You might imagine that nobody needs to be persuaded of the virtues of good design. If a building – a school or hospital, say – is well designed, then surely it is better suited to its purpose? If an object – a chair or toaster, perhaps – is well designed, then it will be more comfortable, or won’t burn the thick slices? If only our perception of what design is, and what makes it good or bad, were that simple.
Take the Scottish Parliament building, designed by the late Enric Miralles after an exhaustive international competition process. Not only did he win the competition, not only did he design the building, but after its posthumous and controversially expensive completion it won all kinds of awards, including Britain’s top architecture accolade, the 2005 Stirling Prize. Not long after, a 12-foot long timber beam fell from the roof of the debating chamber, fortunately causing no injuries but forcing the place to close for several weeks. The beam incident joined a catalogue of other reported problems from leaking roofs to jamming lifts. But set those aside for a moment, on the grounds that all great public buildings have their teething pains. Instead, consider the vexed question of value for money.
If the Scottish Parliament building was a good design when it won the competition and was optimistically costed at £40m, had it ceased to be a good design when – much expanded and amended – it finally hit £430m? If so, then at what point along the graph did rising cost cancel out design excellence? In other words, is value for money an aspect of design every bit as important as functionalism and beauty? Or is it merely a temporary – and perhaps misleading – overlay?
An earlier building whose troubled construction history closely parallels that of the Scottish Parliament is the Sydney Opera House. Building it was a protracted nightmare made worse by malign political interference. Its costs also rose tenfold. Where the Scottish building’s architect died midway, the Australian equivalent – Danish architect Jorn Utzon – was forced to resign. Functionally speaking, the resulting building was pretty poor. A world-class opera house it most certainly was not. But today, who cares? Utzon’s opera house became a symbol of Australia. It is the most famous modern building in the world.
So: was it value for money? Not in 1974, perhaps, when it finally opened, having been first designed in 1956. But since then it has steadily become better and better value for money.
Ah, you may say, but how many such works of flawed genius are out there, places whose design quirks and cost overruns we are prepared to forgive on the grounds of their beauty and impact or rare utility? More than you might imagine.
In Milwaukee, a post-industrial city near Chicago on Lake Michigan, the cost of the new Quadracci Pavilion – an extension to the city’s Art Museum – rose from $40m to nearer $120m as the extraordinary ambition of its architect Santiago Calatrava became apparent. The fundraisers had to return to their benefactors over and over.
They coughed up without demur, bewitched by the audacity of the design. The rising cost turned out to be no scandal. The bony, organically sculptural building duly opened in 2001. And now the crowds gather everyday to see it.“ The most extraordinary thing about the building,” as one university professor told me, “Is simply that it is in Milwaukee at all.”
It has been known for an apparent national scandal to become a quiet success not by being sculpturally audacious in this way but simply by working well and not going wrong.
Decades of criticism of the British Library at St Pancras, designed by Sir Colin St John Wilson, suddenly stopped, the day it opened in 1998. Not because it was, in today’s jargon, an iconic building. Remarkably self-effacing for something so big, tucked away from the street behind a landscaped public square it would have been little use to the international images of Dubai or Beijing. Overseas visitors to London are mostly unaware of its existence. It was – and is – simply a very good library to use, well organised, with a fine sequence of interior spaces, made of durable materials, built to last hundreds of years. It mounts excellent, well-attended public exhibitions. It was expensive to build. But everybody has forgotten about that now.
Public service innovation
Innovation in public service, however, is a tricky business. The civil service mentality of avoidance of risk will usually take precedence over everything else. This generally means that too many new public buildings are designed to be like earlier ones that are deemed to have been reasonably satisfactory. Change is therefore abhorrent, to be discouraged. Public private partnerships (PPP) tend to work in a similar way. When a long-term contract is being entered into to build, run and maintain schools or hospitals, you don’t want any nasty surprises down the line.
Fair enough, you might say. What use is an innovative building where the glass falls out or the roofs leak? Yet at the same time, in all other spheres of activity, we are all being encouraged to embrace change. There is a conflict of attitude. So how do you make sure that, in delivering new facilities, the change you get is the right sort of change? Recently I sat in on an event billed as a ‘design charette’. The City of Birmingham’s education department, in partnership with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) wanted new ideas for its stock of schools. Since Birmingham has a £1bn programme of secondary school building about to commence, this was an admirable attempt to evolve the nature of school buildings to reflect what is an unusually forward-looking and flexible city education strategy. Better to get the deep thinking in first, the city reasoned, rather than build in haste and repent at leisure. Otherwise they would get schools designed for the educational system of the 1990s or earlier rather than today and tomorrow.
Charettes used to be part of the secret world of the architecture student. The word means ‘cart’, specifically the cart into which 19th century Parisian students used to stack their drawings and models to transport them from the studio to the examination room. Today the word has come to signify an intense design session. This is what Birmingham wanted: to pay a cartload of leading young architects to work together over two days to re-imagine what a secondary school might be.
And the outcome? Well, the new kind of school might be either a huge barn in which anything can happen, or a loosely connected village, but either way the traditional model of 30-person classrooms along corridors plus a hall had little to do with it. With teaching increasingly being conducted across different year groups, sometimes in large gatherings and sometimes in small tutorials, the best template for the future is not a conventional school, but something more like a business school. So what do you find too many PPP consortia providing? Conventional schools with lots of 30- person classrooms, of course. Dinosaur buildings, resistant to change.
