Architects' Bake Off - Biscuit or Blancmange?

The scheme for the 'Olympicopolis' project in the Olympic Park, by Allies and Morrison and others, was - along with the continuing saga of the Garden Bridge - a top architectural story of the summer silly season, when the scheme for a new cultural quarter was publicly criticised by Peter Cook and others, basically on the grounds that it is boring.

Rowan Moore's piece in the Observer, well argued as ever, described the spat as 'biscuit vs blancmange' - Cook having characterized the peddlers of the bricky New London Vernacular architecture as the 'biscuit boys'.

This was all argued out in similar terms over a decade ago, in the New Labour heyday of the lottery funded wow-factor 'icon' - the apotheosis of the debate in those days being Graham Morrison's memorable talk at the Royal Academy in 2004, with icon projects such as Will Alsop's Liverpool 'Fourth Grace' in the firing line.

Once upon a time it was obvious which were the important buildings in the city - churches, town halls on so on.  They were the most noticeable, and usually the biggest, buildings, and the best architects got to design them - the 'icons' of their day.

Now the best architects - including the ones who want to do showy buildings - don't generally get churches to do, and even cultural projects are rare - so they give us showy blocks of flats or offices.























The agents and marketing people who are tasked with shifting new office space and flats want pretty much everything to be unique, iconic - or at the very least a landmark or a gateway.

But not everything can be an eye-catching, look-at-me building.  Some architects are much more likely than others to offer you one - but did anyone except the client want one?  Some argue that in an age where consensus about anything is rare and deference is seldom found anywhere, the city is no worse for a few new eye-catchers. And certainly a city where the only things that can go ahead are those to which no one objects is not going to be a very interesting place.

But there is room for a lot more thought, and explicit discussion, at the beginning of a project concerning how far the 'look-at-me' dial is to be turned up in any particular instance.  It is a question that relates to the uses of the building and its place in the city - and the answer might influence the choice of architect, and what the brief asks them to do.

In London, where the cityscape is becoming, in places, a bit of a mess - part glorious mess, part inglorious - there is a clear need for more and better planning - in the sense of ordering the city, through spatial planning, rather than writing more and more and longer and longer documents - and for more quality control.

That means debate both about the basic question of whether building proposals are any good or not, but also questions about what form of expression is appropriate in any given situation: biscuit or blancmange, plain or fancy, straight or curvy.  Both sorts of consideration are important to the future of London's cityscape.

The Olympicopolis Bake Off affair is the reverse of the more common sort of objection that building proposals are showy when they should be quiet.  Peter Cook has a point: if you can't be a bit flash in a cultural project in a regeneration area, where can you?

Planning (in) the digitised future

One of the suggestions made by the Skyline Campaign is that there should be better, and publicly accessible, digitised modelling of project proposals.  I don't agree with a lot of they say about tall buildings, but I do agree with this.   Citizens should be able to find out for themselves what is being put forward, and the technology exists for them to be able to see images of what it would look like from a viewpoint they are interested in.  If you can make a film like Gravity, then you can certainly make a system like that without inventing any new technology. It wouldn't be cheap, though; it raises tricky questions of open access to data; and it also makes you think about just how accessible such a system is likely to be for everyone, as opposed to  IT literate bien-pensants.  Here is a piece on this subject that I wrote for the RIBA Smart Cities programme:

If you were excited by the digital world created in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, then looking up a planning application on a local authority website is likely to bring you back down to earth with even more of a bump than Sandra Bullock’s landing. What are the prospects for better and more sophisticated digitisation of the planning system?

It’s not hard to imagine amazing possibilities for spatial planning in a digitised world, given the continuing exponential growth of computing power and capacity.  The kind of imagery we are used to seeing on Time Team, with successive phases of building on a site presented digitally in ‘fast forward’ fly-throughs, could readily be applied to project proposals, and brought up, as standard, for consultees to review on a local authority website – rather than some badly drawn plans scanned at poor resolution, as we might be able to find today if we are lucky.  A dynamic digital imaging app could allow you to hold up your iPad in front of you on site and view a new scheme overlaid on reality, as it would appear from that viewpoint.

