The Profit Function by Alastair Parvin

Alastair Parvin

THE PROFIT FUNCTION Alastair Parvin

As governments have looked increasingly to private markets for the provision of public infrastructure, community architecture and - in particular - housing, we have all signed a profound contract between private gain and public good. The Profit Function is an enquiry into the dynamics of that contract; the way that this seemingly simple economic shift might have fundamentally altered the way that buildings, cities and public environments are designed, and rendered almost superficial many of the cultural and theoretical ideas we have previously associated with architecture.

THE PROFIT FUNCTION

Based on the premise that profit has become perhaps the most prolific design project in history, but one with no corresponding theory or manifesto, this paper begins to construct a basic theory for the design of profit; looking for spatial patterns and principles, and searching for hidden costs. What is exposed is not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bad designâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, as it is often perceived, but the precise opposite: the systematic success of a design logic whose value systems can then be compared to our own.

2008

THE PROFIT FUNCTION Navigating Architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bottom Line

Alastair Parvin 2008

“Architecture is peripheral to the most important social aims. I wish it was less peripheral. That’s why I’m an architect.”

Cedric Price

Contents

Essay 1 / The Absent Master

Essay 2 / Architecture at the End of the Food Chain

p11

Essay 3 / â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Form Follows Financeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; A Design Manifesto For Profit

p15

Essay 4 / Is there a Gap between Profit and Benefit?

p71

Essay 5 / Architecture Beyond the Profit Function

p77

Essay 6 / Expanded Value Systems: Architecture and the Triple Bottom Line

p81

Essay 7 / Post-Capitalist Architecture: The Authorship of Processes

p85

Bibliography

p91

Image Credits

p97

Appendix of Key Interviews

Roger Zogolovitch

p98

Simon Allford

p104

David West

p110

Kitchen / Living / Dining

En-Suite

Bedroom 1

En-Suite

Bathroom

Bathroom Bedroom 2 Bathroom Bedroom 1

CORE A

Bedroom 1

Bedroom 2

Bathroom

Bedroom 2

Kitchen / Living / Dining Kitchen / Living / Dining

Kitchen / Living / Dining

CORE B

Bedroom 1

Bathroom

Bedroom 2

Bedroom 1

Bathroom

1.0 4 Kitchen / Living / Dining

Kitchen / Living / Dining

Essay 1

The Absent Master “The house is a machine for living in.” Le Corbusier1

A senior procurement manager for a major UK bakery is tasked with ensuring a steady annual growth in profitability. In fact, his job depends on meeting a prescribed percentage annual increase in financial performance. This can be achieved in one of two ways: either by increasing the sales of bread without lowering the price, or by producing the same bread at a lower cost. Bread being a relatively stable market, demand on which is affected only by external economic conditions2, and one where there is little or no innovation in the product itself, the procurement manager is only concerned with improving profitability through the latter method: lowering production costs. Most of the profit therefore is created by a process of constant squeezing, either by improving the manufacturing efficiency (without spending too heavily on capital investments) or by making the least effective employees redundant and reallocating their roles among the remaining few. The bread on the supermarket shelves is not necessarily any better or cheaper for the consumer at the end of the year, but the company can report steady annual growth to its shareholders. As the years pass, the procurement manager’s job becomes increasingly difficult, and the workforce increasingly stretched.3 The same ‘steady squeeze’ principle was reported by Polly Toynbee4 working undercover for an agency contracted to supply portering services to an NHS hospital. The porters are given 15 minutes to complete each job – they usually take longer. Should they ever complete a job in fewer than 15 minutes, they know better than to report-in early for the next job, understanding that any room below the time-standard will be interpreted by management as slack in the profit margin, leading them, logically, to squeeze down the 15 minutes further and lay off staff. In the handing over of work from the public to the private domain, profit is produced by squeezing out what one of Toynbee’s interviewees unapologetically refers to as the “feather bedding” of the employees: “All those pensions, holidays, sick pay, overtime pay and so forth.”5 We should then force ourselves to reflect upon the possibility of the same pattern occurring within architectural production. As most commentators are ready to observe, “today architecture is … almost exclusively located in the private sector”6 and thus the architectural discipline now finds itself more exposed to profit as a mechanism than it ever has been. Within the expanding scope of speculative property development7 and

the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), even public architectural production is driven by a culture of contracting and subcontracting, and thus profit becomes an increasingly crucial output from the design of our environment. The current consensus among policymakers is that customers are best-placed to monitor the effects of profit on the built environment. This paper will make the opposite case, and hopefully justify the premise that the architectural discipline is uniquely positioned to observe and commentate upon the possible hidden cost of this economic policy as an ‘expert witness’, and so onto architecture should fall the responsibility of asking the £200 billion question8: Where does development profit come from? In order to do this, it is important to define what is meant by profit, as distinct from revenue. Profit in architectural development is defined as “the margin between sale price and acquisition and development costs.”9 So while an obvious answer to the question would be that profits come, literally, from buyers, tenants - or in the case of public sector projects, public funds - what is under discussion is not the overall source of revenue but the slice of income which is generated on top of the costs of the land, the materials and the labour. Profit is an extra margin generated “when the value exceeds the cost of development”10; it is a form of excess value extracted from the scheme to be passed out to shareholders, either by growth (and hence an increase in the share value) or directly through dividends. In other words, the purchaser of the finished building is getting slightly less than what they pay for, in order that a surplus income can be generated from the project to reward those outside investors for absorbing the development ‘risk’. So profit comes from a discrepancy between cost and sale price which is created either by reducing costs or increasing value. Although, broadly, it is something we take for granted, the nature of this financial mechanism is inevitably a social concern. More evident in the provision of healthcare perhaps than in that of bread, the dominance of profit-led enterprise in the production of space hints at a profound contract between public good and private gain. Without looking far, it is easy to see this contract formalised between clients, designers and contractors, and also at a national scale, between public services and PFI investors, but the true nature of the (sometimes unwritten) contract is much deeper and more complex: Firstly, in that the design of the environment is a collective concern, as commented upon in 1922 by William Lethaby: “The faces of buildings which are turned outwards to the world are obviously of interest to the public, and all citizens have property in

them… bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street.”11 Lethaby’s aesthetically-led terms may now seem rather pompous and archaic, but beyond aesthetics, the essence of the message can, in hindsight, be seen as dramatically understated. While a particular business project may serve the interests of a limited number of shareholders, we are increasingly aware that any act of construction involves the allocation of finite space and resources (both social and ecological) and thus inevitably causes certain side effects which affect society as a whole. So any act of architecture is ultimately a collective event, in which every human being is in some sense a stakeholder. Under global capitalism, the shareholders represent a relatively small and remote minority, whereas the stakeholders constitute an ever-expanding majority. Secondly, in that even in the absence of such explicitly socialist sentiments, architectural production as a profit generator presents a unique dichotomy: When the immediate design outcome is shareholder profit, the de facto design purpose is not labelled on the drawings; it is hidden. Whereas the traditional architectural project was designed to be used by the client, speculative developments have a function beyond the ostensible use, in that they are actually designed to generate profit for an owner or investor, who is absent. Within speculative development therefore there has emerged an unprecedented duality which has been largely ignored by architects: the use function (cooking, sitting, sleeping, playing, working etc) existing alongside another function which is equally dominant, if harder to see: the profit function. Twentieth century architectural theory has gravitated around the notion of function – the idea that the design of an object might (or might not) manifest an activity or programme which is predefined for it. Yet our conception of function has evolved stubbornly around the idea of the use function, and has thus more or less ignored the influence of the profit function. When we talk about flexibility, universality, indeterminacy, specificity (‘form follows function’) or even symbolism, architects are still referring to occupancy. In some cases, the distinction between the two functions is a fuzzy one, for example in retail and office typologies, because these are themselves spaces where the primary use is also the generation of profit (the use-value is nested in the commodities being sold in the building rather than the building itself). Dwellings however offer the most visible playing field for the creation of use-value and exchange-value through design, because the space itself is the commodity. Le Corbusier’s proclamation that, “The house is a machine for living in”12 was, in some senses prescient, but incomplete. It could now

perhaps be placed alongside Cass Gilbert’s 1900 definition of a skyscraper: “A machine that makes the land pay.”13 The key question becomes not one of whether the profit function exists, but to what extent it alters the design outcomes of spatial production. Its relevance as an enquiry is perhaps unprecedented; as the UK Government look to private industry to deliver “2 million homes by 2016 and 3 million homes by 2020”14 (240,000 per year by 2016) and almost all public projects are contracted to private developers under Public Private Partnerships. We have never been placing more trust in the success of that contract between profit for the investor and benefit for the user. At the root of the pact is the assumption (or belief) that these two masters can be reconciled in common purpose, that their design interests are not fundamentally opposed to one another. It puts great stake in the ability of that culturally ingrained contract to not over-simplify, distort or utterly compromise the outcome.

NOTES 1. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture, 2nd ed. Translated by Frederick Etchells. (London: Architectural Press, 1946) p10 2. Bread is often cited in economics as an example of a Giffen good - an inferior, staple good whose demand increases with its price because it has no cheaper substitute. Thus during economic hard-times, consumers may substitute their diet by eating more bread, even though the actual price of bread has risen. 3. From an anonymous first-hand account to the author. 4. Polly Toynbee. Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain. (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) Chapter 5 5. Ibid p206 6. Ken Worpole. The Value of Architecture: Design, Economy and the Architectural Imagination (London: RIBA Future Studies, 2000) p12. 7. The mass-sector constitutes about 85% of total UK housing construction. 8. Estimated total annual revenues of the UK construction industry before economic downturn in summer 2008, according to a Euler Hermes report on the UK construction sector, April 2008. It is not known what percentage of these revenues were taken as profit. http://www.eulerhermes.co.uk/en/documents/uk_ construction_report_170408.pdf/ [Accessed August 2008] 9. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. (London: Department for Communities & Local Government, 2007) p20 10. Eric Loe. The Value of Architecture, Context & Current Thinking. (London: RIBA Future Studies, 2000) p18 11. Ken Worpole Op.Cit. p6 12. Le Corbusier. Op.Cit. p10 13. Carol Willis. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York in Chicago. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) p19 14. Department for Communities & Local Government. Homes for the Future: More affordable, More sustainable Government Green Paper on Housing. (Norwich:HMSO, 2007) p7

Local Authorities RSLs Private Enterprise 100

Percentage

Local Authorities RSLs

Percentage

100

Private Enterprise

1.1 New Housing Construction by Tenure: England Source: CLG Housing Research & Statistics

19 46 19 49 19 52 19 55 19 58 19 61 19 64 19 67 19 70 19 73 19 76 19 79 19 82 19 85 19 88 19 91 19 94 19 97 20 00 20 03 20 06

1.1 New Housing Construction by Tenure: England Source: CLG Housing Research & Statistics

Essay 2

Architecture at the End of the Food Chain “Any change is a change in the topic.” César Aira1 “It may be that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the corridor.” Jean-Luc Godard2

Architecture is widely perceived to be a primarily cultural phenomenon, but even for those who accept this view (perhaps especially for those who accept this view) it is closely aligned with market capitalism and the influence of global economics. “Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land vales, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.”3 Yet against the backdrop of the burgeoning ‘free’-market project (what Naomi Klein refers to as “The fifty year crusade to privatize the world”4), the architectural discipline has attempted to retain, or even extend, it’s disciplinary autonomy. It has developed a set of languages which exist independently of the financial realities within which it operates; “architects have allowed themselves not to engage in that conversation”5, suggests developer Roger Zoglovitch. My opening suggestion is that while the architectural discipline has somehow been looking the other way, its qualitative, philosophical or cultural discourses have become entirely subservient to the ideology of profit because of the framework in which it operates. The dominant architectural ‘style’ or movement in architecture today is not post-modernist, hi-tech, formalist, deconstructivist or even environmentalist, but capitalist, or perhaps consumerist (that is the belief that material affluence will lead to human wellbeing). An ideology by which the governing social dynamics – the design outcomes – are economic rather than cultural, and one which has subsumed all others. Of course, architecture has always been associated with wealthy and powerful patronage (and has taken its place within a mercantile social system) but never perhaps to such an exaggerated extent that it could not be dismissed as an inconvenient and distasteful smear upon the discipline’s intellectual mystique. This perspective is reinforced by Frederic Jameson in his projection of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”6, under which title he argues that “every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatization – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of

multinational capitalism today.”7 Thus the projected liberation of architecture from the straitjacket of modernist orthodoxy in the form of postmodernism was in some sense also a retreat, or a simulated naivety. In the phrasing of Joshua Prince Ramus:“We [architects] are an intelligent group, so we have rebranded that retreat as conquest.”8 The qualities and value systems which are prized in architectural media, academia and professional awards steadily perpetuate this celebration of architecture’s autonomy as an art form, and invite society to appreciate it as such. Jon Goodbun argues that the getaway vehicle is the production of drawings – architecture’s cultural rather than ‘real’ output: “Drawing cannot address issues of cost, of social power, and of the uses social power is put to in the development of the built environment. By essentialising drawing architects have shifted the discourse about the built environment to issues that drawing can and does address best; i.e. formal, aesthetic and cultural issues.”

But “the exclusivity that drawing wins for architects is

no more than the spoils of a phyrric victory; formal autonomy won at the expense of social power.”10 In business terms, this places architecture’s value as a profession firmly within the cultural sector, which is itself commodified and hence marginalised. As Jameson points out, “In postmodern culture, ‘culture’ has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes in itself…”11 This phenomenon is easily visible in the ‘icons’ of symbolised political ideology (such as the World Trade Center redevelopment), the cultural catalysts of urban regeneration (the late ‘Bilbao effect’) and the booming museum economy of the 1990’s, and it is undoubtedly lucrative for a small avant-garde who hold monopoly over cultural sector projects. But it is a condition in which the entire profession is expected to operate; drawn outwards by lifestyle media and advertising. Architects, thus marginalised as providers of cultural-value, find themselves excluded from the upstream design decisions and are perceived as cultural aestheticians rather than effective contributors to strategic design thinking. As an illustration of this, the 2007 Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery, a comprehensive 236 page report on housebuilding in the UK, mentions architects only once: “Where a big impact is required, for example to support a bid to regenerate a major public sector site, or a town centre high-rise scheme, it may be necessary to bring a ‘signature’ architect on board to produce an imaginative design for the scheme.”12 To some extent, architects are bred for frustration. Education and media provide architects with aspirations to a disciplinary paradigm that denies either the existence

(escapism) or the legitimacy (anti-capitalism) of the profit function, while mainstream practice makes it almost impossible to avoid. Though many architects treat profit as a dirty word - embarrassed by its mercenary connotations - they habitually work within it and await its requests, which come in the form of speculative development projects. It seems to be perceived as a bottom-line below which there is no scope for operation, and most settle to either flee from it, or to not talk about it, focusing instead on what beneficial acts of cultural virtue can be saved from the mauling. The majority of architects pursue those jobs where the aims of the two ideologies are accepted to be reconciled: crèches, museums, restaurants, art galleries, theatres or schools. It is the students of that tradition (among whom, hitherto I include myself) who will often be heard complaining that most ‘generic’ architecture is ‘crap’, ‘careless’, ‘greedy’ or ‘poor quality’. A bland judgementalism often shared by members of the public and directed at speculative developers, as Zogolovitch explained to me: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s designers, whether it’s the planning authority, or whether it’s local residents. If you are the developer, you are the devil… The developer is some fat cat, greedy bastard who’s just interested in money.”13 A prejudice which the Callcutt Review also reports: “The word speculative… is often used pejoratively, implying either a tight budget or low quality, or a sort of moral rapaciousness, as in ‘greedy speculators’. The term however, simply refers to structures erected as rent-inducing properties.”14 It is a well-known adage that 90 per-cent of the built environment has nothing to do with architects, and is somewhat distasteful to them. In his essay for RIBA Future Studies, Ken Worpole attacks “indifferent design, or endless rows of standardised buildings and ill-fitting developments”15, a frustration with which many architects would find common cause. The intent is clearly noble, but the basis of the argument is slightly misconceived. The first misconception is that there lies behind it a judgemental streak attacking the designers or developers behind the developments personally. In a construction climate dominated by market conditions, only a minority of architects have access to jobs where there is enough room in the budget (or a sufficiently wealthy class of prospective consumer) for the client to be interested in re-injecting conventional, culturally-virtuous values into profit-led projects. All architects have the right to decline work on moral grounds, but once an architect is committed to finding paid work, artistic selectiveness (and its moralisation) is a rare luxury available (and therefore desirable) only to a few at the ‘respectable’ end of the profession or academia, who cannot therefore justifiably

preach to those within the rest of the construction industries without looking at the properties of the system itself. To do so would be not unlike arguing that ‘all poor people are lazy’. The second misconception lies in the implication of ‘indifference’ or non-design. Such a position is judged on a definition of design concerned primarily with “objects and appearances” which as Bruce Mau argues, is now obsolete: “Design is now more widely understood as the human ability to plan and produce desired outcomes.”16 Seen through this lens, what may be uncovered is not an absence of design but the very opposite: the rigorous application of design effort to maximise the profit function. Profit (as a design project) has become the dominant mechanism in the production of architecture – and yet it is without theory or manifesto. It is at once entirely obvious and yet absent from architectural thinking. If the design of capital is the most prolific architectural project (perhaps ever), architectural theory seems to stay relatively silent about it. It clearly has a set of design tactics, an internal logic, but they are known by practitioners only informally as working knowledge - knowledge that exists in a space carved out and defended as the ‘opposite’ of theory. As such it is not subject to the same critical intelligence as other design outcomes. Without a theory of profit, architecture has relinquished a radical form of design engagement into the hands of others by proclaiming its own innocence; and discarded a means by which architects might re-engage with the social sector.

