The dog that didn’t bark
Introduction
The architectural profession’s principal responsibilities are (1) to evaluate and articulate clients’ requirements, (2) to explore ways in which these requirements can best be met, (3) to communicate to the construction industry the most efficient and environmentally benign and supportive way of accommodating the client’s wishes for the long as well as the short term, and (4) to build up and share with all parties involved in the process, users as well as other design professions and the construction industry, an open-ended body of knowledge soundly based on feedback from the performance of buildings in use through time for the full range of constituencies and purposes.
In other words, architects are in duty bound to help clients to determine ‘What is this building/structure/environment intended to achieve?’ before designing the optimum way in which the client’s requirements can be met and communicating such proposals to the construction industry. Unfortunately clients’ aspirations are sometimes distorted and diminished by both architects and builders into ‘Which off-the-shelf product and mode of delivery would suit my practice or my business best?’ Disinterested and independent advice to clients has never been more important now that sustainability and the preservation of life on earth are rising so high on the environmental professions’ – and the construction industry’s – agenda.
If architects and builders continue to connive, consciously or not, in mismanaging the planet’s diminishing resources by focusing too much on new buildings and neglecting how wastefully our existing building stock is being used, post-occupancy evaluation may well come to have a much more sinister and definitive meaning than when the term was originally coined.
A very personal perspective
I trained as an architect in London at the Architectural Association School from 1959 to 1964 and became interested in office design in my fourth year in 1962 when our class was given the brief for the design of an office building that, compared to briefs for our much more socially committed projects such as schools, housing and health centres, seemed extremely abbreviated and short of human purpose or sociological content – ‘Design a building of 150,000 sq ft on a site in Central London’. My curiosity was stimulated by the assumption in the brief that office functions were so simple and straightforward that the design of office buildings could be regarded, at least as far as architects were concerned, simply as containers without reference to functionality, business processes or social purpose.
In the following summer, having been stimulated by an article by the historian and commentator Reyner Banham, in the Architectural Review, about a new form of office planning in Germany called office landscaping, I was given a scholarship to travel across Germany to learn about Bürolandschaft, a concept of office design based on studies of internal work processes and patterns of communication while simultaneously offering a much higher standard of accommodation for office workers than contemporary British office buildings.
Three years later I studied in the USA as a Harkness Fellow, first in Berkeley and then at Princeton, where I completed my PhD. The focus of my research was a growing scepticism, despite my initial excitement, against what increasingly seemed to me to be the inherently formulaic and limited nature not just of conventional British and American office buildings but also of office landscaping. The hypotheses in my doctoral dissertation were an attempt to test the relation between two sociological dimensions – i.e. more or less hierarchical organizational structures and the greater or lesser intensity of internal interactions between office workers – with two hypothesized architectural and space planning consequences – i.e. greater or lesser differentiation between workplaces and more or less openness in office layouts. Meanwhile, based in Princeton, I was acting as a part-time consultant to JFN, then one of the leading space planners in New York, thus learning a great deal about the practical realities of contemporary North American office design practice.
In 1971 I returned to London to support a European office for JFN. The firm had just been appointed by IBM to ‘roll out’ a series of open plan offices across Europe. What became very apparent in this series of projects was that European office cultures, even within IBM’s tightly controlled business culture, varied greatly from country to country and that any attempt to homogenize office planning across Europe, on the American pattern, had the potential to stimulate dangerous social tensions within the workforce.
By 1974 JFN had collapsed both in North America and in Europe in the economic crisis of that year. DEGW (Duffy Eley Giffone Worthington) inherited the firm’s European operations and was already becoming, in our own right, a successful international architectural, design and consultancy practice. DEGW conducted many international studies over the decades and became well known particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the field of workplace design. User research was the hallmark of the practice, most notably in the series of ORBIT studies on the impact of information technology on office design, carried out in the 1990s in the UK, Europe, North America and South America. Many other studies were published by the firm over the years and eventually a network of over a dozen DEGW offices was established across Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific.