But today, it feels as if we are still in the Stone Age.  The applications suggested above wouldn’t need any technology we don’t have already (and probably exist already in some form) - but they are not very likely to become standard practice soon.  The reality is that digitisation of the planning system is in its infancy – and for the most part it is in the hands of local authorities, who are generally not at the bleeding edge of technology.

But even if the physical reality of buildings proposals could be presented in more and more sophisticated ways through computer modelling, will this bring about better planning?  The many problems of the UK planning system are not mainly to do with lack of access to data.  

Digital exclusion, too, should be a major concern in a system that is supposed to be democratically accountable.  Your 80 year old mother might want to say something about the Wetherspoon planned to open on her doorstep (mine did), but the average council website will not make it easy for her.

In an optimistic version of the digital future, planning authorities will be able much more readily to receive data as well as disseminate it.  Do we still want a few councillors deciding what will happen – why not ‘open source’ decision making?  Compared with a digital city model, the digital system that would allow citizens to vote on planning applications and strategies would be pretty straightforward.  But there is little appetite anywhere for rule by plebiscite rather then by representative government – which might lead you to wonder what the point would be in providing citizens with increasingly sophisticated data concerning things they are not being asked to decide on in any case.

Undershaft

My commentary on Eric Parry's Undershaft project for a new City of London office tower, from last week's AJ: 

Eric Parry’s design is a good and pleasingly modest proposal for the new peak of the City’s ‘Eastern cluster’ of towers.  Recent skyscraper building in central London has seen a rather attention-seeking crowd of starchitect designs accumulating within the jumbled medieval street layout – curvy in the case of Foster and Viñoly, angular for Rogers and Piano.  In its contingent messiness, it is a very London cluster, in spite of this international provenance, which contrasts with the calm, orthogonal approach to tall buildings raised on a north American-style masterplan grid at Canary Wharf. 

 

Parry has matured into an acknowledged master of the high end, contextual city building.   Here, this approach is taken to new heights, but in its response to its surroundings, it exhibits the same thoughtfulness at seventy storeys as seen at a tenth that height in other projects by this practice which are set within traditional city block contexts.  There isn’t room for another trophy here, and the relative straightforwardness of what is proposed can be read as an implied rebuke to some of its predecessors.

 

The limits of the Eastern cluster are largely determined by London’s protected heritage views, and new towers here need to be squeezed into an area of about one tenth of the Square Mile.  The cluster is getting denser, not bigger, with several other very large towers in the same area planned but not yet built.  It may soon begin to call to mind a crowd of lanky shipwreck survivors huddled together on an island not quite big enough for them - as the tide rises.  Thank God for what we used to know as the CU Plaza that will, in an improved form, provide at least some sort of setting for these huge buildings. 

How to get through planning: a quick introduction for the busy client

Here is a piece, directed at construction clients, that I did for this new RIBA publication, available now here.

The planning system – faites vos jeux

Everyone knows that we have a planning system – but it is by no means self-evident what it is really for. 

In its origins in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time of unregulated growth, it was devised principally to address serious concerns to do with public health and nuisance – for example, so that people did not have to live next door to a glue factory. But in less than 100 years, mission creep has set in, and we now have a very complex system that can control – and in fact micro-manage – almost every aspect of building activity.  Control of land use is still at the heart of the system, even though your neighbour who wants to set up a business is more likely to be using a laptop than boiling up glue – but the system now concerns itself with every conceivable detail of amenity and environmental protection.

Each new planning minister says they want make the system simpler – each leaves office having made it more complicated.

The planning system can be seen a paradigm of the ‘nanny state’, more than any other aspect of public administration.  But it has ended up like this in response to demand.  The person (i.e. voter) who thought last year that their human right to build a back extension to their house was being infringed when the council told them that they couldn’t – is the same person who, this year, believes that their human right to stop their neighbour building a back extension to their house is being infringed when the extension goes ahead.  This textbook manifestation of cognitive dissonance explains why politicians have given us the system we have.