NOTES 1. César Aira quoted in Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. (London:Allen Lane, 2007) 2. Jean-Luc Godard quoted in Simon Foxwell, ed. The Professionals Choice, The Future of the Built Environment Professions. (London:CABE Building Futures, 2003) p56 3. Frederick Jameson. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (London: Verso, 1991) p05 4. Naomi Klein Op.Cit. p359 5. Roger Zogolovitch, interviewed by the author, Monday 11th August 2008 6. Frederick Jameson. Op.Cit. 7. Frederick Jameson. Op.Cit.p03 8. Joshua Prince-Ramus. The Organization of Labor: Architecture. http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yalebuilding-in-the-future-symposium [Accessed July 2008] 9. Edward Robbins quoted in Jon Goodburn & Karin Jaschke Fame and the Changing Role of Drawing. In An Architects Guide to Fame. Ed. Paul Davies & Torsten Schmiedeknecht. (Oxford:Architectural Press, 2005) p54 10. Jon Goodburn & Karin Jaschke. Fame and the Changing Role of Drawing. In An Architects Guide to Fame. Ed. Paul Davies & Torsten Schmiedeknecht. (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2005) p561 11. Frederick Jameson. Op.Cit.px 12. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. (London: Department for Communities & Local Government, 2007) p169 13. Roger Zogolovitch, interviewed by the author, Monday 11th August 2008 14. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. Op. Cit. p157 15. Ken Worpole Op.Cit. p53 16. Bruce Mau. Massive Change (London: Phaidon, 2004)

Essay 3

‘Form Follows Finance’ A Design Manifesto for Profit

The Quantity Surveyors’ Aesthetic “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.” Learning from Las Vegas1 “If you let the market do it, you’ll just get sheds.” Wendy Thompson2 Stripped of the “sophistication”3

lent to the architect by the cultural sector, the

architecture of the profit function implies a kind of imposed functionalism – a painfully naïve return to the single-minded rationalism of early modernism.

But by supplanting

the social ideology of modernism with pure market logic, the assumed ‘objectivity’ of modernism is vastly exaggerated. This dominant paradigm is a modernism whose mantra is not progress but profit, and thus its success can be quantified and counted. As a result, its effectiveness as a design project is constantly tested and corrected by growth or bankruptcy. In conceiving of a manifesto for this economic modernism, it is impossible to ignore the strong parallels with the original design manifesto for social modernism: Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture (1922). Its eight essays form a catalogue of attempts to observe, emulate and tap-into the logic of the engineer, and then transpose it into a set of structural and aesthetic4 design principles.5 “The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony.”6 Le Corbusier’s choice of the engineer as the key specialist in interpreting the potential of new technology suggests that the universal laws from which the architect was to learn were those of physics and mechanics. The assumption was that the stated ‘function’ is one of mass and volume, and that architecture should strip away its “respectful attitude towards mere decoration”7 in order to maximize that function. In the case of the profit function however, the ‘universal laws’ which would seem to govern the architect’s aesthetic are not those of physics (mediated by the project engineer) but the universal logic of the market, mediated by the estate agent and the quantity surveyor. Not spatial engineering but value engineering. An assumption of intellectual authority to which Eric Loe (a quantity surveyor) also testifies: “The Measurers duly became quantity surveyors, sharing with other surveyors a common concern with property and valuation according to scientific principles”8

If the Quantity Surveyor has become the arbiter of the standard, the equivalent of Le Corbusier’s “engineers aesthetic”9 might now be termed ‘the quantity surveyor’s aesthetic’. The following sequence is an attempt to begin that study. Based on interviews, drawings, photographs, reports and personal experience, it takes the provision of dwellings as a case study. Partly this is because housing represents the most resilient and most complex political problem for architecture in sheer terms of volume10 – and partly because, at the same time, it is a legible measure of the humanity of the system, being a spatial commodity where the benefit to the user and the profit to the developer intersect at the smallest, most basic unit. “Not only does it represent our greatest need for architecture, housing is also the genre that suffers from the greatest generalisations.”11 Like Vers Une Architecture, this paper takes the existing patterns of speculative construction in the UK and in turn speculates on how they manifest a set of principles and design tactics for the pursuit of profit. It is divided into 3 parts. Measurement - concerning the conceptual language of profit, The Minimisation of Costs and The Maximization of Value - these being the two stated12 ways of increasing the size of the profit margin.

Measurement

Quantity The central principle behind ‘form follows finance’ is the quantification of everything. It is an intellectually-exclusive logic that deals only in quantities: areas in m2, costs in £, heights in m, time intervals in fiscal quarters, market share as a %. “If you cannot audit it, it does not exist.”13 What this enables is a form of linear parametric design, where factors can be adjusted to model the (ultimately quantitative) outcome. It also enables the establishment of standard ‘exchange rates’ between key design inputs and outputs to be negotiated: dwellings per hectare or most crucially, £ per m2. Rightly or wrongly, these are the benchmarks against which a developer can measure the success of design proposals. This comes as a rude shock to an architecture graduate, who emerges from a largely qualitative mindset to find that the breadth of the discipline’s discourses are under siege, defended as just one word: ‘quality’. Quality has become architecture’s Alamo – the one solid argument for the valuation of its knowledge. The introductory slide on Foster & Partners’ website proclaims (with almost messianic zeal) “The pursuit of quality”14 as its sole manifesto. It is a word whose virtue is beyond reproach, but its meaning never fully understood. Despite this, its value is contested eloquently by architects, as one might expect. Against the profit function, even ‘quality’ is isolated as a parameter; it becomes a variable quantity with an associated cost and, sometimes, a quantifiable value – one such example being research by Bryan Lawson et al. proving that ‘high quality’ healthcare environments produce quantifiably shorter recovery times, higher patient satisfaction ratings, and even a lower dependency on analgesic medication.15 If the link between the profit margin and high-quality is under contention, there is a logical link between high-profit and high-quantity, as the Callcutt Review makes explicit: “Housebuilding is a production process that is more cost effective at higher levels of output volume.”16 In this sense speculative housebuilding is no different from any other industrial mass-production process, where economies of scale increase the margin per unit the greater the number of units, also allowing high-workforce specificity and thus increased construction speed. The historical (and perhaps the most extreme) precedent for this model remains Levittown, a US production process which in 1951 was producing 30 houses a day17 – progressing across a vast tract of land that became, in effect, an open-air conveyor belt. A tempered version of this model still operates as the norm in the UK, its delivery and sales-methods as well as its spatial-design following essentially similar principles. In the UK, where the housebuilding market operates in a condition of limited land

Image: Carey Jones Architects, 2008.

3.1

3.1 Carey Jonesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; scheme for Wellington place, Leeds, UK - conceived as 250,000m2 of commercial area for ÂŁ300m. Urban design as an exercise in carving voids into pure quantity.

supply, quantity increasingly implies density. A condition supported by the availability of government grants and tax incentives for brownfield land development, and aligned with the government urban policy for high-density18. In these cases, there are financial incentives for high-quantity besides sheer multiplication, in that land-value and the incurred groundwork costs become a smaller percentage of the overall project revenue the greater quantity (height) can be constructed above (see Optimisation). This incurred height often becomes an issue of contention between the developer, local residents and planners. Quantity becomes the central aesthetic principle of the profit function, whose calculations have direct physical impacts upon the environment. Even Koolhaas, delighting in his retroactive manifesto for ‘Bigness’, leapt straight to the formal implications of the phenomenon rather than to the phenomenon itself. Unlike ‘Bigness’, quantity does not always imply complexity, but a kind of banal over-simplification. It does not “fuck context”19, but by dint of sheer volume it pretends to be context.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, 2008.

3.2

3.2 Levittown, Pennsylvania circa 1959. The suburb as open-air factory.

Optimisation The principle of optimisation has been introduced to architecture before, notably by Buckminster Fuller who coined the term “doing more with less”20, but like LeCorbusier’s ‘engineer’s aesthetic’, it has revolved around the principle of material optimisation, exemplified in the structuring of the geodesic dome. In the generation of profit however, structural efficiency becomes of secondary interest. Carol Willis: “An important aspect of ‘form follows finance’ is the principle of economic height… Unlike engineering height, which was the number of stories that were structurally feasible, the economic height of a building referred to the number of stories that would produce the highest rate on the money invested.”21 The calculation of the economic optimum height comes, for most developers, early on the design process.22 It is not defined primarily by structural costs, but land value and market demand in a particular location. As the market is likely to shift during the design stages, height is the primary parameter, which may increase in order to keep the profit margin constant. This approach is criticised by both David West (Urban Designer) and Zogolovitch respectively: “Most people unfortunately just sit and stare at a number. They literally say: right, the land cost that. The amount of development is going to be that. I’ve got to be able to squeeze that. The pounds per square metre I’m going to get back is this, because Savilles told me. That was based on something like that, that was sold about this sort of time last year, maybe. Because of that I’m going to make that. And I have to - otherwise it’s not viable.”23 “The idea of setting yourself a target in terms of density; dwelling per hectare and density per hectare is almost the wrong way to go about it – it’s not a creative way of going about it… If you start by saying I want to build to 50 units per hectare or 60 units per hectare, you’re approaching the problem from the wrong end.”

Diagram: AP from OFT data, 2008.

Profit Land Cost

Interest

Overheads

Build Cost

3.3

3.3 Typical subdivision of total sales revenue for a UK housebuilding project, based on appraisals by OFT. The key variables of Land Cost and Build Cost are adjusted to maximise the profit margin for a given location. 25

‘Mix’ Optimisation A second, highly-reported aspect of profit optimisation is defining the ‘mix’ at the outset; the brief in terms of discrete spatial typologies defined by the market (1 bed, 2 bed, 2-bed ensuite, penthouse etc) and floor areas. Since “housebuilders are primarily concerned with satisfying housing demand as expressed in the market”25 which is not the same as housing need, housebuilders will logically construct for key demographics with appropriate buying power. “The urban renaissance…has been targeted squarely at transient, mostly single, professionals working in the new financial and media industries”26 points out Anna Minton. These demographics are worth targeting not only for financial reasons, but also because they make fewer spatial demands on the units themselves (for example, it is widely-known anecdotally that in New York, stylish loft apartments for high-flying young professionals sometimes are not equipped with a kitchen, because the residents eat all meals ‘on the go’). As a profit margin is made on each unit (providing there is sufficient demand) the best return can be generated from more, smaller (1 and 2 bedroom) flats rather than fewer large ones. Although family sizes in the UK are decreasing, this tendency to exclude older, less wealthy or large-family demographics has been the genesis behind the government initiatives of ‘lifetime’, ‘affordable’ and ‘family’ homes – euphemistic revelations of what is excluded from conventional market delivery. Under the ‘current trader’ model these less profitable types are often funded as planning agreements (See Negotiating Section 106) or grants; in other words, at cost.

The Floorplate The concrete floorplate is the central tool of quantity – its essence made spatial. So literal a manifestation of the land-multiplication phenomenon is it, that it has almost become, in itself, a visual icon for speculative development. It allows the plan to behave as a two-dimensionalised histogram of the programme, on which can be resolved the plural demands of access, emergency egress, servicing, unit size variance… A plan drawing, simply extruded to a defined ‘floor-to-ceiling’ height parameter. Our conception of the impact of technology upon the floorplate has thus far been largely centred around mechanical servicing: “The elevator, electricity, air conditioning, steel and finally, new infrastructures formed a cluster or mutations that induced another species of architecture.”27 In fact residential plan depth is still constrained by natural light – only certain room ‘types’ can be planned without external windows (namely bathrooms, corridors and storage) and so a floorplate of excessive depth incurs extra costs for slim return in revenue. There is however, another way in which the floorplate is an expression of its servant technology, not present in the product but in the process of its planning. As a direct expression of quantity, the floorplate is simplified to allow the designer to process it as a complex problem. The use of predominantly orthogonal geometries allows areas to be measured more easily, and thus resolved. The ‘typical floor plan’ is a device designed to solve a large and otherwise complex numeric problem by pure multiplication (see Calculated Indolence). It is interesting to observe that the introduction of CAD as a design tool (in particular the ‘area flood’ measuring tool) has not, as claimed, liberated architecture from the floorplate, but does seems to have engendered more mannerism within its confines. Often still, the speculative residential block can be understood using only 3 drawings – the ground level plan, the ‘typical’ plan and the upper level plan. The floorplate therefore is an intellectual tool made concrete, a field of quantities, a compliant receiver of numeric parameters.

Image Credit: Photographer, 2008.

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3.4 Mannerism in the external floorplate form. Echo Leeds by DLA Architecture.

Plan Efficiency The central plan-design benchmark, besides £/m2 , is plan ‘efficiency’ as a percentage. This is seen as a design challenge for the architect28. The plan efficiency is a representation of the ratio of net area (the area sellable/lettable as commodity) to the gross area, that is the total area including wall thicknesses, vertical circulation, risers, utility spaces and corridors; “the maximum amount of saleable product from the minimum provision of infrastructure.”29 Gross area can be measured as gross external (including external skin thickness) or gross internal. The strength of this percentage, as the term ‘efficiency’ implies, is a measure of the architect’s success/skill in augmenting profitability through design.

Diagram: Code of Measuring Practice. Adapted by Architects Journal, 17.04.08.

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3.5 Guidelines for the measurement of Net Internal Area (NIA) from the Code of Measuring Practice.

The Separation of Cost Elements A characteristic of the need to manage and tabulate costs is the tendency to design-in individual cost categories as discrete building components: structure, core, servicing, fit out, cladding, clip-on balconies etc. The greater autonomy each cost-element can gain, the greater the flexibility of each parameter, and the possibility of it being subcontracted and controlled as a sub-project (this even can extend to ‘Art’ per m2). Inevitably perhaps, the autonomy of the building cost elements becomes visibly articulated in the outcome; each element performing its role independent of the others. The crucial details therefore become those interface systems which mediate between these separated elements: the cladding wind-post, the suspended ceiling. The profit function is therefore exemplified by a coexistence of different overlaid systems. The basic floorplate structure becomes a theatrical fly-tower onto which can be placed an internal ‘set’30 (the finishes) and an external ‘set’ (the façade) which, if desired, can bear little or no resemblance to one another. To some extent this is highly useful for the designer, who can tailor each ‘set’ for two audiences with very different demands – the exterior ‘set’ aimed chiefly at the planner and public, the interior ‘set’ aimed chiefly at the consumer. This condition is most exposed during construction, before the quantity-machine has been dressed for its particular performance, and at which stage it is hard to know whether the use will be residential, commercial or ‘other’.

Image: AP, 2008.

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3.6 OPAL student flats under construction. Shalesmoor, Sheffield, UK. The naked flytower.

The Minimisation of Costs

Shrink Undoubtedly the most topical and literal instance of the ‘squeeze’ phenomenon is on the internal size of dwellings. According to a recent31 article by the BBC, England is building the smallest dwellings in Europe, estimated at about 30% smaller below average.This has not gone unnoticed by the public: a study of consumer perceptions of mass-market housing for Scottish homesnote identified “small rooms”, ”box like, characterless” spaces, “houses built close together”, “thin walls” and “poor storage space”32. This is a conventional wisdom which is circulated alongside urban legends such as that discovered by Valerie Karn in 1994: The design of show-homes with doors removed and scaled-down furniture installed in order to create the illusion of space for prospective buyers33. The reasons for this condition are, on the face of it, obvious. England and Wales are the only countries in Western Europe with no umbrella space standards34. Recent moves have been made by both English Partnerships and London’s mayor Boris Johnson to reinstate standards comparable with the Parker Morris Standards of the 1960’s and 70’s – but the majority of schemes are negotiated by planning authorities. We are so used to the ‘squeeze’ effect, that we often fail to question the logic behind it. Why are smaller rooms worth no less than larger rooms? How do we conceive of the value of a room? We know that the value of a residential unit (as a commodity) increases with location, the number of rooms and the relationship of those rooms to one another (for example, en-suite bathrooms or open-plan kitchens), but what this means is that the physical volume or intrinsic use-value of that space has been de-prioritised. Behind the business advantage of minimisation lies an intellectual behemoth: the assumption of discrete, fixed spatial typologies at the point of delivery - by which space can be squeezed for as long as it is still cognitively recognisable as ‘bedroom’, ‘living room’, ‘bathroom’ – as registered by estate agents. The introduction, therefore, of larger ‘space standards’, while well-meaning, fails to confront the root fallacy of the mindset: the idea that life itself is supported by a set of entrenched room typologies, as Julian Hakes argues: “Major assumptions about lifestyle are implicit within modern industry space standards. We know that the furniture requirements of a master bedroom are: a double bed, a chair, a dressing table and his/her wardrobes. We plan a room that can be used in this way – the trouble is that often it can be used only in this way. The same is true for all of the other rooms. Houses therefore become an assemblage of distinct rooms, each to be used in a prescribed manner.”

Images: Architects Journal,28.02.2008.

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Thus in planning a bedroom to meet the profit function, a double bed and a wardrobe are fitted into the plan, and a minimum of access space around the edge is left clear. There is no tolerance for alternative layouts or additional functions (such as a desk or a musical instrument). This reinforcement of “rigid conventions in the use of time and space”36 betrays an intrinsic failure to refine thinking in relation to shifts in life-patterning. While some activities are highly legible in their spatial needs, (you sleep in the bedroom and cook in the kitchen), there are fewer and fewer reasons why most activities (working, eating, resting, playing...) might not take place anywhere, or in those areas with (for example) the best view or daylight. The selection of specific highly-serviced activities has little to do with legibility and everything to do with convention. It might even be argued that by limiting the range of activity and amount of storage, speculative housing is unwittingly perpetuating the ideology of consumerism, by encouraging users to buy new, dispose old and go out of the house in order to pursue stimulation. The ‘mis-use’ of spaces such as the suburban garage for storage, band rehearsals, gym or fledgling software enterprise have become archetypes of resistance to this effect. This kind of “monolithic”37, top-down approach is anything but a new phenomenon in architecture. The “one size fits all”38 design model upon which it is based was exemplified in post-war housing provision, which again was focused on the central problem of quantity from the perspective of supplier convenience39. The tectonics of post-war housing would seem roughly similar (but outwardly aligned with a social policy rather than an exclusively financial one). This paradigm of design for an imaginary ‘average’ person has not been created by the profit function, but the profit function has perpetuated or even exaggerated its dominance as an idea, while other markets have moved towards a consumer choice model40.

