DMA's submission responds to an international brief to develop an innovative design for social housing in the centre of Preston.
Our proposal restructures the site and brings density, a legible townscape, continuity in the street scene and enclosure to the urban block and its internal amenity spaces. We have sought to design a housing type of recognizable scale and massing, which plays with modulated forms and orientation. Using a typology derived from local housing tradition, all houses incorporate a distinctive front & back entrance layout.
The Meadow is an urban variety of the village pasture - a private amenity space shared between a few houses allowing a new sense of community to grow between hedges and low garden walls, paved walkways, trees and cycles parked in sight of living rooms and terraces. The Meadow integrates high quality housing with an urban landscape and stages the interaction of people on a common ground. Here, everyone has a front door to the street and their kids playing safely with friends out the back.