William Heath Robinson & K.R.G. Browne

Abstract

When living in tiny apartments without proper ventilation, sunlight, contact with nature, or the possibility of social interaction, people tend to generate creative and flexible design strategies to overcome these difficulties. Private and public spaces can be reconfigured into multifunctional areas by using simple but effective means to create links between home and nature. This text-based essay identifies existing and historical architectural discourse that addresses social, cultural, and perceptual issues as a means to locate conceptual solutions suitable for buildings and flats. An inquiry into William Heath Robinson’s (1872–1944) drawings indicates that these images, while satiric, were inspired by complex issues that crossed disciplinary boundaries, taking architectural narrative into the political, cultural, economic, aesthetic, and social discourse. The satirical engines created by Robinson constitute a socio-political critique through the representation of biting solutions to the difficulties found in new settlements in the post-industrial city. During this period, many people living in the United Kingdom (UK) moved from the countryside to the cities, and consistently found themselves living in small apartments. The difficulties arising from the lack of space were addressed by Robinson’s unbalanced and hypothetical design solutions that included proposing indoor space fabulations that would extend traditional forms of users’ occupation. Though an engineer who identified problems and then invented solutions, his creative work was a strange contraption rooted in impossible ideas. He illustrated the possibilities of bringing life to the common areas of shared housing by transforming tiny apartments by adding mobile solutions with the aim to improve the lives of inhabitants. The concepts behind these creative solutionstraced back one century ago can be seen as a counterpart to contemporary transformative interior design strategies.