The ‘Non-Discriminatory Elevation’ Although today’s high-quantity residential developments may be remarkably similar to the those of the 1960s in terms of tectonics, a dramatic mutation has occurred in the role of the elevation. If previously based on a rhetoric of ‘honesty’ (the expression of the design intent), in recent years the façade has leaned towards the opposite: an independent design project to mask the interior. An extraordinarily fashionable technique in recent years has been the ‘randomised pattern’ effect. Far from being a wilful or artistic gesture, the Section 106 mechanism exposes a radical function for this model: “Adopting a ‘pepper-potting’ approach and non-discriminatory elevations can however, help avoid any social stigmatisation and minimise adverse value impacts.”49 This odd phrase is a fascinating twist in the role of the architect. In order to minimise the effect that lower-income residents might have on the overall desirability (and hence planning gain), it is financially logical to do two things: firstly “…seek to locate affordable housing in a position where it has the least adverse impact on market values”50, a practice which, the Callcutt Review points out, “has led to layouts in which affordable housing is concentrated in the most remote and often undesirable section of the site, often separately accessed”51 and secondly, to disguise that distribution of tenancy. The ‘randomised pattern’ elevation, by camouflaging the internal tenancy arrangement, constitutes a startling act of compliance on the part of the façade.

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Images: www.e-architect.co.uk/ Jesticoo +Whiles Architects / AP.

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3.15 KX200 London by AHMM for First Base. 3.16 Wakering Rd Foyer by Jestico+Whiles for East Thames Group. 3.17 iQuarter by Cartwright Pickard Architects. 3.18 Unity tower Liverpool by AHMM for Rumford Investments.

The Structural Grid Theorised as one of Le Corbusier’s ‘five points’, the structural grid of columns has survived as the tectonic driver of standardisation, and conceptual structuring mechanism for high-quantity architecture. It is widely understood to be related to structural efficiency (the span of various beam-types) or the programmatic demands on the spaces within the plan. Yet, a fascinating (and amusing) revelation as to the essential standard behind many grid dimensions. In many cases, the structural grid – which defines dwelling width and access to daylight, appears to be around 7.2 – 7.5m, a seemingly arbitrary number. In fact, the driver behind this dimension is to be found several floors below, in groundlevel or below-ground car parks – 2.4m being the standard width of a car parking space, which (if avoiding costly transfer structures) becomes the driving unit for the structure above. In an ironic confirmation of popular superstition, the car becomes the universal measure of the human dwelling. A second surprise to be found in the grid is in its association with regularity, and thus predictability. In reality, the structural grid is just one building system, which when confronted by others, the irregular and chaotic plan arrangements jostling to accommodate the needs of the market, simply collides with them. As this happens, the grid (formerly the generator of order and regularity) generates moments of bizarre idiosyncrasy – in West One, Sheffield, a view is elegantly spliced by an implausiblylarge concrete column crashing through the living space, set back just far enough from the glazing to allow a curtain rail to pass between the two.

Image: AP, 2008.

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3.19 Abbottâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wharf by Jestico+Whiles Breeze, Castleford by Architecture 2B. 3.20 West One, Sheffield.

Repetition & Risk “In the interests of both space and construction efficiency, houses would ideally be built in straight rows of identical units.”51 “Over the years, housebuilders have endlessly designed, refined and value-engineered their products to create the standard, or template, house design on which they can hang a variety of standardised elevations or features.”52 The suppression of difference in the construction of ‘housing’ (a term which itself implies a core generalisation) is usually associated with mass production: the repetition of elements, the standardisation of dimensions. To some extent this is undoubtedly still the case - fittings bought in bulk are applied uniformly to units within a development yet there is a much more influential dynamic behind it. The extent to which speculative developments are uniform or generalised far exceeds the scales-of-economy required by mass production. Many urban sites are effectively ‘bespoke’ designs - one-off masterplans - and yet, perversely, still do not diverge from the generic, towards what architects would refer to as a ‘contextual response’. The forces at work here are worthy of more in-depth analysis than be given here, but are nonetheless important to recognise. If as developers claim, “development margins are…the gap to take on the risk”53, then there is a major advantage in minimising risk, in controlling everything, and excluding all possible uncertainty at every stage. “[F]unders do not provide finance if the they perceive the risk to be excessive, itself a product of the margin between cost and value.”54 There are three main categories for risk in speculative production. Project risk (the possibility of extra costs appearing during design and construction due to unforeseen conditions and accidents), Market risk (the possibility that house prices in that area may fall during ‘build-out’) and Planning risk, (which absorbs a combination of these factors including whether permission will be granted by planners immediately, or whether costs will be incurred in redesigns or planning appeals). It is perhaps not surprising then that the very act of valuation takes “a ‘riskaverse’ view of products”55, and the players in the construction process are engaged in a game of constant avoidance of liability, tending large-scale developments towards precedented solutions, known quantities and bland forecasting models. ‘Innovation’, prized by architectural culture, is perceived by many developers as a synonym for ‘risk’, and is accordingly designed-out. A further profit motive towards risk-averse design, suggests Andy Jobling of Levitt Bernstein, might come from professional indemnity insurance premiums, as “substantial discounts [will be] offered to firms practicing ‘safe’ architecture.”56 “As we run away from liability”, argues Joshua Prince Ramus, “we are finding ourselves marginalised from the core fundamental elements that allow us to do good design…”57 44

Image: Architects Journal, 28.02.2008.

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3.21 Abito, Salford by Building Design Partnership.

‘Calculated Indolence’ Another underestimated force behind the value of the generic is the extent to which the designer’s time can be perceived as a project cost which returns insignificant savings or value–increases. While many architects dismiss the ‘absence’ of design thinking from housebuilding projects as a form of stupidity or ineptitude, we overlook the possibility that this ‘laziness’ may be a calculated design decision. The decision to use pre-existing design models which more easily conform to building regulations and ‘consumer expectations’ (that is, effectively cut spending on spatial ‘thinking’) may in fact be a conscious attempt to minimise cost and risk. The orthogonal plan, regular grid and repeated elements generate savings not so much in the manufacturing, but the extent to which each part has to be thought-through and resolved by the designer. What many refer to as intellectual failing may in fact be an elegant stupidity; what might be described using Cedric Price’s coinage, ‘calculated indolence’. A manifestation of this kind of ‘thought-economy’ is the emergence of the ‘design architect’ and the ‘executive architect’ as distinct roles under a Design and Build procurement contract; one to provide cultural-capital (see Gobbing-On) and the other to detail and oversee the delivery of the architectural object – a considerably different design-task, often at lower fees. This is related to the architect’s profit margin, as Simon Allford explained to me. The Thatcher Government’s prohibition of fixed fees (which “she regarded as a cartel”58) allowed architects to “win the job by cutting their profits or cutting their costs”59. Both the ‘design’ and the ‘executive’ architects’ roles are legitimate applications (or economies) of intelligence, but the act of lobotomising the design process in this way has, Ramus argues, inhibited or eliminated the value of the designer in applying both types of intelligence at all stages of the project60.

Image: Building Design, 2008.

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3.22 Opal Court student housing in Leicester, UK.

Outsourcing Perhaps one of the most widespread dynamics of neo-liberal policy is privatisation in the form of sub-contracting and sub sub-contracting61, and architecture is by no means an exception. The central business principle is that non-core functions are outsourced. For example, in a hospital, everything but actual healthcare can be subcontracted, including cleaning, even though this does have an impact on the health of the patients. Since the shift in power away from county-council architects towards private practice, UK architecture and construction has seen a dramatic increase in the extent to which design tasks are subcontracted on large projects – to façade designers, services engineers, CAD technicians and visualisers, or in the case of construction, specialist construction teams for almost every aspect of the project. For the clients, these offer considerable improvements in cost-efficiency, largely because “Subcontractors are able to employ labour that merely has to carry out a repetitive task with only a few variables.”62 The improved profit margin which is afforded by subcontracting almost certainly has a cost, extensively argued by centre-left commentators such as Toynbee. ‘Flexibility’ and ‘efficiency’ are often a euphemism for poor job security and working conditions. “The words are ‘outsourcing’, ‘subcontracting’, ‘market testing’, ‘best value’, ‘externalisation’ – for people working on the bottom rungs of the public sector, all these words have meant just one thing: lower pay, worse conditions, less security”63 and funds are diverted away from the point-of-delivery workers to an expanding manager class; what Will Hughes refers to as “a cult of managerialism.”64 But that cost is not quantified in any way which disadvantages the shareholder, and is thus irrelevant to the profit function. Outsourcing is a specialisation of knowledge, but it is also a fragmentation of intelligence, diminishing the number of those participants in the design process who are able to compute or comment upon the performance of the overall system in anything but their own interests, or conceive of fundamental changes to it.

The Reduction of Flexibility The Postponement of Fixity The conventional notion of architectural flexibility is of little currency to the profit function, since the units are designed (usually for immediate rent or sale) according to fixed commodities and regulations, within which cost demands override any interest in allowing users to retrospectively alter or rearrange layouts for their benefit. Housebuilders design â&#x20AC;&#x153;by pre-empting purchaser choiceâ&#x20AC;?65, so for the property buyer, often the only form of flexibility-in-use is to move house. There is however, a form of planned tolerance-to-change which exists within the design process itself, an ordering of the plan which allows the layout to absorb changes once the project is on-site, as Jonathan Wilson and Mike Lapish, architects of West One, Sheffield, explained to me. Once fixed and approved by planners, the faĂ§ade (and with it the structural grid) cannot be altered, but the developer may still wish to alter the mix or internal layout according to last-minute shifts in the market. The architect can tactically anticipate this by placing redundant windows on the elevation, which, once the internal layout is finalised, can be filled with back-painted glass.

Image: AP, 2008.

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3.23 West One, Sheffield, UK.

The Maximisation of Value

The Setback The upper floor ‘setback’ has become almost a motif of speculative dwelling projects. Its very name infers an adherence to an abstract conceptual structure (whereby the ‘typical floor’ plan represents the norm). So it is seemingly counterintuitive as a spatial device - it would seem to relinquish internal volume unnecessarily, reducing the revenue for no reduction in construction cost. In fact it performs two roles which add sale value. The first and most obvious role is that it supports the programming of larger, ‘penthouse’ apartments at the upper levels, appealing to a minority consumer higher up the market, for whom the relinquished perimeter adds desirability as a roof garden with a dominating view. The second, more esoteric role of the setback is to be found in the design/negotiating process itself. The height constraints set by planners on many high-quantity projects are related to surrounding properties and rights of light – which is calculated by drawing an angle upwards from the windows of adjacent properties. If this angle is allowed to define the extent to which an upper level is set-back, it is possible to fit a whole extra floor (or more) onto the top of the scheme in such a way that planners find it hard to protest.The setback often emerges very early-on in the design of buildings and masterplans. It presents almost a default model for the architect to operate against local height limits, such as those set in London, as David West explained: “In London… the GLA get involved when [a building is above] a ceiling of 33 metres. So if you’re one meter or one centimetre below, it avoids a lot of issues. So a lot of developers make the decision based on that. They mark off 32.959m and what we’re going to do is divide that by the number of floors we can just about squeeze in and that means we’re going to be pursuing a 2.5m ceiling height gentlemen. Job done, no real discussion more than that.”66

Diagram: AP, 2008.

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3.24 Diagrammatic illustration of Rights-of-Light constraints on development height from existing dwellings.

Mixed Uses There are two core sources of profit for high-quantity house builders: the sales revenue on the constructed enclosures themselves, and the ‘development gain’, which is the increase in the value of the land as a consequence of the added land use67. On the short term at least, this places the overall attractiveness of the development (to the public) in line with the profit function. “[T]here will come a point at which increased density makes the development less, rather than more profitable. The inclusion of non-residential elements, such as food retail or leisure, can significantly increase the returns.”68 The introduction of ‘mixed uses’ performs a number of functions in improving the financial equation. Most simply, it harvests the revenue of the increased activity generated by the density of dwellings. In this scenario each programme generates demand for the next, and density is used a means to induce intensity (use). This, for West, is also a highly effective means to ensure socially-functional areas: “For me I’d far rather be building at high density… and a set of principles and ideals that allow us to completely shift that piece of London to a completely different geographic status, to a completely different kind of mental wellbeing. If we did everything less dense we’d just end up with car parking on two levels and boarded-up signs saying ‘shop for let’, because nobody can take the shop because there isn’t a sufficient … economic density. So in a sense I’d rather shift it to this almost crazy level, which is going to be amazingly difficult to take through the planning process to release the potential of what we’re doing.”69 There is a systemic success here, in that the profit increases with augmentation, not reduction: more is more, and greater intensity creates more used, shared and supervised resources. However, there are serious limitations to the model. The increase in activity is conditional upon the exclusion of activities which do not themselves generate profit (almost everything but shopping) and the construction of ‘public’ space that is, in fact, overwhelmingly serving private interest. Apart from the self-evident issues of social-equity which are roused by this condition, it is a model which has proven itself to be dramatically over-simplified. Because ‘mixed uses’ are almost invariably designed-in at ground level, their programming becomes a default means for the architect to negate the security and privacy

Image: AP, 2008.

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3.25 Clarence Dock, Leeds, UK, August 2008.

issues generated by proximity to the ground, commencing the residential portions with a ‘typical floor’ above. So easy is it as a design solution, that its application often exceeds the vulnerability of the wider economic pattern upon-which it depends (namely the spending power of individuals). Even before the recent economic downturn, it had become common to see new residential accommodation occupied on upper floors while retail spaces below stand empty. Nowhere is this more starkly visible than Leeds, where massive dockside developments have been left empty by economic downturn, and windswept ‘public spaces’ can be found lined only with printed hoardings; saccharine photographs of aspirational-lifestyle shoppers, flamboyantly labelled with the official programmatic-designation of the failed design intent, ‘Retail’.

Image: AP, 2008.

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3.26 Clarence Dock, Leeds, UK. August 2008.

‘Gobbing-On’ (Importing Cultural Content) However listed towards the ‘supply-side’ the design of dwellings may be, and however normalised the protocols of capitalism may have become, we have not yet reached the point at which consumers or planners are ready to accept the profit machine in its raw state, but rather it must be tempered. “All non-cost effective features will generally have been removed and replaced by the minimum needed to achieve regulatory compliance. The appeal to potential buyers can be enhanced by the selective use of standardised features which are simply attached to the basic house shape. These are known colloquially in the trade as ‘gob-ons’ and can range from fake beams fixed to external walls or UPVC dovecotes and are frequently used without any reference to any styles or materials indigenous to the locality.”70 These sorts of ‘traditionalist’ cosmetic dressings applied to suburban housing developments are familiar to the public, and ostensibly, rely upon the exclusion of the architect. It follows a pattern-book method (much derided by architects) where the architects knowledge is unwanted. And yet, in larger projects, architects are concerned with essentially the same animal. As providers of cultural capital, they are of value to the developer, being formally skilful, habitually nostalgic (even in the case of timber/ brick clad modernism) and, in the case of ‘signature’ architects, eloquent salesmen of a cultural brand which sells legitimacy to the project (and may well pay for itself). The architect’s role, once relegated to the cultural sector, is as political (an)aesthetician, primarily in control of the external appearance of the object. The architect’s knowledge can be applied here with the same calculated rationalism as any other functional parameter. In the case of large, public projects, architecture is a tool to sculpt the project’s media diaspora and glamorise the political perception of the project. In less high-profile projects, the façade is simply employed to disguise the scale of an otherwise monotonous block, articulating the elevation with protuberances or variations in materials (a common example in recent years being the use of brick and blue or cream render). Furthermore, In the choice of materials, the architect can exaggerate or diminish the perceived ‘difference’ of the scheme. Exaggeration (the articulation of the building as symbolic ‘icon’) can be achieved by using

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3.27 Scales of applied â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;GobOnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Small: Suburban housing, UK (location unknown). Medium: Rendering of Opal Student Housing Sheffield once completed. Large: Commercial quantity for Ground Zero New York associated with cultural brands, from left to right: David Childs, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Fumihiko Maki. 61

visibly unusual materials or compositions. Diminution often involves the use of ‘traditional’ materials as cosmetics, even if their physical properties are incongruous; such as using bricks as a non load-bearing skin. Sometimes the façade is used in this way to pay polite lip-service to contextualism by incorporating a ‘local’ material. Those materials deemed to be ‘local’ from a top-down, bureaucratic point of view tend to be geologically-local stone or a simplistic allusion to a regional cultural/industrial heritage, such as steel in Sheffield. This cosmetic positioning of the project can extend into ‘functional’ building elements however, such as the use of roof-mounted wind-turbines or ‘living walls’ which project a (sometimes literally) ‘green’ aspiration for the project. Far from championing “the humanist expectation of honesty”71 architects, as purveyors of the ‘gob-on’, are directly employed to disguise the true character of the system. (It is worth noting that this disguise can sometimes be proclaimed as exposure: as would be the case in the ‘structurally honest’ buildings of the hi-tech movement. The structural properties can be ‘revealed’ in order to mask the commercial properties). In achieving this, so vital is the authenticity of their rhetoric, that architects themselves may be necessarily unaware of their role in the profit complex. Even unaware, they are perversely successful in this capacity: far from appreciating the compelling vastness of mass-produced architecture, the primal, surreal, absurd beauty of sheer quantity, we barely cast it a second glance. We are numbed by a carefully-designed blandness, which leads us to believe that what we are seeing is completely ordinary, unremarkable. Against the profit function, mediocrity is a measure of success.

Image: AP,2008.

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3.28 Brick skin applied to Opal Student housing, Sheffield, UK.

