What Is Handed Down: Type and Domesticity in the Dwellings of Henry Roberts

At Burning Farm, we continue our discussion on type, typological design, and its strategic role in the ‘housing question.’ Perhaps no other architect in the 19th century offered a more systematic (and controversial) reflection on affordable housing than Henry Roberts. Yet—with a few notable exceptions—his theoretical projects have largely been overlooked in histories of this period. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Roberts exhibited his famous ‘Model House for Four Families,’ a design for nuclear-family apartments that had enduring influence on housing production. Yet, this project was just one among several significant schemes by Roberts. In this essay, Joshua Tan examines Roberts’s various philanthropic housing experiments, starting from his earlier, more communal layouts for single workers. Tan traces the gradual evolution of spatial organization across these projects, highlighting the growing emphasis on hierarchical separation of spaces and exploring how these typological experiments were driven by a desire to shape social behavior and organization through housing design.