36 PROJECT REPORT: SOCIAL & AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Engineering Campus, currently under construction for Manchester University. This connection was one of the factors that helped Mecanoo win the competition for the Hulme housing project, but their long- standing reputation in housing design also spoke for itself.
, comprising a mixture of 85 apartments and 20 townhouses, both of which will be at ‘market rent.’ However, the way it provides a variety of human-scaled volumes at the client’s required density on a long, narrow site – not to mention how it connects users to each other and landscaped areas to foster community spirit – renders it just as important.
The scheme in Hulme is humbler than Mecanoo’s other Manchester schemes at 9,500 m2
The site
‘Urban renewal’ in the area around Hulme’s Leaf Street has seen several large-scale attempts at housing Manchester’s lower-income communities over the last century, making this the fourth generation of housing on the site. Its first regeneration was in the 1930s, with what project architect Dick Van Gameran of Mecanoo (also a housing professor at Delft University), says were “typical
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interbellum, relatively modest apartment buildings,” replacing some of the Victorian terraces. However after the war, an “incredibly drastic tabula rasa approach” saw all of those terraces removed, the notorious Hulme Crescents erected in their place.
This project comprised four vast C-
shaped, brutalist concrete blocks, connected by multi-level bridge walkways. However, following the death of a child falling from a walkway in 1974, they became abandoned by residents, and increasingly derelict until demolition began in 1993. Then some “very different, but not very appealing” housing was erected, which remains on the other side of Leaf Street, which the new scheme runs the length of. There is also new student housing, with the university encroaching further towards the residential areas of Hulme. To the east ‘rear’ elevation of the new scheme (dubbed ‘The Aaben’ by the client, housing association One Manchester, after a local cinema demolished in 1993) is the sunken main thoroughfare, Princess Road. The large steel arch of Hulme Arch Bridge runs over the road, the new building’s entrance placed to face this local landmark. The tight rectangular site, hemmed in by
ADF FEBRUARY 2021
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