Engineering Aspirations: The Mythical Defeat of Social Engineering “Even as recently as four years ago, the chairman of a small house-building company could report with satisfaction to shareholders that the company had reduced its range of house types: ‘we now sell what we wish to sell, not what our customers wish us to sell!” - Frank Duffy72 “It is essential to create the right state of mind for living in mass production houses.” - Le Corbusier73 The most direct method of increasing revenue is to increase the demand for any given volume of space. “Location is the main differentiating factor, but once that is decided [developers] can promote further distinctiveness by exercising their discretion over pricing and incentive policy, branding, quality of build and finish”74. The most straightforward means to compete in terms of desirability would be to build to a higher-quality, yet it is here that the crucial fault-line in the speculative model is to be found. As Callcutt confirms in frank terms, “There is absolutely no profit to be made in more thoughtful or better quality design”75, “quality is simply not cost effective.”76 The well-known economic explanation for this market failure is that UK housing is an “artificially”77 distorted market, being a market with tightly constrained (land) supply and theoretically infinite demand, which creates a market where inflation is high (rising property prices) and mass-producers do not have to compete on quality. In this sense, UK housing is an aberration of ‘pure’ free-market economic theory, which Zoglovitch decries as an “old fashioned, iron curtain, communist model of an economy within a consumerist environment.”78 If there is no revenue to be gained from creating demand through higher quality construction, there is an equivalent means by which revenue can be increased through another form of design. If the desired outcome is to meet the customers aspirations, then a direct cost-alternative to engineering a dwelling to meet customer aspirations is to engineer customer aspirations to meet the dwelling. This ability to short-circuit demand represents a colossal, unpalatable truth for the architect. Scarred perhaps by the utopian aims of post-war housing provision, architecture now is in a state of denial over its close relationship with social engineering. The conventional wisdom is that “designers are not social engineers.”79 But what the profit-function exposes is that

Image: Le Corbusier, 1948.

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3.29 Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Modulor.

this distance between architecture and social engineering has been created not by the retreat of social-engineering but by the retreat of the architecture. In the architect’s absence, the chief designer of the profit function (the developer) is expected to engineer his customers’ expectations. If the criticism of mid-modernism was the tendency to design according to a monolithic, ‘one size fits all’ universal model – exemplified by Le Corbusier’s Modulor, then the profit function has advanced this generalism further than Le Corbusier would have dared. It has effectively set about engineering its Modulor: a model-consumer whose aspirations and desires match what the mass-market can provide. Not ‘one size fits all’ but ‘make all one size’. In a designed and paid-for media environment, information has also become a resource which is designed as readily as bricks and concrete, and the propagation of expectations through advertising is a key design tool, which “Increasingly [uses] aspiration and lifestyle [to] create demand beyond basic accommodation need”80. By shifting the terms of desire towards lifestyle and status symbolism, the attention of the consumer can be shifted away from physical properties of the dwelling – such as its size, height, performance, personalisation or relationship with its surroundings. These simpler lifestyle needs can be more easily met by the high-quantity model, through the provision of modish internal finishes such as halogen lighting and wooden floors. For example, by associating images of happiness and fulfilment with open plan kitchens, advertisers (collectively) are able to increase the number of homebuyers who prefer an open kitchen / living room layout – which incidentally demands less floor area and liberates deeper plans. Sometimes the aesthetics of the lifestyle on offer (the commodity) are vulnerable and have to take more direct control in redesigning occupants activities: at West One, Sheffield (like Levittown before it) residents are forbidden from hanging washing out to dry on their balconies, lest its incongruity with the ‘urban lifestyle’ image damage the sale value of the units.

Image: Kaye Alexander, 2008. Image: AP, 2008.

3.30

3.31

3.30 Property advertising at Parsons Green, London, UK, 2008. 3.31 West One, Sheffield listing of tenantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; obligations (highlighting added). 67

This strategic option is a final tool in the arsenal of the profit functionalist, one which architects and policymakers have hitherto ignored, and it represents a crucial flaw in the government’s proposed method of monitoring quality. One of the central proposals of the Barker Review of Housing Supply, which was adopted in the Green Paper on Housing, was that “the [Office of Fair Trading] should intervene if the industry did not significantly increase levels of customer satisfaction.”81 But this reliance on the consumer’s original expectations as a feedback device ignores the fact that expectations themselves are now a territory for redesign. “The consumer has come to believe that what is offered is what is available”82, so while it may be possible for customers to report back on the 84 per cent of new UK homes that have construction defects83, consumers have no means to imagine what in terms of service and space-design they might be missing out on, until the possibilities are explored by industry. Customer satisfaction therefore is almost useless as a gauge of the performance of speculative development.

NOTES FOR ESSAY 3 1. Robert Venturi et al. quoted in Rem Koolhaas & AMOMA. Content. (Hohenzollering:Taschen,2004) p23 2. Wendy Thompson, Major Projects Officer, Newnham Regeneration Project quoted in Loe Op.Cit. p54 3. “Now architects are careful about making emotional political stands about anything. That can seem like sophistication, or it can seem like evasion.” Dejan Sudjic quoted in Robin Pogrebin. I’m the Designer. My client’s the Autocrat. The New York Times, June 22, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/arts/design/22pogr.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2 4. The word ‘aesthetic’ used here not to mean ‘appearances’ but more broadly a form of intellectual shorthand. 5. Le Corbusier. Op.Cit. p15 6. Ibid. p6 7. Ibid p89 8. Loe. Op.Cit p7 9. Le Corbusier. Op.Cit. p15 10. About 85 per cent of all new housing in the UK is produced by the mass market sector. 11.Kaye Alexander. Authenti_city (University of Sheffield School of Architecture BA(Hons) Dissertation, 2006) p37 12. “A wide range of factors can affect a housebuilding company’s profitability; increasing sales revenue is a principal means, but for the reasons already outlined, this if frequently outside the company’s control. Reducing costs… is much more within the company’s gift and can encompass a variety of approaches.” The Callcutt Review p177 13. Roger Zogolovitch quoted in Loe Op.Cit. p42 14. Foster & Partners http://www.fosterandpartners.com 15.Bryan Lawson “somewhere between 15-20% reduction in recovery times” http://design.dh.gov.uk/library/ video_player/player.asp?filepath=bryan_lawson_03.flv&group=bryan_lawson&sub_folder=content) 16. The Callcutt Review p177 17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_Pennsylvania 18. A policy championed by Richard Rogers’ Urban Task Force. 19. Rem Koolhaas. Bigness or the problem of Large in S,M,L,XL 2nd ed. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998) p502 20. R.Buckminster Fuller. Your Private Sky. Ed. Joachim Krausse & Claude Lichtenstein. (Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 1999) 21. Carol Willis. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York in Chicago. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) p45 22. A summary of viability in The Callcutt Review p46. 23. David West. Interviewed by the author. Studio Egret West, London. Tuesday 12th August 2008. 24. Roger Zogolovitch. Interviewed by the author, Monday 11th August 2008 25. The Callcutt Review p15 26. Anna Minton. The Flat Trap (Architects Journal 28.02.08) 27. Rem Koolhaas. Bigness or the problem of Large in S,M,L,XL 2nd ed. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998) p500 28 .Roger Zogolovitch Rules of Thumb - The Net:Gross Ratio (Architects Journal 17.04.08) 29. The Callcutt Review p179 30. The concept of technological ‘sets’ in architecture was coined and explored at length by Ron Herron. 31. Ray Furlong. Compact and Bijou – The Slums of Tomorrow? BBC News, 12th September 2008 33. Valerie Karn. New Homes in the 1990s: A Study of the Design, Space and Amenities in Housing Association and Private Sector Housing. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1994) 34.Some local authorities and residential social landlords do have their own standards for socially-rented dwellings, but none of this covers private sector developments. 35.Julian Hakes in Bartlett et al. Consumer Choice in Housing: The Beginnings of a House Buyer Revolt. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2002) p71 36.Frank Duffy in Bartlett et al. Op.Cit. p38 37. Ibid. p23 38. Ritsuko Ozaki in Bartlett et al. Op.Cit. p54 39. “I suspect that the provision of housing in the UK, both in the public and the private sectors, is similarly biased in favour of the convenience – and profit – of the supplier“ Frank Duffy in Bartlett et al. Op.Cit. p38 40. Alan Hooper in Bartlett et al. Op.Cit. p112

Essay 4

Is there a Gap between Profit and Benefit? “Vernacular buildings are not the sentimental, picturesque backdrop to real life. They may be beautiful but that is beside the point. They have emerged out of hard necessities, hard work and hard lives. Their appeal lies in the sense that they make.” G.Darley1 “There is evidence that in all of the advanced economies that around a fifth of households, or up to a quarter in some nations, will not have adequate resources to afford adequate housing without some form of support.” Duncan Macllennan2

The emerging patterns of design, while incomplete and imprecise, are nonetheless recognisable in the built environment. It seems indubitable that speculative architecture reflects the properties of the process by which it is procured: that there is a profitvernacular. But perhaps we have never fully grasped the depth to which housing is a reflection of its supply mechanism. The crucial point is that this is not, as many would claim, ‘bad design’, but rather the opposite. What is exposed by exploring the characteristics of the profit vernacular and the extent to which it serves the interest of company shareholders is not the failure of a design protocol but the success of a design protocol; one whose interests are profoundly divergent from those we expect of it. Housing Minister Caroline Flint’s hope to be “working in partnership with industry to improve design, quality and environmental standards”3 constitutes an attempt to harness together two value systems which are, in many ways, pulling in opposite directions: the stated aims of one (energy performance and high quality) are perceived by the other as costs (and therefore luxury goods) to be minimised in order to succeed.

As much as the argument can be made that there is a profound flaw therefore in asking the profit mechanism to deliver education, healthcare and dwelling systems, it is not possible to prove that flaw as a static, quantifiable state. Rather, by looking at the intrinsic tendency of the system, it can be seen as systematically likely, and this may be a more useful way of studying the problem and testing alternative models.

The profit margin, that slice of finance extracted from the project to reward shareholders for their assumption of ‘risk’, is not simply a fixed tax upon the project. Rather it is a motive, the presence of which, however tiny, fundamentally alters the behaviour of any given social system – it causes the mechanism to tend towards a certain direction. An illustration of this might be a large public transport network. A bus network running only

to pay for itself is interested only in three things: providing the widest possible service for the lowest possible ticket prices while ensuring its long-term survival. As long as the total system can sustain this, it does not matter if certain routes are compensating for other parts of the network – that is simply what webs do: absorb shocks and expand. As soon as that same network is subdivided and privatised, the basic rules of the game are altered. Each operator’s motive is to return as high profits as possible, and so a process of fragmentation occurs, with a number of bus companies competing intensely for a few, busy runs, and (unless required to do so by government legislation), no longer operating buses on those routes which run at a loss (which theoretically can constitute up to 49% of the total network activity and a much greater percentage of the network area). So while privatisation of a service-providing system may improve ‘efficiency’ by providing a non-altruistic motivation for participants, as political advocates argue, it can do so at a catastrophic cost in overall performance.

The accepted approach in housing is that “Government can specify outcomes, such as good quality or environmental performance, but should allow industry to determine the best means.”4 So in order to harness industry, public bodies set quantifiable targets, benchmarks and standards. This is problematic, because whatever standards and targets are set (in numerical terms) at the outset, from then on the mechanism wants to shrink and minimise every possible form of cost around those targets. Aside from the fact that it is impossible to write a watertight contract that encapsulates every form of value, what it leaves is a system which is fundamentally stingy, always looking to minimise what is meant by ‘new home’, ‘bedroom’, ‘public space’. For this reason our conventional response to the perceived problem of the profit function may be wrongheaded. Increasing the space standards to something akin to Parker Morris standards may marginally improve the stock being built, but it will not change the intrinsic tendency of the profit mechanism to deliver as little as possible.

There is also a major flaw in our means of perceiving the outcome: quality. Because ‘quality’ is a property of the static product, it ignores the process of formation behind that product. What would happen if, instead, we assessed the performance of ‘housing’ (which is, after all, a verb not a noun) not with the word quality but with the word generosity; generosity being a property not of the end product, but a property of the delivery system across time. Does it want to give more?

“We need to take a step back and search for the ‘qualitative’ processes of a sustainable system,

such

diversity, learning, adaption and

self-organisation…revealing

organizational patterns [and] identifying virtuous feedback loops, rather than… setting targets and negotiating trade offs”

Seen in this way, the gap between profit and benefit can be explored more clearly. It lies in the application of innovation. For Corbusian Modernism, as well as Buckminster Fuller’s anticipatory design science, technological progress was the core of improved living conditions for all. The capacity for technological innovation to augment capability was, in their vision, something which could be applied to improving the benefit to the user. When the root function shifts away from use and towards profit, something happens: technological innovations (what are referred to in the housebuilding industry as MMC (Modern Methods of Construction)) are applied not to augmenting the performance of the commodity but to augmenting the profit margin on the supply-side. “Doing more with less”6 becomes a means to ‘Sell more for spending less’, and so, over time, the evolution of the commodity is very different. This evolutionary effect is illustrated brilliantly in the closing pages of Vers Une Architecture, where Le Corbusier forecasts his “Airplane of to-morrow”7. His airliner has evolved as a huge flying wing, with triple fuselage – a high-performance aerodynamic design (later used in fighter aircraft and the stealth bomber). What Le Corbusier’s flying wing enables is for each passenger to have a forward-facing window, in order that they might experience the full thrill of flight in a structure where leg room is spacious for the majority. By contrast, the evolution of the airliner (according to the profit function) has, as we all know, provided a rather less usercentric model, by which passengers are packed as tightly as tolerable lengthways into the fuselage, and wrapped in varying degrees of cosmetic comfort (‘quality of finishes’) which have been applied to the interior. Even simple human comforts such as leg-room or the ability to lie flat are sold for a premium8. Le Corbusier correctly predicted the technological advance, but completely failed to anticipate who the beneficiaries of that advance would be. If, as a society, we are serious about the long-term provision of high-quality houses with ever-increasing environmental performance, we are going to have to embark on a search for an economically viable procurement system which exhibits intrinsic generosity in its evolution rather than intrinsic stinginess. One whose motivation is the reward of its end-users. If we can develop such a system, the ‘targets’ set by government are likely to be continually exceeded rather than perpetually frustrated.

NOTES 1. G. Darley. quoted in Ken Bartlett et al. Consumer Choice in Housing: The Beginnings of a House Buyer Revolt. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2002) p78 2. Duncan Maclennan. Housing Policies: New Times, New Foundations. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2005) p13 3. Ray Furlong. Compact and Bijou â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Slums of Tomorrow? BBC News, 12th September 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7612384.stm 4. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery Op.Cit. p4 5. Julie Richardson. Accounting for Sustainability: Measuring Quantities or Enhancing Qualities? In The Triple Bottom Line: Does it all Add Up? Ed. Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson (London: Earthscan, 2004) p43-44 6. R. Buckminster Fuller. Your Private Sky Ed. Joachim Krausse & Claude Lichtenstein (Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 1999) 7. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture, 2nd ed. Translated by Frederick Etchells. (London: Architectural Press, 1946) p263 8. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also interesting to note that advertisements for airlines very often compensate for this by relying entirely on figurative illustrations (such as beds which are magically transported from London to New York while the occupant sleeps) - only very rarely do they show an actual aircraft interior, and if showing it, then only first class rather than standard accommodation.

Essay 5

Architecture Beyond the Profit Function For proponents of ‘perfect-market’ economics, the lack of generosity in the property system is a result simply of ‘artificial’ constraints on the supply of land. So the key to ‘correcting’ this flaw is a radical, simple one, that challenges some of the most enshrined principles of the UK planning system: relinquish vast tracts of extra land for housing, ending inflation and creating an economic environment where housebuilders compete on ‘quality’ and customisability, as they do in other commodity markets. Undoubtedly such a move would have a major impact upon the housing market. There are however two key problems with this argument. Firstly, the constraints on the supply of land are not artificial but natural. The ownership of property is in theoretically infinite demand, but supply of land is inherently limited by inalienable geographical constraints, in front of which political constraints are merely an (admittedly large) buffer zone. So the imposition of a pure ‘free-market’ model upon finite space is a platonic abstraction, whereas the imposition of space-constraints upon a hungry market reintroduces an unavoidable reality. Secondly, this proposition underestimates the effect of that finalloop of the profit function: the ability to engineer aspirations. As long as the profit function stands to gain from it, it will seek to adjust aspirations towards its own terms before it extends to meet others, so there is no guarantee that consumers will, for example, favour environmental performance over other factors which are prioritised by lifestyle advertising and cost. This dilemma is found today in almost all market products. Duncan MacLennan, in his 2005 paper for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), argues more broadly that “The notion that markets left to themselves will function, unfailingly to serve everyone or that an endless litany of clever partnerships could ‘magic’ decent housing solutions for the poor has been debunked by the experience of market outcomes over the last 20 years.”

