Alain de Botton at the London Festival of Architecture 2010

As part of the London Festival of Architecture, Alain de Botton will be in conversation with Zumthor Architects, MVRDV, Michael & Patty Hopkins, JVA and NORD to discuss his ground-breaking architecture project, Living Architecture, which seeks to challenge negative perceptions of modern architecture.

Imagine experiencing cutting edge architecture as if you owned it. That is the premise behind this not-for-profit venture, instigated by de Botton in part because he was ‘frustrated at being merely a “thinker” rather than a “doer”’, which will offer members of the public the chance to rent special architect-designed houses for holidays in five locations around the UK.

The first five architects to take part in the scheme make an impressive line up. Their designs reflect each practice’s distinctiveness: award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has created a secular mini-monastery, which aims to bring an ecclesiastical calm and solemnity to the Devon countryside; on the North Nofolk coast Michael & Patty Hopkins, architects for, among other structures, Portcullis House in Westminster, have designed a Modernist wooden long house with a medieval-style hall at its centre; NORD – young Glasgow-based architects – have designed a stark black box in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station; the design in Thorpeness by Norwegian architects Jarmund/Vigsnæs Architects, authors of, among other buildings, the Oslo School of Architecture, has four steel roofs, each of which houses a bedroom and a bathroom. And the house by MVRDV, a cutting-edge Dutch architecture firm that was among 10 recently commissioned by the president of France to produce a masterplan for Paris in 2030, appears to be balancing, Italian Job-style, precariously on the edge of a hill in Suffolk.

‘The idea has been to avoid the obvious and to place houses in locations one hadn't necessarily ever thought of holidaying in and to design rooms different from those that people know from their own homes,’ explains de Botton, who chose the architects with other members of Living Architecture, who include Dickon Robinson, Chair of Building Futures at RIBA and Mark Robinson, ex manager of the Serpentine Pavilion scheme. ‘We also want to keep things accessible. Prices start at £20 per person per night and the buildings themselves, while always comfortable, are far from grand - the build-cost was scrupulously held down to £2,200 per square metre. The organisation has an educational mission at its core, a wish to teach as well as to soothe and relax.’

Sites were selected by Living Architecture but beyond that the brief was simply to stay within budget; criteria for the designs were that the building must be comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, as well as of the highest architectural quality.

The first two houses - MVRDV’s Balancing Barn in Thorington, Suffolk, and The Shingle House in Dungeness, Kent, by Nord Architecture – will be available to rent from October 2010.