In 1963, when architect Walter Segal married for the second time, he and his new wife, Moran Scott, found that with six children between them they needed a newer and larger house. Consequently, they decided to demolish Scott’s existing house in Highgate, North London, and rebuild and expand it.
This left the problem of where to live in the meantime, and so Segal designed a wooden framed structure at the bottom of their garden as a temporary home for him and his family to live in. In order to construct this as quickly and cheaply as possible, rather than digging foundations he used paving slabs to weigh down and locate the structure, adding further rigidity by using a wooden frame which has its own integral geometry. He drew on traditional methods of construction seen from England to Japan.
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Walter Segal (1907-1985) was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish Rumanian parents in 1907, and grew up partly in Ticino, Switzerland before emigrating to England in 1936. He set up practice in London in the 1950s, most notably designing a block of flats in Ovington Square built in 1957, but he only gained recognition after 1963, when the development of his simple dry-trade construction methods saw his name become known as one of the progenitors of self-build.
This frame was then clad with standard off-the-peg sheeting materials and lining elements, meaning the reduction and elimination of most “wet” trades on site, such as brick laying and plastering. This resulted in major time-savings: the whole was built in just two weeks, and cost only 800 GBP.
The radical simplicity of this make-do solution for his own immediate housing needs attracted considerable interest, leading first to commissions and later to Segal’s development of a new system of self-build construction that could be followed by others. With his methods tried and tested, Lewisham Council in South London released several sites for self-builders to construct their own homes following his methods in the mid-1970s. After his death in 1985, the Walter Segal Self Build Trust was set up, and has continued to promote and propagate his method of self-build using dry-trade techniques, which originated at the bottom of a Highgate garden. I (rgw)
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