In light of the resistance to government proposals to build new ‘eco-towns’, it is probably also worth observing that such a radical shift in planning policy would be a political impossibility in the UK today, resisted on one hand by conservationists, and perhaps on the other by the middle classes, for whom inflated property value represents a large share of their assets. An obvious alternative to private development is not-for-profit development, which has been strongly advocated in particular by the JRF, for whom the “concerns” over the quality and sustainability of housing supply “suggest the need for a sustained, and preferably growing, role for not-for-profit development.”2

An increasing number of Residential Social Landlords (RSLs) have expanded into building houses for sale (estimated at 2000-3000 per year by the housing federation), and there is scope for growth up to 10,000 units per year over a 10 year period.3 The key advantage of non-for-profit development is the removal of the ‘squeeze’ phenomenon – it is motivated only by delivering as many affordable, high-performance dwellings as possible and attracting the best employees. There is an intrinsic neutrality, if not a generosity in the system: “As RSLs are not required to deliver returns for their investors, their business model is somewhat different. Their objectives generally are concerned with the wider public interest and that of the communities which they serve. They are therefore much more likely to focus on quality and sustainability in design and construction and welcome innovation.”4 Having understood the intrinsic flaws in the profit function, the simplest top-down policy-shift would be for Government to drive radically towards not-for-profit (‘third sector’) development as the majority mode of production, but there are nonetheless, caveats: “Even if RSL’s are under no obligation to deliver a return for investors they must take care to allow an adequate margin for risk.”5 What not-for-profit mass production does not do however, is eliminate the “monolithic”6, “supply-led attitudes”7 inherent in the supply model. While some RSLs and developers alike are beginning to allow a degree of pre-build customisation, the design of dwellings is still broadly towards a generalised individual. “[H]ousebuilding firms have tried to avoid customisation by pre-empting purchaser choice”8 The coming-of-age through which, surely, housing must pass in this century is the reinstatement of use-value in the design motivation; the evolution of market diversity and mass-customisation. This is not contrary to the economic framework of massproduction. Our clothing, for example, is largely mass-produced, and yet the infinite combinations allow personalisation and diversity in a crowd. This shift in housing production could, comparably, be like a progression from everyone wearing a uniform to everyone wearing casual clothes.9 The closest so far we have got to effecting this “house buyers’ revolt”10 is the growth of the ‘self-build’ market, which in the UK now constitutes about 10% of total production, although this is still a smaller proportion than many countries11. ‘Self-build’ is something of a misnomer, since it includes not just those who physically build their own house but also those who employ contractors. It would more accurately be called ‘selfprocurement’. In self-build, the profit function is ostensibly absent because the design is focused on use-value rather than immediate exchange-value, and accordingly, research

has shown that there is an intrinsic generosity in the self-build mechanism. “[S]elf-build developments characteristically achieve a higher quality of specification and better costin-use. They are more likely to be innovative, not least in sustainability.”12 It has enjoyed in recent years a popular boom, fuelled by media such as ‘Grand Designs’, but this has led to a myth that self-build is a luxury to be enjoyed only by the super-rich, who can remain unperturbed by overruns in budget and timetable. In reality, many self-build homes are confined by construction budget and are far from being flamboyant expressions of individuality: “Almost all self-build projects are limited aesthetically in design, usually along traditional, conservative lines. This is in part a result of planning regulations and in part a result of self-builders and valuers’ concerns about resale values.”13 The lesson here is that the profit function is more pervasive than we would imagine – it does not confine itself to speculative building but rather, augmented perhaps by ‘Sarah Beeny’14 media culture, it creeps into self-build developments. Many self-builders find themselves designing property rather than dwelling, and so begin to prioritise the generalised norms defined by the market over their own design preferences. There are mitigations to this however, in that “self-builders can take a longer-term view of the value of land as, unlike developers, most self-builders are unlikely to consider selling their house until several years after completion”15. So even where there is a profit function, there are still design incentives to consider running costs and use. There is huge scope for companies to emerge playing new roles as intermediaries in self-build and mass-customisation, either as land agents, affordable construction systems or service providers, which may offer a middle-way between property-capitalism and use-value design – particularly in the capacity for each house to be incidentally unique and thus have more ‘character’ (that being a marketable quality).

NOTES 1. Duncan Maclennan. Housing Policies: New Times, New Foundations. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2005) p12 2. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Submission of Evidence for the Callccutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. April 2007 http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/responses/docs/calcutt-housebuilding-delivery.pdf [Accessed July 2008] p6 3. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. Op.Cit. p28 4. Ibid. p28 5. Ibid. p28 6. Ken Bartlett et al. Consumer Choice in Housing: The Beginnings of a House Buyer Revolt. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2002) p32 7. Ibid. p23 8. James Barlow et al. Homes to DIY For: The UK’s self-build housing market in the twenty-first century. (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2001) p04 9. It is worth noting in passing the likelihood that such a system would (like fashion) experience conformist behavior, by which many will choose to wear a ‘voluntary’ uniform (e.g jeans). 10. Ken Bartlett et al. Op.Cit. 11.“The UK is unique in the way in which the supply of new housing is dominated by speculative housebuilding.” James Barlow et al. Op.Cit p44 12. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. p27 13. James Barlow et al. Op.Cit p19 14. Sarah Beeny presented the Channel 4 programme, Property Ladder, which encouraged homeowners to redesign their house before sale in order to maximize its exchange value by aligning it with market interests. 15. James Barlow et al. Op.Cit p25

Essay 6

Expanded Value Systems: Architecture and the Triple Bottom Line “If we can decide upon our priorities we can use our new machines instead of being used by them.” Geoffrey Vickers1

It is inevitable perhaps that we should ask: if spatial capitalism is such a difficult system to reconcile with our environmental wellbeing, why should we accept it? The architecture of capital, overlooking the architecture of use, seems to be forcing us to live in human-scaled commodities; assets made into replicas of dwellings. Yet as members of a society shaped by neo-liberal economic policy, participation in capitalism is a given for us. As designers, it is has been precisely our refusal to engage with the processes and politics of capitalism which has allowed us to be overpowered by it. What is left then is not anti-capitalism but a form of post-capitalism. Not its denouncement but the acute realisation of its limitations.

This allows us to see capitalism not as an ends, but as a means to achieve some other form of value, and to govern it accordingly. For economist Richard Layard, that other form of value is human happiness, beginning his treatise on ‘happiness economics’ with the observation that “in advanced countries happiness has not risen, despite unprecedented rises in income”2. The idea behind this is that we have consistently overestimated the connection between economic prosperity and human wellbeing, which has caused us, Jonathan Porrit argues, to over-prioritise economic value: “For most economists and politicians, the global economy has become the centre of reality, the overarching system within which all else is subsumed. Human societies, communities, ecosystems and habitats are all seen as sub-systems of that overarching system… [This] flies in the face of biological reality. However persuasive and dynamic it may be, the global economy is in the first instance a sub-system of human society, which is in itself a sub-system of the totality of life on earth.”3 In other words, we need to redesign our industrial / economic design complex to better reflect reality.

Post-capitalism might also be interpreted as a search for “enlightened capitalism.”4 At the centre of enlightened capitalism is the argument that capitalism’s exploitation of ecological and social capital for the wealth of an elite is only considered gain when a narrow view is taken, excluding natural and human costs, and taking a short term view

rather than a long term one. The introduction of a long-view alters the profit/benefit relationship, because “Profit maximization over the longer term does not necessarily require (and may be undermined by) profit maximization over the short term.”5 Apart from obvious examples such as forestry, an explicitly building-orientated example would be the consumption of energy. While the desire to increase short-term profit might lead a developer to decrease the environmental energy performance of a dwelling, if that developer were to calculate for a longer term interest, the extra initial capital cost would soon be paid-for by the savings in running costs. So by maintaining a longer term interest in the development (as now happens in the case of some PFI service-providers) the developer would look to increase the capital cost on energy performance. This is where John Elkington’s ‘Triple Bottom Line’ (TBL) theory comes into play. “In the simplest terms, the TBL agenda focuses corporations not just on the economic value they add, but also on the environmental and social value that they add – or destroy.”6 It does this by attempting to calculate and quantify the value of those other forms of natural capital, which otherwise are “often considered free and therefore… without economic value”7

TBL theory has proven a powerful, integrative idea, but it is has struggled to be implemented. It has yet to be demonstrated to be anything more than an accessible conceptual-language by which financial paradigms can structure their thinking on corporate social responsibility. There is as yet no single, agreed method to calculate value of social and ecological capital, as Julie Richardson points out: “Contrary to popular belief, there is no ‘how to do it’ manual for triple bottom line or sustainable accounting.”8 Where the profit function has managed to establish valuation ‘exchange rates’ between (for example) m2 and £, triple bottom line accounting has not been able to create universal exchange rates between social, economic and natural capital.9 Some argue that it should not attempt to: “One cannot say that for example, a human life is worth more than the preservation of a scenic view, or that the lives of wild animals are more valuable than the maintenance of indigenous hunting cultures. The values are incommensurable: like apples and pears they cannot be added or subtracted from one another.”

If the quantification of everything is a property of the profit-centric methodology, then it is precisely that narrow view which should be avoided: “much of the language and many of the tools of sustainability have evolved from our mechanistic worldview. Breaking down the complex economic, social and environmental systems into separate silos to be traded off one against the other may be part of this mind-set.”

Once again, our

approach should be one where we see sustainability as a “whole system property,”

observing the tendency of any given business or market. Of course, many businesses will make contributions towards reputational corporate social responsibility, such as allocating a proportion of their profits towards conservation or humanitarian charities, but the acid test follows a simple rule of thumb: a system can be viewed as sustainable if its growth in financial capital corresponds with a growth in natural and social capital. What if everyone bought it? Would the net effect be a loss, gain or balance in terms of ecology and the social wellbeing of all stakeholders, from labour & local economies to the population of the planet?

In some product life-cycles, this is relatively easy to establish, but “housing is a complex commodity”13. Hardly anyone has a conception (and it is a hazy one) of precisely what value a well-designed environment brings, and therefore what forms of value we should prioritise. It is by no means taken for granted. Rem Koolhaas may have been right when he famously declared that: “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it.”14 Equally, the central principle of Keynesian economics was that housing’s transformative value was not as an outcome but a production process, a means of spending to provide employment for economic stabilisation. The central and critical decision we must make in deciding upon our courses of governance is to decide which is of greater value: a strong national housing market or a strong national housing stock. If Koolhaas is right, then the most important form of social value derived from housing is monetary, and the profit function must become the architect’s central area of design expertise, accepting that the poorest will be excluded from, and possibly exploited by the form of value it generates. The opposite argument is presented by Maclennan:

“It is time to move beyond income and instability assessments of housing to a much more explicit consideration of how housing outcomes can impact productivity and economic growth.”

Our failure to recognise the lack of compatibility between the profit-function and the use-function has been rooted in the failure of architects to justify the extent to which “housing outcomes affect environmental well-being, social justice, good governance and, of course, the economy.”16 In other words, if the UK’s primary economic resource is its citizens, then high-generosity dwelling provision is of greater economic value than high-profit dwelling provision. Beyond a certain point, the profits made through speculative development are what Layard would call “self-defeating”17, in that they diminish the capacity of their end users to contribute effectively to society and the economy by adversely affecting their quality of life.

This is not exclusive to housing. At the centre of all economic markets is something that the market itself cannot fundamentally value, but merely profit from (for example football clubs cannot put a price on the impulse of delight which causes fans to pay to see football matches season after season – they simply sell seats), and it is always possible that the presence of that market may mar or even devalue the very thing it sought to profit from. But the hegemony of profit has become almost an excuse for architects – who have tailored their thinking to exclude its behaviours, and seen it as a set of constraints on design rather than as something to be designed.

NOTES 1. Geoffrey Vickers. Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing Values in an Unstable Society. (Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harmondsworth, 1972) 2. Richard Layard. Happiness: Has Social Science got a Clue? London School of Economics, 3rd March 2003 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/events/lectures/layard/RL030303.pdf [Accessed March 2008] 3. Jonathon Porritt. Locating the Government’s Bottom Line in Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson ed. The Triple Bottom Line: Does it all Add Up? (London:Earthscan, 2004) p65-66 4. Michael Jacobs. The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable development and the Politics of the Future (London: Pluto Press, 1991) p202 quoted in Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson ed. The Triple Bottom Line: Does it all Add Up? (London: Earthscan,2004) p41 5. John Elkingon. Enter the Triple Bottom Line in Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson ed. The Triple Bottom Line: Does it all Add Up? (London: Earthscan,2004) p3 6. United Nations Conference on Trade And Development 2006, quoted in Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson ed. Op.Cit. p18. 7. Julie Richardson Op.Cit. p34 Save perhaps for the 2006 Stern Report for the UK Government. Although it did not establish an incontrovertible cost of ecological capital, it worked on a model which simulates the effect of climate change on the economy as a total cost. 8. Michael Jacobs. The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable development and the Politics of the Future (London: Pluto Press, 1991) p202 quoted in Adrian Henriques & Julie Richardson ed. Op.Cit. p41 9. Julie Richardson. Op.Cit. p43 10. Adrian Henriques. Op.Cit. p26 11. Duncan Maclennan. Op.Cit. p25 12. Rem Koolhaas. From Bauhaus to Koolhaas. Interviewed by Katrina Heron for Wired Magazine, July 1996 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html 13. Duncan Maclennan. Op.Cit. p23 14. Duncan Maclennan. Op.Cit. p25 15. Richard Layard. Op.Cit.

Essay 7

Post-Capitalist Architecture The Authorship of Processes “Why not go on to explore the imminent dynamics of the discipline? Well I think in light of current realities, devoting your time to these kind of intra-architectural fascinations may be a bit silly…there is a degree of urgency to deal with larger issues that makes disciplinary solipsism no longer a free choice but an act of deliberate denial.” Ole Bouman1 “Maybe architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct it can become a way of thinking about anything – a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.” Rem Koolhaas2 Architecture too, is a system: an intellectual sub-culture feeling its way from gentleman’s hobby to profitable design complex. Primarily it is an information system, but one that leaves its traces in the physical environment. What happens in-between is unclear. “[T]he physical outcomes of any dynamic system that we observe actually manifest from a complex network of relationships, information flows and learning feedback loops between its component parts.”3 One of the most exciting things about the architectural discipline is its ability to learn. As this paper has argued, the backdrop against which architecture operates has undergone an epic shift in recent decades – the victory of cultural capitalism – which practice has absorbed, but theory has broadly ignored. It is not surprising perhaps that an increasing number of young architecture graduates are moving ‘up the food chain’ into careers in property development and project management. Knowingly or unknowingly, what they are doing is not leaving design behind, but in fact following it. There, they are engaged in a radical form of design which architects have been trained not to recognise as virtuous because it focuses on shaping financial outcomes. Zogolovitch: “That piece of land for me is a canvas upon which I can then make my work – I’m no different from a sculptor.”4 But the design of profit is not celebrated as success. Ramus: “We have created a false condition in which we value, or overvalue individual creative acts and shun those processes by which we might execute those individual acts… we have to stitch creation and execution back into the authorship of processes, not the authorship of objects.”5 What this implies in his case is the blending of the roles of executive architect, design architect and project manager. This forces the involvement of the architect in costinnovation and financial strategy, to which Ramus attributes the success of recent projects such the Seattle Public Library and Museum Plaza building, Loisville; “We

design collaborations.”6 In fact architecture’s ability to shift from the design of form to the design of formation could go much further than that. Not limited to the design of buildings per se but to other kinds of system, the word ‘architecture’ might take up a meaning closer to that in which it used by software designers: the topology or structure of a system across time. A reconnection with the idea of design as a strategic form of action, to bring about certain outcomes and conditions, as advocated by Alford:

“What I’m really saying is why pay for Accenture or McKinsey’s to come up with ideas when we can come up with ideas, and too often I find that we’re better than project managers, we’re the people who will unlock opportunity. If you come along desperately trying to drop a piece of architecture onto a client then you’re done for – if you’re coming on the basis that you’re interested in making things happen then you can even get paid for making something not happen.”

This shift in attention from formal complexity to system complexity (taking in finance, politics, media patterns, social and ecological resources) has been suggested before, as Alford pointed out, by Cedric Price, but perhaps, because he “was not a commercial man in many ways”8, his ideas have not been associated with the same primal brand of design which is now used in the pursuit of profit. His suggestion that “No one should be interested in the design of bridges, they should be concerned with how to get to the other side”9 represents a profound evolution in architectural thinking (perhaps as important for architecture as was Marcel DuChamp’s 1917 ‘Fountain’ for art10), but one which has been repeatedly overlooked by the architectural discipline. Instead of branding this level of design engagement as something separate from the design of capital, we can recognise Price’s conception of design as being extraordinarily prescient. The surprise is that a ‘post-capitalist’ architecture would involve us not walking away from the cold myopia of finance but drawing it, exploring it and applying our design intelligence to its effects, tailoring the operating system: what Ramus calls “creative financing.”

If architecture is to reassert its social value by operating in this way (at the intersection of all the social systems - economic, cultural, biological, technological, geographical…), then it is going to demand a fundamental rethink in the value-systems of architectural media and education. We need to question the formal bias (student projects as hypothetical ‘Building’ projects where ‘site’ and ‘brief’ are givens, and money does not exist even as a constraint, much less a parameter). Too often, architecture dismisses as ‘unimaginative’ those elements of architecture which Ramus argues are the key areas of expertise in reasserting our usefulness:

“In order to author processes we need to assume liability, and if we are to assume liability we had better be sure that we’re very good at navigating everything from contracts, to fee structures, to complex programmatic analyses before design, to dreaded escalation and cost analysis, all the way through to probably the most important thing; the ability to design procurement strategies.”

