During construction of his own house in London in 1963, the Berlin-born architect Walter Segal built a temporary structure within the garden space, in which he and his family would live during the main works. The construction of this interim dwelling established a number of principles he was to pursue for the remainder of his career, later characterised as the ‘Segal Method’. The rationale of the temporary house was centred on the use of readily available, mass-produced and dimensionally coordinated materials. These off-the-shelf elements were employed with minimal on-site alteration, and fitted, with dry jointing, into a timber post and beam structure that was dimensioned according to standard insulation slabs and plywood sheets. The omission of wet trades, and the reduction in secondary alteration, transformed the nature of on-site work towards a process of assembly. The resultant build was extremely cheap and fast.
In the following decade the method was developed and refined in a number of private house commissions, always with a view towards rigorous simplification of process. These projects were undertaken with no main contractor; their pared-back logic requiring only a carpenter, an electrician and a plumber. Eventually clients, observing the straightforwardness at play, realised that they could do the works of the carpenter, and took on elements of the works themselves.
Existing solutions to the question of housing provision were being questioned and challenged in London, as elsewhere, throughout the 1970’s. Alternative solutions favouring dweller control seemed to offer greater autonomy for residents over their own lives. Within this political context, Segal was eventually able to apply his method of building to a series of self-build houses on council owned land within the London Borough of Lewisham; the radical simplicity of his approach allowing unskilled residents to construct their own houses with their own hands. In this manner Walter Segal’s work exemplified an architecture borne of ideas around and about construction and oriented towards the building site, while his approach suggests the potential of ideas of construction to radically reconfigure roles and relationships in the building process.
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