•  All stakeholder groups (people with interests in buildings) are included in POEs and they speak for themselves. To avoid evaluator bias, the building is used as the objective prompt to elicit stakeholders’ comments. Thus, the building’s support or frustration of productivity and well-being are addressed in three dimensions of building evaluation, namely, design, use, and conditions.

•  Stakeholders’ testable observations about cause and effect are documented. For example; “We switch on electric heaters because the air conditioning is too cold in summer.” Participants often contribute parameters of design/use solutions to problems and the architect evaluator’s recommendations to improve well-being and productivity are based on balanced consideration of all relevant stakeholders’ experiences of building features.

•  Organizations’ POE reports document experiences of all relevant parts of a building and building features and qualities are addressed specifically in each part of the subject building, as their performance may vary substantially in different parts of the building and under different operating conditions.

•  Whilst buildings are the common subject of POEs, the process can equally be applied to landscape design, ships, or other built environments.

The fundamental purpose of POE is to communicate stakeholders’ experiences of buildings as a basis for generating recommendations for improvements. The architect’s website described one building in published notes in terms of its layout, appearance, intended effects of light, and intended flexibility. An architectural awards jury gave it a prize. By contrast, occupants report regular sewage smells in their working spaces, uncontrolled noise interrupting meetings, excessive mechanical plant noise, safety concerns about windows, lack of security, excessive light impairing sight, switching problems, blackouts and unwanted light, air quality causing discomfort, illness, sick leave, and rainwater leaks through the roof, wall, and doors.

It is unusual for occupants’ experiences to be heard in architectural criticism. The “loud silence” about such unheard diversity of experiences is perhaps what Frank Duffy refers to as “the dog that did not bark” (Mallory-Hill et al. 2012). It is not clear whether the award jury saw photographs, drove past, or looked inside the building with so many problems, but it seems unlikely that they listened to occupants.

Property managers, architects, engineers, and builders seldom report defects. On the few occasions when unwelcome experiences are mentioned, responsibility for them is attributed to each other or to the occupants. Terms of architectural engagement rarely encourage architects to review occupants’ experience a year or two after completion. Frank Duffy described the removal of section M of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ services (Mallory-Hill et al. 2012). He writes “[it] locked the profession in an intellectual prison. Hopefully, we architects haven’t yet collectively thrown away the key.” Perhaps institutes of architecture will find ways of consulting occupants more thoroughly when granting awards.

Learning lessons

The buildings we evaluate have been designed and approved by clients and architects from conception to completion, and most design features function satisfactorily for most purposes under most conditions. However, there are sometimes serious and unnecessary failures that the architects and their critics are unaware of. Outsourced project management and fear of being held accountable may be reasons why project teams do not take a responsible approach to managing failure.

Example: classroom design for alertness

In POEs of mechanically ventilated buildings, the unanimous summary of many stakeholder groups is that air quality is among the worst aspects. In one unpublished survey in a European country reported to the author, 23 out of 25 schools were found to be too hot in both summer and winter, and a technical review found that the same 23 out of 25 failed to meet energy efficiency standards.

Example: wash hand basin design to minimize spread of infection

Populations’ well-being and productivity are also affected by health and hygiene, as reported by Dr Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Hygiene Centre. “There’s a strong economic case for investing in good hand washing facilities in our schools. Britain’s twelve million cases of norovirus, gastroenteritis, MRSA, e-coli and now swine flu infections are mainly down to dirty hands” (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Hygiene Centre 2010).

Scottish schools are equipped with wash hand basins at a suitable height for children; however, POE stakeholders reported that the basins were too deep for younger children to easily reach the tap. The lesson was learned but not used by a neighboring education department designing a subsequent school that we also evaluated a few years later – it also had a basin too deep for the smaller children to reach across.

Objective review – the universal set of building experiences

Stakeholders’ building experiences are subjective. The first stage of POE is to objectively prompt and document stakeholders’ experiences of architecture in a neutral manner. At this initial stage, it is important that comments are recorded without judgment so that stakeholders respond freely. Thus, even comments that are based on assumptions that the interviewer may understand to be false are occasionally documented. At a later stage the stakeholder findings are considered and recommendations are generated for design and used to support stakeholders’ well-being and productivity. Recommendations can include some action to correct misunderstandings.

Some professionals argue that they alone describe objective experiences of buildings. Lighting designers, for example, might insist that the objective measure of success in office illumination is 400 lux at 700 mm above floor level. Such lighting designers might be unaware of other stakeholders’ concern that the regular level of light wastes energy by lighting empty desks, carpet, and the tops of shelves, for example, regardless of whether anyone else wants the light. The 400 lux illumination has also been blamed for migraine headaches that take staff away from work. Other interviewees have removed fluorescent tubes or used sunglasses and peaked caps in their office to protect their eyes from 400 lux of light.

Stakeholders seeking to achieve optimum solutions need to be able to communicate their various needs under different conditions within the design parameters. POE documents all stakeholders’ reported experiences within operational conditions about controversial issues so that design and use solutions can be developed.