The rise and fall of Stage M
‘Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended’, T. S. Eliot (1940)
By the 1980s I had become much involved in professional politics, eventually serving as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and of the Architects’ Council of Europe.
‘What’s Stage M?’ I hear you ask. In the early 1960s a distinguished multidisciplinary team was tasked by RIBA to study problems of organization, staffing, quality of service and productivity in a sample of architects’ offices. In a time of continuing post-Second World War reconstruction, many leaders of the British architectural profession were convinced of the relevance of the social sciences to architectural practice. In fact, two members of the RIBA team, Janet Madge and Joan Milne, were sociologists. However, nothing came of the Institute’s original ambition to make user feedback – i.e. Stage M – the mandatory final stage of the British profession’s official plan of work.
The economic context at that time was such that at least half the income of the architectural profession came from social and government funded projects – housing, schools and hospitals – in fact, whatever was needed to repair years of bomb damage and neglect in order to create the fabric of the brave new world of the Welfare State.
The team’s report, published by the RIBA in 1962 as The Architect and his Office (RIBA 1962) – how uncomfortable the gender bias inherent in that title sounds today – declared that (1) architectural education should be diversified to bring technical skills into the profession, (2) architectural education should consist of a planned mix of practical training and an approved syllabus to be taught in architectural schools, (3) architects’ fees should be related to the size and complexity of jobs, and (4) architects needed to be taught managerial skills to take advantage of the application of standardization and industrialization to the production of architecture. By the standards of the early 1960s, this was a radical agenda.
In the following year the Institute published the RIBA Plan of Work (RIBA 1963) based on the team’s socially conscious, modernizing programme. Although revised from time to time, this template has regulated for five subsequent decades the conduct of British architectural practice. Mandatory fee scales were laid down that still today are widely regarded as guidelines despite increasingly strong competitive pressures and increasingly stringent, anti-monopoly legislation. Given the Institute’s Plan of Work’s principal objective, i.e. ‘to provide a model procedure for methodical working by the design team’, it is hardly surprising that the following sequence of an outline plan of work was defined – ‘Stages A to M – from inception, to feasibility studies, to outline proposals, through scheme design, to detail design, to production information, to bills of quantities, to tender action, through project planning, to operations on site, to completion’. Stage M – ‘Completion’ – was originally intended to embrace post-occupancy evaluation.
For 50 years Stages A to L (but significantly never M) have been the backbone of British architectural practice and have been widely adopted by the British construction industry. However, Stage M, i.e. the obligation to gather data on how well each completed project had met the client’s original objectives, was never made mandatory nor put into operational effect, probably because it must have seemed, given the collective psychology of the profession – to this day an unstable mixture of optimism and insecurity – too complex, too difficult and, above all, far too likely to lead to trouble. Architects are notoriously keen to move on to the next project. Moreover, even in those far off and relatively easygoing days, lawyers were on the prowl and many a client would have been more than delighted to use the gift of a critical or even a mildly apologetic post-occupancy report to claw back fees still due. Of course, in the wider context of the construction industry, there were then and remain today plenty of other frictions between contractors and subcontractors as well as within design teams themselves. Squabbles often occur. Grievances call out to be settled – in court if necessary. Even Stage L, the less controversial evaluation of project delivery from the points of view of the design team and the contractors, has provided plenty of scope for post-project wrangles. Stage M itself was stillborn and never made operational.
The architectural profession, as a whole, in the UK but also worldwide, has been shy of and has taken too little advantage of garnering systematic feedback from clients and users. On the whole architects have failed to legitimize socially, operationally, commercially and legally acceptable methods of uncovering and learning from the successes and failures of projects, least of all from the multiple and frequently divergent points of view of investors, clients and users. Unlike architecture, the medical and the legal professions have long since been accustomed to harvest practice experience and willingly, even enthusiastically, to share data – hence the huge value of and respect for epidemiology in medicine and for precedents in the legal profession. For the same motive many business schools today use empirically derived case studies as a valuable teaching method.
