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.