Architectural criticism – another stakeholder experience

The difference in experiences between architectural critics could hardly be more stark than the abovementioned award winning architecture in which occupants suffer sewage smells, rainwater leaks, and air, noise, security, safety, and light problems. Fortunately, most buildings can be described as broadly successful for most occupants and other stakeholders regardless of architectural critics’ experience of them.

This section compares several published architectural criticisms with the experiences typically reported by stakeholders in POEs. A sample of published critics’ self-described experiences of buildings were weighted towards their aesthetic sensitivities in terms of their values and appreciation of architectural history and style. Their discussion about other functional performance dimensions is generally vague and unsubstantiated. Critics’ photographs illustrate limited interaction between people and the subject building.

By contrast, stakeholders in POEs typically observe a myriad of building quality effects on well-being and productivity. They often offer testable observations as evidence in support of their comments. POE photography shows anthropometric relationships affecting ergonomics such as the hand-washing example above. Photos also communicate to decision-makers the experience of occupants – delight, disgust, awe, satisfaction, etc. – in ways that are not possible using text or numbers, and have recently become known as “photovoice.”

Comparison #2: architectural critics within POEs

In 2004–2006 architects were included as participants in three POEs. They were selected for their specialist knowledge of the effects of building materials, construction, and building operation on the environment and so provided a practical summary of life-cycle effects of the buildings on the environment. These “green architects” were engaged to represent future generations’ interests so that the environmental effects of subject buildings could be noted alongside current stakeholders’ interests. They were specifically briefed to represent the environmental effect of the building on future generations off-site.

In addition to commenting on the effects of the buildings on future generations, the architects went beyond their brief venturing into predictions about building users’ experiences of some building features. In effect, they adopted the role of architectural critics. They did this with mixed accuracy. When their predictions of building users’ experiences conflicted with building users’ reported experiences they undermined their own credibility.

The green architects’ inaccurate predictions of occupant experience had a minor effect on the POE but the author drew two important conclusions from the process. First, that the architects could be overconfident about the accuracy of predictions of building occupants’ experiences of buildings features. Second, it confirmed a basic principle of POE: that stakeholders should describe their own experiences of buildings.

Comparison #3: young architectural critics

Students at Juan Carlos School in Murcia, Spain, became architectural critics in October 2013 (López 2013). The author heard in one report that the temperature reached 50 degrees Celsius in classrooms that have been used for 15 years. In 2013 students publicly protested after three of them fainted. The author heard that protesting students were later reprimanded – perhaps discouraging further architectural criticism.

A POE in the first year or two of building use could have documented any discomfort and promptly negotiated and implemented a resolution so that students and teachers could be alert and comfortable in their workplace. Lessons from such an evaluation could have also informed design of other schools within the last 15 years.

The author’s work in Australasia and Europe since the 1980s has witnessed increasing privatization of building procurement and ownership as global investors acquire control of many public building programs and services. This has happened through outsourced consulting services, public–private (so-called) partnerships and fully outsourced services.

Investors have rented facilities to governments that financial advisors say are cheaper – apparently because they are from public operating accounts instead of public capital accounts. Government departments have been downsized leaving remaining school building managers to negotiate specifications and contracts with corporate lawyers who represent the investors.

As corporations increase their role in planning, designing, building, owning, and managing facilities for public use, there are opportunities for POE to identify and communicate architectural lessons learned so that the projects can become more successful. Citizens, with interests in the facilities, continue to need buildings designed on lessons learned to improve economic prosperity and citizen well-being.

Conclusion

The definition of POE offered includes provision for sharing all experiences about design in terms of use under various conditions. It includes the principle that all groups with interests in the subject building are entitled to participate as stakeholders. Each is treated as an expert in their experiences of the building. At a later stage lessons are professionally documented for application on future designs and management.

The client project manager, architect, engineer, and builder routinely participate in the author’s evaluations and report on the building from the perspectives of their interests. Professional architectural critics may lack understanding and experience of using buildings for operation purposes but their interest in architectural history, design, style, and philosophical considerations of aesthetics are as valid as other stakeholders’ interests. Thus, professional critics are entitled to participate in POE along with other stakeholders and can be expected to complement other stakeholders’ experiences to contribute to the necessary diversity of POE.

Architect Frank Duffy wrote “The dog hasn’t barked yet” (Mallory-Hill et al. 2012) to describe the lack of community dialogue about architecture. Building occupants have no forum to negotiate the nuanced mix of design/use/conditions to support well-being and productivity. The dog may not have barked yet, but architects are rapidly losing niche markets as clients engage project managers, building scientists, engineers, interior designers, and other specialists who undertake work once under the auspices of architecture. Architecture remains largely beyond criticism in the public realm, but this could change. Just as whistle blowers have exposed secret government crimes, “social media” could expose architectural features that compromise well-being and productivity. This could provide an opportunity for architects to communicate our ability to design for the population at large. In the same discourse referred to above, Duffy also wrote “if we architects had been as clever as Sherlock Holmes, we would have realized long ago that it’s the absence of barking, the absence of feedback … Silence is Not Assent.”

