Project Home

Intro

Project Home – Housing for Festival Gardens

Housing is in crisis, in the UK and globally. As architects, we believe we must be more deeply involved in how housing is conceived, designed, and delivered. The word project implies projection—an act of imagining and reaching toward possible futures. This studio isn’t just about delivering homes; it’s about shaping the environments people will live in for generations.

Festival Gardens is our site: Once Knott’s Hole, then an industrial dumping ground, later a spectacle of urban regeneration during the 1984 Garden Festival. After years of abandonment, the land was remediated—more than 380,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil removed. 22 acres are now cleared for future development. The site is benchmarked as a key site in Liverpool’s 25-year Riverfront Masterplan developed by West 8 and BDP. Up to 1,500 homes are planned. The studio approached this place not as a conventional housing site, but as a platform to rethink what housing could be—socially, environmentally, and spatially: What public life, forms of mobility, and ecological systems can support a future community here?

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Project Home – Housing as Infrastructure for the Future

Home is where I want to be (…)
In “This Must be the Place,” Talking Heads, 1983

After developing ideas on the site and strategically sketching masterplans, we turned to housing itself. We thought of housing not as isolated units, but as infrastructure for living. We asked: How can housing support future communities and adapt over time? This meant looking closely at the relationship between public space and the home, collective and private life, flexibility and permanence.

To spark our thinking, we travelled to Barcelona, another port city rich in experimentation. We visited co-housing models and innovative housing types—projects that challenge standard market logic and propose alternatives rooted in care, community, and sustainability.

Students developed projects that respond to Festival Gardens’ layered terrain and imagined futures. Typologies ranged from intergenerational living to cooperative housing, from incremental models to hybrid live–work arrangements. Each project worked to address contemporary challenges: issues related to the climate emergency, the crisis of affordability, and the social disconnection produced by conventional housing models. Housing, we concluded, must do more—and can.

Tutors

Jocelyn Froimovich
Simon Cadle
Teresa Erskine
Yu Zhan

Consultants

Sustainability: Dr Stuart Gee
Structures: Dr Hanmei Chen
Construction: Susanne Pollmann
Model photographs: Martin Winchester

Reviewers

Anthony Benson, Allies and Morrison
Sandy Britton, UoL
Graham Burn, Studio Mutt
Fei Chen, UoL
James Jones, Sheppard Robson
Tringa Kelmendi
Tony Lees, Studio Mutt
Caoilinn McConville, LCC
Paco Mejias-Villatoro, UoL
Johanna Muszbek, UoL
Ryan O´Connor, BDP
David Rudlin, BDP
Ben Scragg, LCC
Dubravka Sekulic, RCA
Su Stringfellow, Harrison Stringfellow
Alex Turner, Studio Mutt
Enrique Walker, Universidad de Chile
Tom Williams, Tim Groom Architects
Francesca O’Shea, Gibson Thornley

Barcelona Visit

Josep Maria Borrell Bru, IMPSOL
Cristina Gamboa, LACOL Coop
Urtzi Grau, UTS
Anna Puigjaner, MAIO
Alicia Stiglitz, Ricardo Bofill Taller de ArquitecturaSpecial Thanks

BA3 Team
Ben Devereau
Dr Nick Webb
Lucretia Ray
Ross Monnaghan
The Tech Team