Throwaway Houses: Garbage Housing and the politics of ownership

Published in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, edited by Kjetil Fallan (New York: Routledge, 2019), 221-236.

The book chapter examines the case of British architect and critic Martin Pawley’s Garbage Housing project, a series of essays, design studios and research undertaken by Pawley during the 1970s. The project remains unique in its approach to the reuse of materials and serves as a reminder that inquiries into the reuse of waste materials emerged out of a particular political climate during the 1970s, in response to neoliberal policy about housing and private property. The introduction is excerpted below.

“During an interview for the TV station of the Architectural Association (TVAA) in 1975, architect and critic Martin Pawley explained the origins of his decadelong project, Garbage Housing. Though the undertaking had matured into a fully- fledged antidote to the housing crisis, Pawley conceded that it started as an exploration of the ambiguity of meaning produced by ‘combining a pejorative term “garbage” with a valued term “house” ’ (TVAA 1975). In saying this did Pawley mean that housing was akin to garbage, just a disposable object like any other consumer product? Or did he mean to imply that a house should be constructed out of throwaway materials? Or did Pawley mean to say that public housing was in a state of decline, like other sociologists and housing workers of the time (Cupers 2016)?

Pawley mined the potential of the Garbage Housing project through a series of design studios, research programmes, books, and critical essays from the beginning of the 1970s until the early 1980s. The stated goal of his research was to address shortages of housing by transforming consumer waste into building materials for low- cost construction. But Pawley also intended Garbage Housing to be a provocation to cultural and political norms. According to Pawley, the reuse of consumer waste for housing questioned the assumption made by housing policy that ‘value [is] the expression of a single use, and a single use the sum of a useful life’ (Pawley 1975a, 34). In place of a ‘single use’, Pawley proposed a concept of ‘secondary use’, imagining that consumer products and packaging could attain a second life as building materials or other uses. By elevating trash and denigrating housing, Pawley exposed the ideal of privately owned, permanently occupied housing. Like Archigram and other proponents of expendable architecture during the 1960s and 1970s, Pawley imagined the house as a throwaway object on a par with a car or even a box of Sugar Puffs cereal (Archigram 1999; Colomina 2007; Pawley 1975a; Steiner 2008). Garbage Housing embraced the consumer economy by integrating the manufacture of products and their reuse into a total system. The components of the garbage house were, in theory, indistinguishable from other consumer products and were thus easily disposed of and replaced, giving users more control over the construction and adaption of their houses. Secondary use harnessed the immense productivity of consumer industry, making secondary use products and building materials free and widely available to users (Pawley 1976). Rather than construct housing, Garbage Housing expanded ownership to new users by making building materials easy to acquire and use, and then scrap.

In the 1970s, however, Pawley’s designs for mass production transformed into studies of ad hoc, labour-intensive reuse of materials. Responsibility for Garbage Housing changed from a state sponsored industry to that of individual users. The impetus to change course was not merely technical. The political and economic backdrop to Garbage Housing transformed over the duration of his research, challenging presuppositions made by Pawley and his students about the production, use, and temporality of secondary use products. Though he conducted the majority of his research on the subject of garbage at American universities, Pawley’s work was also informed by debates among politicians, social scientists, and development experts about the expansion of private home ownership in Britain, as well as the global South during the 1970s (Pawley 1978). The shadow of the Conservative ideal of a ‘property owning democracy’ in Britain loomed over his critique of housing policy, as did the uncertain political fate of housing constructed by the state after the Second World War (Forrest and Murie 1988, 25).

An examination of Garbage Housing sheds light on the sociopolitical motivations of early inquiries into architectural uses of waste materials such as bottles, sulfur, and commercial discards. The chapter focuses on techniques of assembly and construction in designs for three houses, at Cornell University (1973), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, 1975– 1976) and Florida A&M University (FAMU, 1977– 79) respectively. In each instance, Pawley and his collaborators used the design and reuse of consumer waste in order to reimagine the political economy of housing.1 Like other research about alternative building technologies during the 1970s, Pawley kept Garbage Housing at arm’s length from overtly political struggles over housing and land (Pawley 1971a, 90).2 But while they shied away from political movements of the time, close scrutiny of Garbage Housing demonstrates that Pawley and his students grappled with new forms of governance and political rationality. The project’s transformation from a partially state sponsored program of housing in the early 1970s to a framework for individual skill building by the end of the decade signaled the retrenchment of the state from housing and the institutionalization of neoliberal norms of conduct. Still, Pawley imagined Garbage Housing as an experiment in the truest sense. As such, it was open to failure: Garbage Housing risked becoming single use. If not by design, the disposability of houses exposed the limits and contradictions of a property-owning democracy.”