. This quart-into-pint-pot scenario is tempered by good transport connections (the site is next to Shadwell Docklands Light Railway station), high quality in individual dwellings and a high degree of private amenity space.
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