References

One of the impediments to a fully integrated built environments criticism seems to be the perception of the architect as the sovereign agent of building design, a mythology with roots in the evolution of professional identity from antiquity through the modern era. After all, the prefix “archi-” – “chief,” “first” – stubbornly suggests sole authority in all matters involving the history and evolution of building types, likewise all matters involving the composition and construction of buildings in particular and especially the theory of the unity of relation between part and whole. One question criticism has yet to ask is whether or not it’s possible to sustain disciplinary and professional identity at the same time architects open up their practices and research to a radically integrative and interdisciplinary enterprise. Architectural composition and its historical formalisms have traditionally resisted the incursions of both mechanical and behavioral science, since they threaten to apply empirical data and methodology that may reveal operational and spatial flaws and shortcomings to owners and the public, beauty notwithstanding.

Another impediment to a more inclusive built environment criticism is that architects finally regulate themselves. They largely decide or influence the criteria for competence and achievement; they decide what inputs from the public they accept or do not accept; and they are the authors of their own internal ideologies, which rarely extend beyond self-enclosure. “The profession is, in fact, allowed to define the very standards by which its superior competence is judged,” Magali Sarfatti Larson writes. “Professional autonomy allows the experts to select almost at will the inputs they will receive from the laity. Their autonomy tends to insulate them: in part, professions live within ideologies of their own creation, which they present to the outside as the most valid definitions of specific spheres of social reality” (Larson 1977).

Another way to account for the profession’s rejection of science is professional education’s resistance to empirical research. The professional curriculum clearly orients toward design methodologies that privilege artistic composition over either measurable technical performance or empirical evidence. Despite significant forays into both these spheres of academic activity over the last hundred years, design reigns supreme. Despite their long-standing flirtation in the US and Europe, the distrust between design and research may have roots in twentieth-century phenomenology and its general critique of scientific rationality, especially after World War II. “Science manipulates thing and gives up living in them,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously wrote in the first sentence of his last published essay.

It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always has been that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general – as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.

(Merleau-Ponty 1964)

The degree to which modern artists and architects embraced phenomenology in the first half of the last century helps account for architecture’s orientation to philosophy, fine arts, and the humanities, especially since the tenure system obliges the vast majority of full-time architecture faculty to meet standards of achievement in the humanities, not science.

If the ruling thought behind nineteenth-century architectural production is “typology,” followed in the twentieth century by “program,” then surely the ruling thought behind the production of twenty-first-century built environments is “research,” which needs much clearer definition against the backdrop of studio-based curricula. Other disciplines in the university envy the studio structure, and rightly so, since design is often the alchemy that determines how effectively knowledge formed in the mind leaves the hand. The full potential of our professions therefore involves a question about what research in our disciplines looks like and how it changes our criteria for success, especially among the noble but often moldy assumptions underlying the accreditation of professional degree programs.

Design inquiry in the age of climate change

A new built environment criticism might better leverage the privileged branches of knowledge that command not just research revenues but also the public trust and public imagination. By virtue of their funding priorities, the NSF, NIH, and other public agencies endow science, medicine, engineering, and related disciplines with both the resources and the authority to objectively diagnose “grand challenge” problems – energy, climate, environment, urbanization, information, health, and social equity – all of which intersect the root vocabularies of architecture and related disciplines. Among recent examples of emerging, transdisciplinary initiatives that promise to change the landscape of education, practice, and criticism is a consortium of public and private organizations, firms, and universities that comprise the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC) for Energy Efficient Buildings, which received nearly $130 million from the US Department of Energy and other federal agencies. The GPIC aims to develop innovative energy-efficient building technologies, designs, and systems. A significant portion of this funding will transform the 1,200 acre Philadelphia Navy Yard into a laboratory where researchers will apply new technologies to existing urban fabric and infrastructure, with goals to demonstrates a 50 percent energy saving in a “scalable, repeatable solution that can be affordably applied to a broad spectrum” (Penn State 2010).

When architects use the terms “knowledge-based practice” and “evidence-based design,” they generally mean practice and design supported by methods of inquiry characteristic of the physical and social sciences. In this case, architects seek to use knowledge the same way doctors and engineers use knowledge, shaped and structured by verifiable conclusions and measurable data that flow from universally acceptable scientific methods. On the other hand, when architects speak of “history, theory, and criticism,” they seek to use knowledge in the same way that literary critics and art historians do, shaped and structured by provisional interpretations and readings that flow from the undecidable nature of images and texts. The aforementioned changes in the ways we design and produce built environments suggest that architectural knowledge has already radically shifted.

The question remains, how can we ensure that current standards of criticism keep pace? Whether or not critics (and for that matter, educators) can effectively slipstream disruptive technologies is finally the province of individual writers and their institutional context. Yet opportunities abound, and they surround the heart of current practices – parametric modeling, mass customization, urban infrastructure, public health, building life-cycle, big data, and carbon management, to name just a few of the most obvious examples. The faster we can explore hybrid criticism, the faster we can promote hybrid design – the faster we can produce higher performing and more suitable environments; the faster we can renew public respect for the social and economic value of design; the faster we can create steady demand for professional knowledge and services; the faster we can generate new interest among an increasingly diverse and demanding readership.

References

Larson, M. (1977) The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–90.