In a much broader sense, architecture must work hard to be at the centre of a public debate about value - and how certain well known forms of value (particularly financial) are translated into less tangible forms of value, and vice versa. By ignoring the form of value which has become the central driver of the architect’s working environment, education risks relegating architecture students to frustrated naivety. If the same emphasis and reward were placed on economics, systems thinking, life-cycle planning, cybernetics, computing, power or politics as is currently put on formal originality and detailing, it is extremely likely that architects would become as skilful in the design of social systems as they have become in the design of cultural artefacts. Zogolovitch: “I think it is actually an act of criminality that an architectural profession can exclude the notion of valuing the component you’re building from the education process… I’m not suggesting that all architecture is development, far from it. Development is a particular type of beast and it’s complex, but I would like somebody at least to demonstrate to me that at any time in the history of mankind buildings have never cost any money. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at the pyramids or a church building. All building is the summation of resources that people have put together to make that artefact, and the idea that architects are somehow devoid of that is... it’s just insanity.”12

NOTES 1. Ole Bouman.Volume Magazine Press Conference. March 2007 http://uk.youtube.com/ watch?v=ACuV9K7ErkM [Accessed April 2008] 2. Rem Koolhaas. Content. (Hohenzollering:Taschen, 2004) p20 3. Julie Richardson. Op.Cit. p43 4. Roger Zogolovitch, interviewed by the author, Monday 11th August 2008 5. Joshua Prince-Ramus. The Organization of Labor: Architecture. October 2006 http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yale-building-in-the-future-symposium [Accessed July 2008] 6. REX Architects. http://www.rex-ny.com/approach [Accessed September 2008] 7. Simon Allford, interviewed by the author, Friday 15th August 2008 8. Ibid. 9. Cedric Price The Square Book. (Chichester: Wiley, 2003) p51 10. ‘Fountain’ - an upturned urinal bearing the signature of fictitious artist ‘R.Mutt’ - is one of the most famous legacies of the Dada movement in art. It was one of a series of provocative ‘readymades’ which challenged thinking on what precisely constitutes art and what an artist does. It is widely recognised as marking the genesis of conceptual thinking in art. In 2004 it was voted to be the most influential 20th century work of art by curators, critics and artists. 11. Joshua Prince-Ramus. Op.Cit. 12. Roger Zogolovitch, interviewed by the author, Monday 11th August 2008

Bibliography Barlow, James et al. Homes to DIY For: The UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s self-build housing market in the twenty-first century. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, 2001 Buckminster Fuller, Richard. Your Private Sky. Ed. Joachim Krausse & Claude Lichtenstein. Lars Muller Publishers. Baden, 1999 Bartlett, Ken et al. Consumer Choice in Housing: The Beginnings of a House Buyer Revolt. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, 2002 Davies, Paul & Torsten Schmiedeknecht. An Architects Guide to Fame. Architectural Press. Oxford, 2005 Elkington, John. Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. Captsone. Oxford, 1998 Foxwell, Simon ed. The Professionals Choice, The Future of the Built Environment Professions. CABE Building Futures, London, 2003 Henriques, Adrian & Julie Richardson ed. The Triple Bottom Line: Does it all Add Up? Earthscan. London, 2004. Jameson, Frederick. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso. London, 1991. Karn, Valerie. New Homes in the 1990s: A Study of the Design, Space and Amenities in Housing Association and Private Sector Housing. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, 1994 Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. Allen Lane. London, 2007 Koolhaas, Rem. S,M,L,XL, 2nd ed. Monacelli Press. New York, 1998 Koolhaas, Rem & AMOMA. Content. Taschen. Hohenzollering, 2004 Le Corbusier. Le Modulor. Translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock. Faber & Faber. London, 1954 Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture, 2nd ed. Translated by Frederick Etchells. Architectural Press. London, 1946 Loe, Eric. The Value of Architecture, Context & Current Thinking. RIBA Future Studies. London, 2000 Maclennan, Duncan. Housing Policies: New Times, New Foundations. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, 2005 Mau, Bruce & The Institute Without Boundaries. Massive Change. Phaidon. London,

2004 Price, Cedric. The Square Book. Wiley. Chichester,2003. Toynbee, Polly. Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain. Bloomsbury. London, 2003 Venturi, Robert et al. Learning From Las Vegas 2nd ed. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977 Vickers, Geoffrey. Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing Values in an Unstable Society. Penguin. Harmondsworth, 1972. Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York in Chicago. Princeton Architectural Press. New York, 1995 Worpole, Ken. The Value of Architecture: Design, Economy and the Architectural Imagination. RIBA Future Studies. London, 2000 足足足

Pamphlets & Papers Alexander, Kaye. Authenti_city. University of Sheffield School of Architecture BA(Hons) Dissertation. Sheffield, 2006 CABE. The Value of Good Design: How buildings and spaces create economic value. London, 2002 CABE. The Value of Public Space: How high quality parks and public spaces create economic, social and environmental value. London, 2003 Callcutt, John et al. The Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. Department for Communities & Local Government. London, 2007 Department for Communities & Local Government. Homes for the Future: More Affordable, More Sustainable Government Green Paper on Housing. HMSO. Norwich, 2007 KPMG. Study Investigating Financing for Housebuilders. Office of Fair Trading. London, June 2008. Minton, Anna. The Flat Trap. The Architects Journal (28th February 2008) Zogolovitch, Roger. Rules of Thumb - The Net:Gross Ratio. The Architects Journal (17th April 2008)

Web Brignall, Miles. OFT Launches Investigation into £20bn Housebuilding Industry. The Guardian, 22nd June 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jun/22/housingmarket.consumernews Corporatewatch. UK Construction Industry Overview http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=277 [Accessed August 2008] Euler Hermes. UK Construction Industry Report http://www.eulerhermes.co.uk/en/documents/uk_construction_report_170408.pdf/uk_ construction_report_170408.pdf [Accessed August 2008] Furlong, Ray. Compact and Bijou – The Slums of Tomorrow? BBC News, 12th September 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7612384.stm HM Treasury. PFI: Meeting the Investment Challenge. 2003. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/F/7/PFI 604.pdf [Accessed April 2008] Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Submission of Evidence for the Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery. April 2007 http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/responses/docs/calcutt-housebuilding-delivery.pdf [Accessed July 2008] Koolhaas, Rem. From Bauhaus to Koolhaas. Interviewed by Katrina Heron for Wired Magazine, July 1996 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html [Accessed September 2008] Layard, Richard. Happiness: Has Social Science got a Clue? Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures. London School of Economics, Delivered on 3rd, 4th and 5th March 2003 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/events/lectures/layard/RL030303.pdf [Accessed March 2008] Pogrebin, Robin. I’m the Designer. My client’s the Autocrat. The New York Times, June 22, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/arts/design/22pogr.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2 Prince-Ramus, Joshua. The Organization of Labor: Architecture. Talk given at Yale School of Architecture, October 2006 http://www.rex-ny.com/approach/yale-building-in-the-future-symposium [Accessed July 2008] Soper, Kate. The Other Pleasures of Post-Consumerism. http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/articles/soper.html [Accessed April 2008] Thompson, Max. Interview with John Callcutt. The Architects Journal, 22nd November 2007 http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/Interviews/john_callcutt_author_of_review_ of_housebuilding_delivery.html

Local Authorities RSLs Private Enterprise 100

Profit Land Cost

Percentage

Interest

Overheads

Build Cost

1.1 CLG Research & Statistics. From the Callcutt Review, p10

3.1 Carey Jones Architects. www.careyjones.com [Accessed September 2008]

3.2 Wikimedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_Pennsylvania [September 2008]

3.3 Diagram by Alastair Parvin based on data from KPMG. Study Investigating Financing for Housebuilders. Office of Fair Trading. London, June 2008.

3.4 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.5 Code of Measuring Practice. Adapted by Architects Journal, 17th April 2008.

3.6 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.7 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.8 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.9 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.10 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.11 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

1.1 New Housing Construction by Tenure: England Source: CLG Housing Research & Statistics

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7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4 2.4

2.4 7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

2.4 2.4 7.2 Grid Dimension 7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

2.4 7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

2.4 2.4

2.4

7.2 Grid Dimension 7.2 Grid Dimension

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7.2 Grid Dimension

3.12 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.13 Studio Egret West, 2008 www.e-architect.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.14 Studio Egret West, 2008 www.e-architect.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.15 AHMM. www.e-architect.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.16 Jestico+Whiles, 2008 www.jesticowhiles.com [Accessed October 2008]

3.17 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.18 www.e-architect.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.19 Adapted from the Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

3.20 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.21 The Architects Journal, 28th February 2008

2.4

2.4 7.2 Grid Dimension

2.4

2.4 7.2 Grid Dimension

3.22 http://www.bdonline.co.uk/ 3.23 Alastair Parvin, 2008. story.asp?sectioncode=431&storyc ode=3096795 [Accessed October 2008] 96

2.4

3.24 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.25 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.26 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.27 www.morrishomes.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.28 www.brownesmithbaker.com [Accessed October 2008]

3.29 www.archiseek.co.uk [Accessed October 2008]

3.30 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

3.31 Le Corbusier. Le Modulor. Translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock. Faber & Faber. London, 1954

3.32 Kaye Alexander, 2008

3.33 Alastair Parvin, 2008.

4.1 Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture, 2nd ed. Translated by Frederick Etchells. Architectural Press. London, 1946

4.2 Singapore Airlines http://biztravelguru.com/ blogs/business-travel-news/ archive/2007/09/13/singaporeairlines-release-a380-cabin-configuration-details-and-seat-map-diagram. aspx [Accessed October 2008]

1.0 HTA Architects, 2008

Interview with Roger Zogolovitch Monday 11th August 2008 I saw your ‘rule of thumb’ on Net to Gross in the AJ. Are there other areas like that where the architect can apply quantitative thinking? Yes, I think the architect has a quantitative input in other areas – particularly in the plan form, because I think the plan form is what drives efficiency. It also drives the useful of the space. I think it is quite interesting that architects use their sensitivity to get the most out of something. The plan form is not the architecture itself, but I think if you look at some of the early Victorian buildings or stuff from the 1960’s, people were very efficient about how they managed the spaces. Back then there was always a quantitative problem, but I don’t know whether we – certainly I as an architecture student really think about it like that. I don’t know what you mean by quantitative. It seems to me that – well maybe I’m a different generation – but where you generate the plan – the components – the DNA you start to do so with a sensitivity for what people want in the space that you’re looking for. Once you do that, you have to start looking at the efficiencies you bring to the table. So I think it’s a completely iterative design process. The idea of setting yourself a target in terms of density; dwelling per hectare and density per hectare is almost the wrong way to go about it – it’s not a creative way of going about it. The creative way to go about it is to think – what are the units you’re going to get there and how does

that configure with what the constraints of the site are – how high should it be, what’s the topography, what’s the state of the landscape... so actually, you should be optimising what you get. If you start by saying I want to build to 50 units per hectare or 60 units per hectare you’re approaching the problem from the wrong end. That’s interesting, because a lot of the things I’ve been looking at so far has started with the figures of profit optimisation, where we need this many and this mix on the site – and asking the architect how you then go about it. I think architects have allowed themselves to not engage in that conversation. They have allowed themselves to be trapped into their own sort of containment if you like. They’re not able to say – my conversation with this client is how to optimise the development from a design point of view. I listen to what you say about what the market expectation is, but… Well, look at the building I’ve built in centaur street. The market optimisation was to build a unit of 500 square foot, and I had to say to my agent – that may be your drive, but I believe I want to build a smaller number of units of 1500 square foot. When I was working on my year out, one thing I could never get to grips with was having loads of 1 and 2 bed apartments. What are the drivers that mean we always have, for example, 1 and 2 bed apartments? Well, the 1 and 2 bedroom apartments were driven by a by-to-let market which is now, correctly, collapsed. It was driven by a misunderstanding in the industry… to say that what the housing market has been undergoing over the last 10 years is house place inflation. Nothing else, just

straight forward inflation, and the danger with inflation is that if you started at the beginning and you capitalise at the end then you’ve done very well and you’ve got a capital gain. But if you’re trying to join at the later stages of inflation – if you say to yourself what are the driving factors that enable you to buy a home, then it’s your ability to service a mortgage. So your ability to service a mortgage of £100,000 is different from your ability to service a mortagage of £300,000, and if you have inflation In the retail price index, where the economy is inflated by, say, two and half percent per annum, over ten years that’s compounded so let’s call that 25%. But at the same time you’ve got 200% or 300% capital gain then your ability to service that loan is completely out of line. So you see what’s happening now as a correction. It’s a correction for a process of inflation and the failure of the government bodies to declare it as inflation is to do with an accounting methodology not the fact that it’s not inflation. That’s interesting. The central, sort of, issue that’s coming across is this thing John Calcutt says in his review, which is that there is no business advantage in providing quality. The profit margin increases the more you can squeeze out costs on space, 106 agreements, environmental performance and so forth. You have three businesses…clearly you disagree with that? Well what’s happened is that there has been historic inflation in housing. Therefore the public authorities have felt that they want to tax that inflation, so they’ve been looking for mechanisms by which they can tax what they consider to be an overriding

gain. So they’ve treated section 106 as a taxation, they’ve treated affordable housing as a taxation, they’ve treated requirements for upgrades of sustainability to provide payments for low carbon homes. I’m not questioning those as objectives but if you look at the economic model, my version of the economic model is that if you’re trying to optimise quality you have to give choice. To give choice you need to have more product rather than less product. Which is a fundamental problem because we have a market with limited supply… Exactly. As soon as you have shortages… so what I’m saying is that we have an artificially constrained shortage. Housing in this country is not a predict and supply model. A predict and supply model says ok, the population is growing so we’re going to need 3 million new houses or whatever it is, this is an old-fashioned iron curtain, communist model of an economy within a consumerist environment. If you’re wealthy you might want to have a house in Spain, you might want to have a house in Italy, you might want to buy a house in the university town that your child goes to. You might need to extend your own house because your parents are coming to stay… It’s a choice. All these are choices. So what we don’t have, what we need to do is find a mechanism where the supply is expanded – if the supply is expanded then the market will ensure that now I’m in competition – you now have a choice. You walk into an estate agent and they won’t be saying – there’s a shortage so unless you make up your mind today that house or flat is going to go. So you have a choice. I offer you a building which may be bigger – you can say – I like that one, I do want one that looks like a reproduction whatever it is or I don’t. I have a choice. Our ludicrous situation is that the planning

constraints are such, and the additional constraints are such that you’re completely destroying the supply side. If you look at Switzerland for example, there’s been zero house price inflation and yet they have the best housing you could find anywhere. Do you think, though, realistically that we are going to see such a radical shift in planning policy to make enough land available for the housing market to meet demand and therefore have... competitive choice. It’ll have to. The _______ politics are really quite good. But the planning policy is a Canute – by which I mean King Canute policy – the political public are standing on the sidelines saying we are not going build any more houses. If you are you’re going to have to pay this, you’re going have to pay that, it’s going to be constrained, it’s going to have to be this height… Ultimately that isn’t going to work. What you’re hinting at there is that what we have at the moment as a result of this situation we have that… It’s driving inflation. By driving inflation it ensures that you get less accommodation, accommodation which is worse made, and the reality of it is, is that because of the shortage of land and the difficulty of planning constraints, in terms of GDV - Do you understand the term GDV? No. GDV is gross development value. Here is a site we get consent for 20 units, there are 6 2-bedrooms, 6 1-bedrooms etc – Your local estate agent will value that, add it all up and at the end you have the total which is GDV. That’s the capital land value?

That’s the value of the finished development. In a development equation, your profit is the margin between your gross development cost and your gross development value and that’s treated as a percentage. But what you’re now seeing is the scarcity of land, as a rule of thumb, is driving up the value of the land as a percentage. If land was 20% of your GDV you have a very different equation when it gets to 40 or 50 per cent of your GDV. So you’ve got the cost of the land, you’ve got the cost of a whole lot of section 106, affordable housing, sustainability, lifetime home criteria adding another 8 or 10% of your GDV, what you’re doing is – your profit is going to remain the same – so you’re squeezing down all those things which generate a better quality product. We have quite an adversarial construction process for a lot of projects, and you’re quite interesting because you seem to have your feet on both sides of that divide. In my experience developers and architects tend to have quite a tense relationship – architects want to design something that doesn’t make business sense, and then the planners want something else again. You seem to sit over that line and then you’re a consultant to planners as well – is that quite weird for you? Do you have an internal conflict? Not in the slightest. To my mind, development is the most creative process. In other words I went from being an architect to becoming a developer; and the reason I did that was because I thought development was the mechanism by which I could actually control more of the story about what’s happening. I don’t see any difference between what I did as an architect and what I do as a developer. OK the difference is that I’m not working for

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x number of clients, I’m working under my own ends, on a piece of land. That piece of land for me is a canvas upon which I can then make my work – I’m no different from a sculptor. What upsets me, or makes me cross, is that in any other walk of life if you are seen to be by your peer group to be providing better quality you get rewarded with better opportunities, awards, media support and so on – in the development world the developer is completely untrusted. Fundamentally there is no level of trust. In other words the developer is some fat cat, greedy bastard who’s just interested in money.

trust, let’s say Marks and Spencers or Waitrose or Sainsbury’s or motor car brands – BMW. Those brands – and there’s a lot of text on the subject – those brands make sure they invest in you, the consumer, to make sure that you feel satisfied and completely comfortable with the brand that you’re buying. I would put if forward as a challenge- I’m sure that …maybe one or two..but a very small percentage of people who have bought a Mercedes car or any other car for that matter actually says to the car dealer I want to see the test results of the brake system demonstrated to my satisfaction. You take it as trust.

There’s a lot of judgementalism from designers.

It’s a merc.

Absolutely. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a designers, whether it’s a planning authority, whether it’s a resident: You are the developer. You are the devil. This is something I’m very interested in, that maybe designing the finance mechanism is just another form of design – but it’s one step further up the food chain. The ‘quality’ argument sometimes seems quite solipsistic because architects moan about quality without really engaging with the mechanism intellectually. Absolutely. I did a lecture and I’m actually doing it again, weirdly. And it’s on the theme of brand. I’m very engaged with this process of how develop trust with the wider public. Because I’m completely sympathetic with people’s fear of development. I’m not stupid, I understand their fear of development and that fear is based, quite reasonably on the experience of development as a hostile thing and an ugly blemish. I’m fascinated by the relationship with brands. If you forget buildings and look at the brands that you

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It’s a merc. These guys know what they’re doing. What’s interesting about that is that it puts responsibility on the brandholder to ensure that they don’t upset their consumer. They don’t do something that’s stupid. So I think there’s something really interesting in that there really aren’t any brands in housing – ok maybe Urban Splash a bit, maybe Harry Hausman with manhattan lofts, but not to the extend that we see in other industries. I spoke to John Worthington and he actually said something similar, that there’s definitely a big space for developers to have a ‘unique selling point’ almost to their brand. Yes. Then I think that becomes something which works not just from the point of view of the public but also something which the authorities can then recognise – that the brand that’s being pursued is one that they want to see. I think probably the closest to that kind of thinking we’ve seen is Poundbury. Whatever anyone may say about it – the reality is that as an analogy it’s very close, it has the prince of wales

behind it, it is a place which is unfortunate in terms of its sensibility…

we lay down all kinds of wrongheaded thinking.

But they’re buying into a belief system.

One of my interests is in MassCustomisation. The fact that architecture and development haven’t really bitten into mass-customisation yet.