It might seem only too obvious, but good design is all about designing for what goes on in a building. Which is not the same as designing a building where things just happen to go on. Or as Briony Smith, director of research at the Serco Institute, puts it: “It’s about designing with the service in mind.” Smith is the author of a recent report from the Institute, ‘Built to Serve: the benefits of service-led PPPs’. The report makes the point that the building should reflect the activities that go on within it, not vice versa.“ Physical infrastructure should not be the starting point in a PPP that is concerned with the delivery of effective services. The infrastructure is merely part of the service solution,” she says. “By thinking about the service requirements of a particular project – be it a hospital or a prison or a training establishment, for example, you get ideas to help you think about ways to design the building itself, to achieve certain ends,” she says. Those ends might include building it in such a way as to cost less to run over the long term, say, or (and these are not mutually exclusive attributes) making things better for the service user.
The example Smith gives for prisons is doing away with the often infamous shower blocks, providing prisoners with showers in their own cells.“ That way you create a more normalised environment.” Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Think of the users first. But then you’re into the second problem, namely – I know what is best for the users now: what about in the future? How should my design think about that? Smith agrees with the findings of my Birmingham charette: anticipation of change is key.“
“There is a discussion around the issue of change. In a long-term contract such as Public Finance Initiative (PFI) certain things are defined upfront. From a service point of view, you like to have as much flexibility as you can so as to meet changing needs.” The solution is to have enough big, flexible spaces that can be divided up in all kinds of ways for uses nobody might have thought of yet; or conversely smaller spaces that can be opened out.
Future focused
The team redeveloping St Olav’s hospital in Norway, due to be completed in 2015, is using IT in a bid to future proof the design and make it the most technologically advanced hospital in Europe.
The aim is to use technology to enable the organisation to deliver better patient care through improved communication between patients and health professionals and to cut costs. For example, the hospital will use mobile and wireless technology so medical staff communicate with one another and check patient records using mobile devices, wherever they are in the hospital. Verbal updates will become a thing of the past in this high-tech environment.
For patients, the technology will bring the ability to easily contact medical staff as well as access the internet, control lighting and room temperature.
St Olav’s also tackled a problem faced by many hospitals: patients admitted to wards who are too well to be in hospital but too ill to be at home. To answer this conumdrum, a patient hotel was opened in September 2004. Boasting 150 rooms, the hotel allows patients to be self-sufficient with access to 24-hour professional care. All the clinical centres can be accessed via a heated walkway or underground corridor and there is also a unit dedicated to new mothers.
Attention is also being paid to maximise the therapeutic role of the surroundings including the grounds. To further enhance this, art will be displayed inside and outside the hospital. Several art installations have been commissioned, including Kare Groven’s five boulders. However, only time will tell whether the design is sufficiently future-focused.
Architects like to quote Louis Sullivan’s famous mantra ‘Form Follows Function’– always remembering that the function might change, of course. What’s important to remember is that the same response to the perceived needs of a building’s users can lead to a remarkable variation of outcomes. Take the series of Maggie’s Centres for people affected by cancer. These were conceived by the late Maggie Keswick Jencks, when she was undergoing cancer treatment, as places that were supportive, domestic, reassuring, friendly – everything that hospitals, with their necessary emphasis on clinical treatment, are not. But as the series of centres has rolled out across the country, each next to but not part of a large hospital, one thing has become very clear. Each may offer similar services and spaces, but they vary wildly in appearance. Frank Gehry’s one in Dundee is nothing like Zaha Hadid’s in Fife, which in turn is completely unlike the one Richard Rogers is building in London’s Hammersmith and every other one in what is a very ambitious programme.
This is not just because the driving force behind the centres, Maggie’s husband Charles Jencks, is a noted architecture critic who is effectively building up a collection. As many a university and art gallery will tell you, the involvement of a big-name architect – or headline-grabbing design, which is not necessarily the same thing – helps mightily with the fundraising. So a cancer support centre may need to be an architectural icon for exactly the same reason as Sydney Opera House.
But that does not mean that every single cancer support centre, everywhere, must be like that. There is always more than one factor at play. London Zoo has a number of famous listed buildings. Some are as useful now as they were when new. Others are now unfit for purpose. But the zoo is stuck with these buildings, which are very fine to look at but do not adapt to other uses.
Consequently the brief to architects Proctor and Matthews for the latest building – the Gorilla Kingdom – was to produce non-architecture, an anti-building. Something certainly non-iconic. That way, the zoo will not become a hostage to fortune in the future when zoology might reveal better environments for a captive breeding programme for gorillas, when perhaps radical changes would need to be made. Easy to say, harder to achieve. The Gorilla Kingdom is rather good but if I think that now, what might future preservationists think?
This is by no means an extreme contrast. In the early 1980s, private research carried out into its clients by one of Britain’s biggest firms of architects revealed that while certain clients loved the idea of an award-winning building because of the prestige it would bring, others, in both public and private sectors, sensitive to charges of money being wasted, preferred anonymity. An architecture award could be seen as evidence of profligacy.
Changing attitudes
This attitude has since shifted, for two reasons. Firstly, design awards today tend not just to reward appearance but also the way a building serves its users. We are also more clued up about the importance of appearance in certain sectors. The Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum may well be both functionally and aesthetically questionable. But why do people flock there? To see the building. Its appearance has become its function. No less than the famous Art Deco Hoover factory in West London.
Better by design? Of course. But the key thing to remember is that there is always more than one set of users, more than one kind of design, more than one function. And that, over time, the users’ needs, hence the function of the building, will change. Art museums used not to have cafes and education suites. Cathedrals used not to have visitor centres. Schools used not to have computers. Hospitals used not to have shops. Houses used not to have more than one bathroom. People never worked from home. The best buildings adapt readily. There was a phrase for this, popular among better architects as long ago as the 1970s. It’s time to revive it: Long Life, Loose Fit.
Hugh Pearman is architecture critic of The Sunday Times and editor of the RIBA Journal