Three factors could still facilitate the gleaning of relevant feedback by architects: (1) specialization in single building types, (2) learning from experiences derived from parallel projects that facilitate the comparison and categorization of success and failure, and (3) taking advantage of ongoing relations with groups of similar clients, sector by sector. Access to comparative data on the performance of buildings in use, preferably in collaboration with the relatively new profession of facilities managers, could already have begun to provide a sound basis for the development of measures of success and failure. An accessible body of shared, professional experience, systematically accumulated and presented, perhaps in the format of business school case studies, or of precedents in legal practice or of epidemiology in medical science, would be invaluable not just to clients and users but also to the practice of architecture and the enlightenment of architectural students, but more strategically to benefit clients and users. So far the opportunity of creating such a body of data and of precedents has been quietly turned down by two professions’ – architecture and facilities management – grievous, continuing and long-term loss.
Supply-side thinking, which results in complacency and the suppression of inconvenient, and potentially embarrassing, feedback, is particularly strong in my field, the development and design of speculative office buildings in the English-speaking world. In Northern European countries, such as Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, where developers play a less predominant role in the financing and delivery of office projects, clients tend to be more proactive and involved firstly because many of them are accustomed to financing and procuring their own, purpose-built buildings, and secondly, because of the power of workers’ councils in the social democratic political context. In this way these countries seem to have been able to avoid some of the problems that have resulted from the combination of an over-emphasis on the logistics of delivery combined with the weak articulation of demand-side criteria that has been characteristic of British and North American speculative office development.
It is also the case that the American as well as British supply chains in the design of office buildings are predominantly developer- rather than client-, let alone user-, led. These supply chains work as follows: first comes the money, in these days often from the Middle East or China, business cultures not yet particularly renowned for caring too much for end user criteria; secondly, the money is handed over to professional developers who consult realtors, whose principal job it is to sell or let space rather than using, let alone managing, this commodity. They negotiate with the help of lawyers, whose bias regrettably tends towards maximising short-term financial benefits for their developer clients rather than protecting the longer-term interests of the eventual building users. Architects are then brought in, usually too late in the day to have any influence on strategic client decisions, followed by the rest of the design team, who work together to hand projects over to the construction industry from which the ball is tossed to corporate real estate in client organizations and then on to facilities managers. They have sometimes been known to prefer to tell end users what they ought to have rather than enquiring too deeply about what they really need. The result of this, for all intents and purposes unstoppable, chain is what we see all round, particularly in British cities, but also in the United States: the endless repetition of formulaic solutions such as deep, ‘efficient’ office floors, occupied by row after row of space-consuming and isolating ‘cubes’. This is shown in that ingenuous cartoon character, Dilbert, and many of his male and female colleagues, are imprisoned.
The principal characteristics of this supply chain are easy to characterize: invisibility, a top-down bias, unidirectional processes that are unstoppable once started and, worst of all, a strong tendency to neglect, ignore or bury feedback from users.
Conclusion
Within this wider chain of events the RIBA’s Plan of Work has turned out in practice in office design in the UK to be a single, relatively unimportant series of processes. The good intentions of the authors of The Architect and his Office and RIBA’s Plan of Work were quickly subverted. By defining, in effect, the architect’s task too precisely in terms of project delivery rather than of opening up a series of open-ended, goal-oriented enquiries, the intelligent and well-meaning members of a RIBA committee 50 years ago unwittingly locked the profession in an intellectual prison of which architects absent-mindedly have mislaid or even sometimes may have thrown away the key.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that in office design the dog still hasn’t yet barked. Despite the many good things that architects continue to achieve, had we been as clever collectively as Sherlock Holmes was individually, we would have recognized long ago what our profession on both sides of the Atlantic has long been missing: quite simply we architects, as we move from project to project, especially in office design, a field in which developers’ and even corporate clients’ time horizons are so short, have found it easy to be deaf to the cumulative and longer-term requirements of whole classes of users.
References
Eliot, T. S. (1940) East Coker. London: Faber and Faber.
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) (1962) The Architect and his Office: A Survey of Organization, Staffing, Quality of Service and Productivity. London: RIBA.
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) (1963) RIBA Plan of Work. London: RIBA [many subsequent editions].