But they’re buying into a belief system – people are exporting it, as it’s developing in Dorchester it’s also developing in Essex and other areas, and it goes along with the Duchy Originals etc. Actually in a way it’s a fairly strong brand, and you can imagine that a planning officer would be able to say ‘I want one of those.’ But a cynic would say, and I’d almost put myself on this line, that at the moment a lot of the branding work which the industry does collectively is very much about instead of, say, making our product larger, let’s put a lot of lifestyle associations out there and make people want what we’ve got. That’s no branding. That’s a kind of product….If you look at a lot of marketing material and brochures they’re not branding they’re just peddling a lie. They’re just saying, somehow the implication is that if you live in this terrible apartment block of buy-to-let accommodation your life is going to be good. That to me is cynical marketing. It doesn’t have the depth of real branding, and to me the Poundbury thing is not like that. It is actually at a high level of intellectual positioning. Personally I just wish it didn’t have to masquerade under these clothes of, a sort of, previous period because it’s unnecessary. I think it would just be much smarter and better if we could housing that was of our own time, not of a past one. That’s really where my mind is…what I spend a lot of my time doing. Trying to see a kind of typology, if you look at the Georgians and Victorians – we did have typologies. There’s nothing wrong with having typologies but I think

What do you mean by that? Well a number of developers have begun to arrange that if you buy in before something’s constructed you can have some influence over the layout, but the idea that you might have a housing typology which uses an evolving component system, which isn’t a kit but provides the ability to… I’d agree with that. I think I’d put it a different way, it’s a form of cataloguing. But I think IKEA as a brand is very interesting because it’s the only brand that I know where the catalogue actually does identify and give authorship to every single designer of every element which they have in that catalogue which I think is an astonishing thing and very, very important. There are IKEA homes now – there’s one somewhere out by Gateshead – that’s why we in Solidspace are looking at what we call our ‘raw’ look. The principle behind the raw thing is actually that the long term elements that you need to build in the city are actually the frame and envelope, and internally it has the flexibility to be able to use the spaces in different ways. So we set up a kind of theatre inside the house which allows you to live within it. Like the (Frank Duffy) high-speed, lowspeed change model? Yes. Long life, loose fit. That somehow – I believe in self-build as a model because I think that somehow what you need as an owner is a house you can have a sort of

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sweat-equity in.

economics at architecture school?

Mass Cutomisation is, in a way, commercial development and self-build sort of meeting in the middle. Yes.

Well I cannot.. I’ve spoken to the RIBA about it many times. I think it is actually an act of criminality that an architectural profession can exclude the notion of valuing the component of what you’re building from the education process. Basically it’s like telling people to go out into the world with only… I’m not suggesting that all architecture is development, far from it. Development is a particular type of beast and it’s complex, but I would like somebody at least to demonstrate to me that at any time in the history of mankind what buildings have never cost any money. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at the pyramids, or at church building, all building is the summation of resources that people have put together to make that artefact and the idea that architects that architects are somehow devoid of that is…

I’m also, of course, thinking about Nonprofit. Do you think it would be possible to build mass-scale on a no-profit or lowprofit model? That is an organisation that is owned as a charity, a public body or an NGO, and you don’t have that 20% profit, or whatever it is going to the owners. The reality of the development margins are that they are the gap to take on the risk. I don’t think it’s taking you to a place you need to go. I think in a civilised society there is a need for affordable housing, just as there are needs for lots of other services, and that needs to be dealt with appropriately. I don’t care how it’s dealt with whether it’s by taxation or capital gain what I’d say at the moment is that you’re taxing a very small part and you’re actually trying to tax the manufacturer. But the issue is that according to market principles, you shouldn’t need affordable housing to be attached to development, because development itself should be able to incorporate the full range of the market.

It’s an incredibly... moribund mindset isn’t it. ..it’s just insanity. Also if you look for example at Germany – German architects learn quantity surveying. An excel spreadsheet isn’t difficult or unfriendly. I think we might need to be able to think about that as a medium for creative design as well.

That’s correct. But at the moment we have a situation where the developer doesn’t want to. Yes, because if you constrain supply you artificially put up the value which is my argument about inflation.

So do you think architects should be taught

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Yes, it is. It’s like a sketchbook. … I think it’s not going to go away, it’s a sort of obsession for me. I don’t think it gets a lot of attention from the architectural press, it tends to give a lot of attention to one-off houses. But I think there are some, kind of, fundamental adventures in how you make new typologies, that’s what I’m hard at work doing.

Interview with Simon Allford Friday 15th August 2008 / AHMM What I’m interested in is profit, as a mechanism through which architecture is delivered, and certainly the majority of architectural production takes place through profitable means. Architects don’t really talk about it or include it within the architectural discourse but at the same time it does have some kind of recognisable impact upon the design process and the designed product. What I’m trying to find out is what that impact is… I can tell you my theory on profit – will that help? It’s something you have to look at in the round. We don’t have fixed fees anymore, we used to have fixed fees until twenty years ago; Thatcher got rid of them. She regarded it as a cartel. So we had a thing called recommended fees. We might get a job on 5%, o 7% and other people could go in at 2% and they could win the job by cutting their profits or cutting their costs – or, I don’t know, taking loads of risks or whatever. So the big thing you need to understand is that up until 20 years ago there was thing called fixed fee. The other big thing is that since architecture has become a large scale business as opposed to a gentleman’s hobby – that’s post war… up until that time 20 or 25 years ago when they broke it up, 80% of the profession was employed in local government practice, so again profit was not necessarily – no doubt each department had to report on it’s costs – but was not necessarily a … thing, and anyway they were working under a fixed fee regime. Which was obviously probably better because under a fixed fee regime all architects were offering the same concept

of service and therefore the same overall service and there was no benefit in someone undercutting someone else. And therefore you didn’t compromise professional action. That’s the theory anyway. Of course the reality is that some did anyway through other means, and so… that’s a big change. The idea of private practice produced the majority of work, it’s a bit like the privatisation of gas – it’s the same kind of thing. Fundamentally therefore architecture has become a bigger profession, there are more people working in it, as you know as a student people are building up debts and all these things are shifting. We’re probably 20 years different.. behind.. or ahead of America where profit is a much more culturally embedded part of their psyche. The reality is therefore, in my opinion that if you’re running a business and you’re paying rent and you’re paying salaries and you don’t have an attitude to profit that fundamentally underpins what you do, you’re either paying rubbish salaries in which case - you come out with college with a debt, then you can’t pay your debt off, then you say architecture isn’t what I thought it should be. Then you’re told it’s never like that it’s always been about sacrificing yourself for the good of your art all of which is great, and in a way we lapse behind artists who claim to be manipulative, successful, PR savvy figures who charge vast hyped fortunes. It’s interesting to approach if from this angle, because what I’ve been looking at is profit beginning from the developer’s perspective and the link there being this ability to, once deregulated, undercut each other and so forth – so I’m interested therefore in the relationship with developers as they’re trying to maximise profit at the same time. Well, keeping just a strict theory of

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practice, the more money you make the better you can pay people, the more you can research, the more you can make decisions, the more you can be in control, the more you can then decide that our office projects will cross with healthcare projects and school projects. Not because we’re wonderfully socially minded people but because we think that actually greater spread makes our life more interesting and probably makes us more successful across the board anyway. Sometimes we might be socially minded but it’s not really about that – on a hard level if you think about commerce; lot’s of different vectors will make different profits. So you might target 50% on commercial architecture and still do a fantastic job and you might charge 5% on healthcare architecture – and our aim- our theory of profit is to try and make all jobs make at very least a minor profit because otherwise if the economy goes pear-shaped as it has done, then we can’t do anything. Office’s aren’t there to subside the schools. The whole range is what makes life interesting and that’s why we do it. But the reality is that as the offers fall away our profit levels will probably drop because we’ve probably set the budget (to make money out of it.)? That’s the hard business fact of it. There’s another interesting idea about decision making and profit, and I don’t believe that good decisions made fast and driven well necessarily compromise your architectural integrity, so what we’re trying to do is charge people more and more, and make more money from it doing better architecture. And using profit as our decision to invest money back into a project if there is a …… . We’ll never pull people off the job because we know it’s better do complete the job well and win awards. And that’s just your practice’s way of

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moving up the market isn’t it? Yes, exactly. I could give you a number about what a wonderful group of people we are but I don’t believe that to be the case. It’s much more about the fact that we enjoy making buildings for people, we enjoy working in different sectors and we also enjoy are commercial office developers and they won’t do housing and if they do housing they have to do social housing, and a doctors surgery etc. We deal with all those areas. Also, specialisation is a very boring place to be – we specialise in being architects. That’s all relevant. Now the interesting point you said about is fee scales. Our view, and a view I’m very resolute on is that anyone who chooses on fee scales is a fool, so if you’re going to choose someone who’s 4% when we’re 5% which is 1% of the construction cost different, OK so there’s plenty of difference in our fees – it’s nothing compared to the risk cost overruns, design value, all those things. So really it’s kind of a crazy thing to go with cheapest bidder as the best. When you’re a young practice it might be a way to get in there, so if you were starting up it might be a way of being cheaper so people will go to you and then you can move on. But the reality is that people are happy to pay more, they have no problem, they can’t always assess what is the value of good design. But most of the cost you’ll incur as an architect is not on the fee scale but certainly the perception of architects is that they’re trying to push up the build cost. Yeah, well they’re trying to make a better building which inevitably pushes up the build cost, but the point is that a good architect will be able to argue why they’re making it a better building and where

they’re making it a better building. So if I get a client saying, there’s a £100,000 saving there- I wouldn’t take it because we’ll get a screwed up building and history proves… Take an office building. Say an office building has a £5 million a year rent roll, in their equation they’ll leave a two year void from completion to first rent – at risk. If you design a building that gets occupied over the first two years, that’s pure profit for them which is written out from their equation, and our fee for that job might be 3 million quid and the extra cost that you incur might be 2 or 3 million quid. Yes, so a good building pays for itself quite quickly. Yes, this year there’s been lots of work done – it’s very difficult to prove. But there’s research that’s been done in medical centres that shows that people get better, happier and get out of them quicker in nicer hospitals and it’s much better than making a cheaper building. Yes, there’s some research done by Bryan Lawson. Yes. It’s the same with architecture schools.. I am into that, but at the same time I remain slightly sceptical about this ‘quality’ argument because architects tend to be fixed on the notion of trying to make buildings more expensive. Well, because we could build cheaper buildings. But your job as an architect is not to spend more money it’s knowing where to spend the money. So the standard office building £2300m2 but our one is £1800m2 because we took a view that we would omit a set of materials – we would omit ceilings

and plasterboard finishes and leave a raw concrete structure – that in itself is more environmentally intelligent and actually speaks about architecture, so I wouldn’t… if you’re cynical you’re in a fairly hopeless position for the future. Architecture does not change people’s lives, it does not turn an unhappy schoolchild into a happy schoolchild but it does actually enhance or improve conditions and lift their spirits in some way and that is worth a lot of money. You cannot demonstrate that easily through facts and figures.. you can tag onto some research but the ultimate research is that if the housing you’re doing is social or mixture of private and social – if on the day it opens there are people queuing around the block to live there and when they live there they don’t leave that inevitably has got that fact (?). Anyone who’s building more than one building at a time, it doesn’t take them that long to realise that. If you want to work with people who don’t realise that you’ll never be able to prove anything. The people who want to build the cheapest rubbish which you can do in the housebuilding sector on the one-off houses, not the one-off but the… Because there is such a shortage it doesn’t really matter. You can sell bad Trabants on the back of the fact that in East Germany that’s all that’s available – and that’s what our housing market is like – so- you know. It’s very difficult in that market to say – we’ll build better houses because actually it doesn’t really matter because of the scarcity value, but I think fundamentally it’s absolutely correct. It doesn’t mean you spend five.. our approach says ‘I can’t be bothered with shadow-gap detailing I wouldn’t spend that £200,000 there’, but when I say to them I demand that our flats all have 6 sq metre balconies – I’ll make cheaper kitchens to pay for them because people upgrade their kitchens, there’s an intelligence there.

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Cost and programme. So designers are inherently having to design with money as much as designing with other kinds of spatial factors. Money is absolutely fundamental. The idea that Getty and Richard Meier- I’m not a fan of Richard Meier at all but his worse work is where he has the most money and least constraint. I’ve just come from lunch with someone, Francis Goulding who advises on townscape. We go to battle with Westminster over putting in some housing in the middle of soho – retail, college, lowcost housing, penthouses, there’s a landuse issue, there’s a bulk and massing issue. We develop an architectural idea about how we hide bulk and mass, how we hide the garden on the roof, what a wonderful place it will be, how environmentally intelligent, but ultimately we need that kind of mass to pay for the whole project - full stop. We need to do a land-use design to explain to them that the land-use …….. otherwise nothing will get built on that site. So architectural design, to me, fundamentally, to me: everything. It’s not designing a building, if you go around waiting to design building – our client’s don’t give us briefs they give us site opportunities. ‘We could look at a commercial scheme, we could look at a housing scheme, we could look at offices and houses here, we could do this. The most prominent scheme we’re doing at the moment is for … We’re looking at an office scheme, and two housing sites and a theatre – it’s a four site strategy, all part of the crossrail devopment. We spent the first year designing ways of thinking about four-site strategies before we knew at all about architecture, in any way shape, or form. Simply designing an urban, and organisational, and technical, and planning and financial strategy.

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Cost and programme and the manipulation of uses and a strategy for getting it through planning and protecting the entire profit – all those things, that’s still design. So have you developed any kind of… mechanisms if you like… to enable you think like that. Do you sit down with a QS at an early stage… Er..QS’s have views often on the cost and the value but in a sense the approach we have is to say it’s design and we have ideas and we don’t get stuck into what people would traditionally call architecture too early on. So we’re not always giving people visions of what could happen but to be saying, these are ways I’m thinking we could organise sets of uses in central London to allow better things to happen – to release public space. In that particular project we had to go to Westminster 5 times, we had to show them the building as it’s likely to be, they said too big, then they said, probably OK but maybe a floor too big, then we went back and said if you give us another floor which makes it 2 floors too big we can give you a public space you haven’t got. To pay for the cost of devopment. Exactly. So how to do you persuade people that you as an architect can think like that, because the common perception is that architect is a Gehry-style artiste. I personally talk about strategy and tactics. All of what I’m saying to you is absolutely relevant even if you’re making a rubbish building at the end of it. My point is that the idea that life is too complicated, I

think is a fantasy of architectural folklore and architectural education that we are some kind of lonely Howard Roarke figures. Take someone like Cedric Price who was not a commercial man in many ways, but his position was always that architecture should be there to enhance people’s opportunity for quality of life and that might not involve architecture. So what I’m really saying is why pay for Accenture or McKinsey’s to come up with ideas when we can come up with ideas, and too often I find that we’re better than project managers, we’re the people who will unlock opportunity. If you come along desperately trying to drop a piece of architecture onto a client then you’re done for – if you coming on the basis that you’re interested in making things happen then you can even get paid for making something not happen. Yes. Price is really one my heroes – but the thing about him was that he never managed fully to convince people about that whole getting a divorce thing. Finding the value in the architect’s ability to be able to say when you shouldn’t build. He was a friend of mine, and really a maverick figure so the point is he was never really interested in anything more than ideas. He didn’t want to build. That thinking…I’d say if he’s your hero you’re already on the right track! But that thinking... it’s not about being a pompous – I mean he was a socialist, I regard myself as a rightwing anarchist. You don’t have to offer this sort of ‘I’ve done social housing’ because I’m doing it for the good of society, I do social housing to make money out of it. If we’re losing money I won’t destroy the project. I do things because I like making buildings. I won’t make buildings against all odds, inappropriately. But we should think of ourselves not as people who solve

problems but find what the real problems are, then we perhaps… that’s a skill we learnt by design, then perhaps we use our particular, personal stylistic, artistic prejudices to show our best way of making that become three dimensional. That’s what we do, and I think that’s probably what we’ve always done, and the idea that somehow we once were gentlemen going on the grand tour - even when we designed country houses I’ve no doubt there were issues of budget and organisation and labour. In fact, the more we’ve let go of those things the more we have to prove that our skills are valuable as general problem solvers. It’s a bit like working with artists. I often joke that the more we work with artists the more I find we’re describing what the artist does and they come along and do it – we joke now we do AHMM art because [they need the colours – they don’t need the colours?] So when I work with artists I’ll give them a canvas to work upon within the building – the canvas might be the façade, but whenever we try to do it like we’re all just thinkers working together, I find it just doesn’t work. They regard change and compromise as being destructive to the idea of artistic vision, whereas we regard change and compromise as parameter shifts. Allowing or demanding new responses. Not kind of ‘the client has made a compromise’, more that we’ve found a new way to construct this model we’ve had to drive down the cost and increase the value and it’s a bit like – if space planning is a bastard process, it probably is, but funnily enough it probably helps us make better architecture than in America where it’s a very simple process of making an extrusion and filling it up because there all that happens is that developers decide on the cores and all architects do is decorate boxes. Whereas our system, for all its

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horrors, actually means smart people can keep rethinking and responding and making something better through each iteration, not compromise. That’s what’s potentially good about architecture in my opinion. That’s why profit and all those ideas, of course they should be addressed because if you’re 26 and you come out of college and we said to you that you’re on 13,000 a year for the next ten years and by the way there’s a recession and you don’t get holidays and so forth, but my crappy , third rate legal friend is….you know.. it’s not very good. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, you need to make profit, the more you make the more you can pay people, the more they can enjoy life, the more you can have money to invest, the more powerful you can make yourself. Of course, when you’re starting out, you have ten years of that – you can’t – you’re doing things cheaply – but hopefully you’re building a reputation along the way.

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Interview with David West Tueday 12th August 2008 Studio Egret West The way we approach projects is always from an ‘architecture to make life better’ approach, so our starting point is almost taking a brief and trying to find the best way to make that brief sit on the site. Clearly there is always a variety of options from which we choose but what we try to do is try to do a lot of that optioning internally, in the studio. We gather our thoughts together and then present that back to the client, almost as the preferred option. We find that a more formulaic approach would be to go to the client with all the options and say ‘which one do you like?’ – which we think is the wrong way to do it because the client will always choose the one which is the simplest and the easiest with the clearest profit on the top. Wheras what we prefer to do is draw a few – we always draw the obvious scheme, we draw the (persons?), we draw the kind of ‘could be anyone elses’ scheme, we draw the commercial scheme, we draw the crazy scheme, then we land on the scheme which we think is entirely appropriate to the site which is usually a hybrid of all those things with one, two or three binding concepts. Then, to be honest we just go and sell it. Literally we then go and say, to be honest we think the best thing is this – we could have done this, we know about that but actually this would be special. So what you’re doing is actually turning your preferred design solution into a brand.

