With riotously bright colours, Rogers’s ‘move-on’ housing scheme is dressed in the child-like garb of a My First House. But design niggles mean nothing to the tenants getting their own homes for the first time

A fine achievement, but it’s easy to understand why factory-built housing hasn’t taken off
A fine achievement, but it’s easy to understand why factory-built housing hasn’t taken off - “The development of volume factory-built housing is a welcome step, and it’s encouraging that it has received such high-level backing,” says architect Alex Ely, who worked on the design guide. “But there’s a danger that this becomes an excuse for local authorities not to deliver long-term solutions for affordable housing, and merely use these types of buildings as a stop-gap – like the post-war prefabs, when there was a desperate need to build quickly. We should be careful that we’re really spending time getting it right.” RSH+P thinks it has the winning formula already. The architects are currently working on plans for a similar development in Lewisham, the £4.3m Ladywell “pop-up village” of 24 two-bed homes, which looks even more like an out-of-town data centre, a vast grey shed this time adorned with pink, yellow and green panels. The homes will be in place for no more than four years, while the council decides on a long-term plan for the site, after which the structure will be moved elsewhere in the borough. Y:Cube is a laudable initiative to ease the country’s urgent housing need for those in desperate circumstances – but it must guard against being rolled out as an alternative to councils providing long-term affordable homes. If taken up as the silver bullet to endless waiting lists, there’s a very real risk it could sow the seeds for a future of cheaply built, meanly scaled, less stable housing that can be conveniently swept away at a moment’s notice.

“I still can’t quite believe that the same architects who designed Terminal 5 and the Cheesegrater have designed my house,” says Wendy Omollo. “To have people as grand as that doing low-cost housing projects is really quite amazing.”

Omollo has been homeless since January, but this week she will join 35 others when she moves into the YMCA’s first factory-built “move-on” housing scheme, designed by none other than multi-award winning, international airport designing Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. While Richard Rogers’ practice graces this year’s Stirling prize shortlist for the sixth time, with the controversial Neo Bankside development and its £22m penthouses, it might come as a surprise to learn that a little further south, in the London borough of Merton, his office has just completed this scheme for a cost of around £45,000 per apartment, to be rented at less than the council’s affordable housing allowance.

Developed over the last few years in partnership with the YMCA London South West, manufacturers SIG and project managers Aecom, this 36-unit “Y:Cube” project is the practice’s latest foray into off-site manufactured housing, a dream Richard Rogers has entertained since his “Zip-Up” concept house in the 1960s – an unrealised fantasy of a modular pink prefab pod on stilts.

A more prosaic version of that dream came partially true in 2007 with the practice’s first experiment in factory-built housing at Oxley Woods in Milton Keynes. The scheme was showered with plaudits at the time, but has been plagued by leaks and legal claims ever since. In the charitable hands of the YMCA, might the concept fare any better?

On paper, the benefits are clear and indisputable. Each apartment is built under controlled conditions in a factory in Derbyshire, increasing precision and quality control while minimising waste, then craned into place on site, with services already installed. This process takes about half the time of conventional construction and it’s a good deal cheaper, at around £1,400 per sq m (as opposed to the usual £2,000 for local authority new-builds). Each studio apartment comes with its own en-suite bedroom and living room with a galley kitchen and, crucially, each unit has its own front door, giving the residents a sense of their own place, often for the first time. And, even though it’s made in a factory, there’s nothing particularly futuristic about any of it.

“It’s all simple technology,” says RSH+P architect Andrew Partridge, describing the structure as a basic timber frame with MDF or plasterboard lining and simple cement board rain-screen cladding....