Oh absolutely! I was just going to say the one thing we always have, always, every single project which is well beyond the brief of an architect really – though I think realistically it is the brief of an architect – is to offer the brand as a project. I’d far rather be brand manager than someone else gets employed to give it a silly name. Almost all of our projects have wonderful names, and almost all our projects have the name absolutely associated with the architectural output. And the architectural output is always associated with a lifestyle and a particular set of principles and a particular set of values which we want to share with our clients so our clients can then share it with the planners so the planners can then share it with the councillors so then we have to keep in mind that our main goal is to develop it as a piece of architecture that makes life better. So our starting point is about trying to make life better and our end point is that too, and everything else in between is about to gather together as many cores themes, and hold onto as many core themes and prove as many core themes as possible. It respect to profit – I’ve never had a client who didn’t want to make 25% profit, that’s just how it is, and so we take it as read that some things are going to be too expensive, and our job is that if we are going to suggest something expensive then we are going to have to compensate for it somewhere else. An interesting example would be our Nottingham science park project which is the first one we’ve got built. The classic science park is a box next to a car park. So (drawing) a box and then some external car parking with a row of trees in it. Then another box with some more car park. In this project we had £100 a square metre– super cheap building and we suggested – this was the big movethat we tuck the car parking underneath in line with the building so we hid all the

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car parking and then obviously lift up this unusual landscape which folds all the way around it. The negative thing for the client was that they would have to spend more money because they would have to dig down .5 of a metre and then obviously lift up this really unusual landscape which folds around it, the positive part was that we could double the density of the site, because they could suddenly do 4 of those rather than 2 of those. So you’re working to the volumetric constraints or even showing that you can, by design, exceed them. And I think we can see that kind of process, maybe because part of the belief in our pitch that we can make life better is that as part of sustainability I guess is that we can maximise the use of a site, if we can, if it’s appropriate then we will seek to optimise the amount of accommodation we can achieve. Not from a desire to maximise the number of units or the amount of floor space, our approach is to find a way of achieving I guess the most of the site to pay for the most..... For example at Clapham our project will deliver over 120 apartments but in return for that we’re actually delivering a new NHS walkin centre, a GP-unit and family health clinic and most importantly an all-singing, alldancing spiral library. As part of a Section 106 agreement. Yes. For free. On the other site in Clapham we’re delivering a brand new swimming hall and sports hall and a community art centre – we’ve got this incredible package of all these free things and that’s incredibly associated with profit, and you could only do that in Clapham because Clapham is a really desirable, hot place to live for 20’s to 40’s and they all have a nice income

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and they want to spend over half a million pounds on apartments. We are totally attuned to that – in terms of what it means for the budget for the library space and those community spaces. I’d far rather be pursuing that and intensifying than not having a library. Essentially your design into the quality if you like, that you use the profit generated by the residential planning system development to pay for social wealth. Yeah – there’s another project in south London, which I can’t title, where we will literally be building an entire network of community sports infrastructure on a huge scale in part of London which has absolutely nothing. For me I’d far rather be building at high density – like a sort of Barbican number 2 – and an amazing set of principles and ideals - I’ll come back to those in a minutea set of principles and ideals that allow us to completely shift that piece of London to a completely different geographic status, to a completely different kind of mental wellbeing. If we did everything less dense we’d just end up with car parking on two levels and boarded-up signs saying ‘shop for let’, because nobody can take the shop because there isn’t a… Yes, economic density. …sufficient economic density. So in a sense I’d rather shift it to this almost crazy level which is going to be amazingly difficult to take through the planning process to release the potential of what we’re doing. So what you’re doing is really riding on the back of the social manifesto for urban intensification. I think so. Part of our social manifesto – for all of our projects. When we were

first starting two or three years ago we did competitions, east Manchester – for 3000 homes I think which was alongside Manchester millennium village- which we did at Alsop’s. The big project in east Manchester. It was all about the concept of families and, you know, the slow realisation – it’s amazing how it’s really hitting the market now four years later in a recession – the massive need to build grow-on homes for people who didn’t want to live in a one or two bedroom box anymore. So the entire project was about designing for families, designing for growth, designing for changing, designing for adaptive typologies. We came up with this whole list of, I think, really lovely typologies which recalled traditions. So we re-engaged with the muse, we reengaged with the maisonette- the triple maisonette rather. So just like that we doubled the density, everybody had a front door. Mansion houses, town houses. Every single typology was about ten principles which were about dwelling and about family. Everything people had been neglecting… maybe because of profit. Possibly because of profit because I think sometimes profit in the wrong hands blinds cleverness, blinds thinking about possibilities. Particularly at the start of the project. How? Well at the start of the project you have endless possibility, in the middle of the project you have less possibility. What I’m interested in, because I can’t remember this ever happening, is this idea of using the strength of the concept to drive through the idea… Well, it adds value. I do think architecture has value, I mean real added value. You worked for Rogers and they’re quite

notorious for adding value in terms of.. strangely enough not always through design but through the brand of Rogers. Yes, but it’s simply importing cultural content- so it’s cultural currency. Exactly, but on a more prosaic level a developer forgets to add the bicycle rack, forgets to add the basic ……., forgets to add storage. But after you’ve had this – how do you cope with the developer coming back with a QS and saying, yes, but let’s make this into something more normative? Well, what happens is before we go with the project at concept stage we create a set of principles, so we abide by a set of principles, whatever the project, whether it’s a library project, a culture house project, a design park project. But particularly principles on the housing. So we don’t ever do single aspect housing… Ah really? So a bit like your idea of the New London Standard, you set your own slightly higher standards? To be honest we’ve just been very clear on that with every person who’s phoned us up or had us in to interview – we just won’t do it. We won’t do that. So when a developer comes and says.. . I want you to make your flat sizes smaller?... Well, interestingly flat sizes is…we are doing smaller homes than we’d like to on a few projects but we always make sure we’re making up for it with something else. So let’s say you have a set of ten principles you might manage only 8 of them. So let’s say, having your own front door, having

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adequate storage, that’s a fundamental one, having clever storage. We came up with this thing about building additional space by having a loft then hiding it, so then someone bought a loft then realised they could go upstairs and go “woah – we’ve got another room.” So we’re talking about having a 5m space instead of a 3m space then building up into it. I think if we are stuck by 45m2 one bed, 65m2 two bed, 70-80m2 three bed, in that case we have to have adaptive systems, flexible wall units, we have to be able to tuck beds beneath floors so we have absolute flexibility. So maybe principle number seven comes before ………….. And we’ve found we’ve been able to live fairly honestly. So you must have to be quite tough…I suppose it depends on the developer? Well, we have had to walk away from projects. We only work with developers who have a fantastic ambition of the quality we want to build like urban splash and park hill – Park Hill’s a very unusual thing because you’ve got Parker Morris homes from day one which is great – without any architecture they’re already great. So our job is to give it a new life and make it greater. With other projects with them it’s always good. They always want the ambition to do the next thing, whether it’s allotments, amazing kinds of gardens, amazing spas, amazing additional things. I think maybe because of our relationship with them and because of our profile that all the developers who have come to us since have come to us wanting something a little bit extra. And what we say to them is that if you want that little bit extra you have to buy into this whole set of ideas. But the extra added value you’re asking the developer to buy into is not just cultural brand, it’s something actually more

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tectonic about what you’re designing. I don’t think our brand as Studio Egret West is particularly sellable like Gehry or Zaha.. Maybe give it ten years… Maybe ten years! But at the moment you’re buying into attitudes, a thoughtfulness, a creativity to find a solution which can be at high density, can be mixed use – no problem – any kind of use. We take on that there has to be profit and we find a way to be malleable to that as long as what we set up at the outset isn’t compromised. If it’s compromised we will walk away, we will say, guys we can’t do this. But we’re not arrogant enough to say one design rules. What’s intriguing is there is this beautiful project, the Sidcup project which is a super brave bit of development – seriously south London, met all of our standards. Really unusual, really special, would have been a very special piece of design. Everyone had double height spaces, it broke all the rules but it was actually profitable. What was interesting was that it didn’t get planning. I was going to say it looks like the sort of thing that would meet with quite a lot of resistance. It was absolutely thrashed, we got completely crushed at the planning – it was absolutely kicked into touch because it didn’t match this bit of red brick nasty thing here- this 1920’s 30’s post-war building. Because it didn’t match. So what we’ve done now is a much calmer scheme, completely different that’s been recommended for planning – completely different mindset. For me that is driven by profit – the second approach is always harder – the amount of money has already been spent, you’ve got the same risk. In

fact it’s even higher because you’ve got a weird relationship there. It’s going to be lower density, it’s going to be more challenging. Much constrained. Even then we’ve managed to uphold the majority of our principles, it’s a completely different piece – aesthetically much more gentle. I don’t think I’ve got an image.

That’s incredibly risky.

I remember seeing that image on your website and thinking you’d come up with a new post-commercial typology almost. It looks like a commercial development but it’s got the whole world in there.. hybridised. But a lot of architects run away from that.

Well it’s incredibly generous.

I don’t know if that’s to do with profit, but our approach is to have no style. I genuinely believe in that. So every year when we have our studio review we’re talking about what’s our identity – it’s unusual ideas, special ideas, sometimes clever ideas, sometimes quite good ideas, sometimes exceptional ideas, but each one is completely site specific, programme specific, project specific, politically specific, people specific, output specific. It can be exceptionally beautiful, but it can be raw. Price used to see style as something completely time-based- the product of your working rather than a visual signature. For us, profit is just one of the constraints. There’s lots of p’s. There’s programme, politics, power, profit… predictability? They’re all resources, profit is just one. The things we’re doing with Urban Splash, Urban Splash don’t ever do a profit plan until after planning …ever. Really? They don’t do it.

Yes. Literally you design the whole thing, you put it into planning and only then – you get a figure in the sky outline – but only into the really nitty gritty stage – stage D & E. I don’t know whether that’s in the public knowledge.

It gives the architect…they say to you – we trust you to have the intelligence that this site is probably worth this much, it’s kind of worth this. Design your optimum. Which is why we get on so well with them. There are no preconceived ideas, you put it all in. Start again – how shall we afford this. Then, OK we can’t quite afford that but ah, what about this. From that level the cost and property equation gets hit and you find a cheaper way of doing it. You’ve still got your central set of principles, you’ve still got your strong concept, but instead of being wrapped in titanium it’s wrapped in corrugated iron. Is it going to look bad? No! It’s still the that’s what we’re going to design’. So I think they use profit and cost plans in a good way – so it’s not burdening. The wrong way for example, is the Olympic village. 3000 new homes all designed to the same internal product, everything. 3000 homes designed by Multiplex in Australia – literally they just got typologies designed in Australia, brought here then copy, paste , copy, paste. Glenn Howells is going to wrap one…literally they’re going to wrap them. It’s outrageous! Because, quote, it’s the profit model and they don’t want to make a mistake, so we’ve got a standard set of kit, a standard set of this, a standard set of bathrooms, standard set of kitchens, and you’re going to wrap them. And what’s going to happen is we’re going

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to get 3000 of the same bloody home. Hello – that’s an estate! ** This is a housekeeping question really, but when people talk about minimum standards, say for ceiling heights, where do they come from? Are they building regs? No, they vary. Is there a national standard written down? There is a Building Reg’s minimum height, I think it’s something like 2.3, a little bit lower in a loft room – 2.1 I think. Then something like 2.7 or something for office, I can’t remember. But there are space limit standards, and the house building federation will suggest standards, everything else is down to production and down to the architecture of the project. If you’re in a Georgian street with 3.5 ceilings you’re in a good place because you can maybe play with the same proportions as possible. It also depends on the quality of spaces, and lifestyle of the product. Candy and Candy would never go too low because they’d never sell them. Another thing on that in London is when the GLA get involved because there’s a ceiling of 32 or 33 metres at which point they get involved. So if you’re one meter or one centimetre below it avoids a lot of issues, so a lot of developers make the decision based on that. So they mark off 32.959m and what we’re going to do is divide that by the number of floors we can just about squeeze in and.. aha.. that means we’re going to be pursuing a 2.5m ceiling height gentlemen. Job done, no real discussion more than that. Which is why when we put that idea of the 2.8m out – what won it was because

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we didn’t want to do the tedious drawings of the whole of London connected up with green spaces and waterways because it’s really obvious. Really obvious. The other reason was I was struck by the impact of affordable housing that from day one when Boris arrived – from now on 33 or 35% has got to be affordable – boof. Every single client had to deal with it. And that’s it, it’s not negotiable, you just had to deal with it. So you have to design with that. So we have to – from now on we have to. Done, from now on it’s a standard. ‘Can I have 2.5 here’ yeah, you can, as long as you make it 3m over here – so it averages at 2.7 – good use of a standard. We were intrigued, because making flats bigger is harder for us in a way. ** The weird thing about profit is that there’s no ingenuity about it. Do you think there isn’t? Well, in terms of most people’s perspectives. It’s like a real…there’s a lot of people who aren’t very clever on that side of things. I know one person who’s brilliant – Ben Denton who’s one of the directors of First Base who’s one of the people doing student housing and particularly now affordable housing and now have responsibilities for like 20,000 homes or something. He’s a fascinating, very bright, very together. He’ll know lot’s of stuff about profit. He’s a really clever guy at thinking about economic models. Most people unfortunately just sit and stare at a number. The literally say: Right, the land cost that. The amount of developments going to be

that. I’ve got to be able to squeeze that. The pounds per square metre I’m going to get back is this, because Savilles told me. That was based on something like that that was sold about this sort of time last year, maybe. Because of that I’m going to make that. And I have to otherwise it’s not viable. I have to make 25%. Not 18%, not 17%, not 15% then brand and grow it , I have to make that right now, today, or it doesn’t work. You end up with these ridiculous conversations where everybody round the table – that site, that place, that vibe, that ambition, that lifestyle, those principles, that kind of space, that thing you bring to the market, that ability to go upstairs, does anybody have a loft in the shell. Can’t deal with all of that. Which I think is why a lot of aspiring architects particularly in their early 30’s become developers. When you have a wonderful idea, or you think it’s a wonderful idea, you think it’s a gap in the market, and you think you can do it without these guys. These guys aren’t always as bright as perhaps they should be. They’re not showing any intuition or invention. You’re providing all this intuition and all this invention. This wonderful idea of yours gets flushed and you have to go back and draw it. This is the thing – it’s their money which they’re risking. This is something that as an architect or urban designer you have to be responsive to that, because it’s not your money that you’re risking. So we have the ambitions for greater good and for the people who actually live and work in the places we make but to make those places we have to get these guys to risk their money in order to build it, which is why we have to take all these things into consideration. So to round up – a set of principles that we believe inherently as values – the value of good design. The onto that I’d say an

added layer which is to achieve specificity of design through originality – not in our case through a high architectural brand, but through concept and specialness we can create a brand within the actual project and by that we can create another area of value. I think some architects try to shy away from that actually but I do personally think it’s fundamental part of architecture. When we’re not in the market we’re in, two or three years ago there were a lot of people getting frustrated with the lack of originality there and going and doing their own thing. Although maybe, I don’t know anything about it, but maybe the fact that the market is down turning you might see more… Well I think that’s it. Recession always brings about originality – temporary things on mothballed sites. We’ve got a project in Camden on a site which is definitely mothballed. Who care’s – the best thing happens in Berlin in 5 minutes and that’s that, I believe in that. I’m quite a believer in that it unlocks more ideas and gets rid of this attitude of building cheaper flats. I think maybe architectural production - the more it builds, the less it thinks. Absolutely, I agree with you. That’s the interesting thing about profit within architecture, not just profit in developers but profit in architectural practice. There are two different schools of thought on that, one is turnover and volume. By having 50+ in our studio you can handle in most clients eyes bigger, larger, longer projects – you’re, quote,a safe pair of hands. You can just churn out the same, same, same thing and keep going. And through that turnover you can get a sizeable chunk of profit. A lot of practices work on that model and just churn it through. It’s weird, even really

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good design companies can turn into really average design companies just because they grew to 50, then 60 then 80 then 100 and they just have to feed those mouths. Everything we’ve discussed about identity, uniqueness, time spent …. Principles goes out of the window to meet the profit. The other school of thought, more the Renzo Piano school of thought- you’ve only got a few people – produces…pretty wonderful buildings. Now and then the odd one… but as a mindset extraordinary output. It’s high profit, good design. We spend longer, we think more, we pursue original things which sometimes leads to a blind alley and we have to start again but that’s part of the proper design process which we were taught when we were at school. We have no ambition to be more than 25 max, ever. That’s why we’re called studio, that’s why we have a nice flow of people, sometimes for year out, sometimes for six months. It’s not based on turnover, it’s based on doing good work. I couldn’t judge, but that certainly seemed to be one of the issues with Alsop’s which was that it got quite big, quite sharply and then when a couple of projects collapsed it deflated. Yeah. It was amazing - a really amazing practice. It grew from 50 to 120 in a year? Two years? A year and a half? Two years? Completely unsustainable. It’s back down to 30 or 40 now. And that’s a much better size for that kind of work and that kind of attitude. For some reason despite the huge entities. And that requires saying no to quite a lot of work. Yes it does.

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Time Donors

Cristina Cerulli (Tutor) Kaye Alexander John Worthington Roger Zogolovitch Simon Allford David West Jonathan Wilson Mike Lapish The West One resident The Procurement Manager Howard Parvin HTA Architects

Originally written as a Masters Dissertation produced at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture 2008

alastair@bemakeshift.co.uk www.bemakeshift.com

Alastair Parvin

THE PROFIT FUNCTION Alastair Parvin

THE PROFIT FUNCTION

2008