Given the complexity of the system, it is no surprise that obtaining a planning consent, for a project of any size, usually involves a protracted negotiation – a process now at the heart of the system, although the word negotiation does not appear anywhere in the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

The planning system tends to be more interested in how a proposal relates to the rest of the world than in the proposal itself – so a local authority’s priorities may be upside down when compared with those of the client and their design team. And within a council, elected members may not have the same priorities as officers.

Every significant planning application is looked on as an opportunity for the local authority to get things that it wants – within the scheme itself, or outside it, via the ‘Section 106’ system – a sort of legally sanctioned ‘brown envelope’ which allows councils to ask applicants to fund things the council wants to see happen, as long as some tenuous connection with the project can be demonstrated.

The planning system has to operate under the pretence that it is rational and objective, but as practised it is a black art, and highly political, both with a small and a big ‘p’.  A lot may depend on whether decision makers like the look of your scheme – or indeed of you.  And because there are so many different aspects that are negotiable, while any one point can be considered in the light of adopted policies and guidance, the degree of discretion within each subject area is such that in practice there is a table full of chips to be shuffled around.

Planning negotiations are generally carried out with the local authority’s planning officers.  Planning decisions for major projects, however, are made by elected politicians, who will be thinking about what their electorate will think – even though their task is meant to be to decide whether a scheme complies with the planning policies that they have set out.  Planning officers are professionals (unlike politicians) – but their advice to you may be tempered by attempts to second guess what the elected members will think (and it could be in your interests that officers do this).

The dynamic between officers and elected members can vary greatly from planning authority to planning authority. In some places an authoritative or forceful chief planner may rule the roost, and members are content for that person to make the running and vote for or against schemes as they are recommended.  In a neighbouring council, members may undermine officers at every turn.

Decisions can be capricious – officers may recommend a yes on the basis of twelve months of discussion, but councillors can say no in a matter of seconds at planning meeting, while you were trying to find the right page in the agenda.

The human factor is important in planning.  A client wants their architect to design a great building for them.  But without planning permission – in the UK at least – the great design won’t get built. As well as being a designer, the architect needs to be a communicator, who can convince officials and politicians of the merits of their design.  They need to be able to tell a coherent story, in a persuasive way, about how the design is the right one for the place it will be built, as well as for the client’s brief.  They need to be able to listen to what is being said on the other side of the table as well, and to be able to judge when to stick and when to concede.

In conclusion, my five top tips for clients who seek to find their way through the territory sketched out above are:

·         Personalities matter. Build relationships.

·         With your architect, present your case to the planners confidently, in a way that shows that you understand the planning system.

·         Remember that the planning system is more interested in the project from the outside in, while the client may be more interested in it from the inside out.

·         Work out what the council would like to gain from your project – which may be quite different from what you want from it.

·         As a last resort: remember you can appeal against a refusal.  You will get a rational hearing from a planning inspector, if you didn’t get one from the local authority.

The post-war listing lottery

The listing of post-war buildings is a tricky business, and although everyone involved has to maintain that the process is entirely objective, in fact there is an element of arbitrariness to what ends up listed and what does not.

The group of post-war commercial buildings that were listed recently, for example, was a pretty good set of choices in my view; but I or any other architect or architectural historian making the final cut from the published long list would inevitably have come up with a slightly different set.

The closer one is to the present, the less there is likely to be a settled view or consensus concerning what is worth keeping. It's true for almost anything. Robert McCrum in Sunday’s Observer, reflecting on his choices for the 100 best novels in English, wrote that

'these novels span about three centuries, roughly 1700 to 2000. Compiling a list for the first 100 years was relatively straightforward, from 1800 to 1900 progressively more difficult, and from 1900 to 2000 (my arbitrary cut-off) perilously close to impossible.'

- and those who wrote in to complain about his choices were for the most part concerned with the latter group.

It's just the same for the people responsible for listing at Historic England ('HE', as we must now learn to call what was the planning half of English Heritage - it's said that the people's choice for a new name, 'Past Caring', just failed to make the cut).

Property owners who are worried that a building might be listed can apply for a Certificate of Immunity from Listing (COI), which if granted guarantees that a building won't be listed for five years.

Applying for one of these is in effect the same as applying for a building to be listed, since it means asking the Secretary of State (who makes the decision, based on advice from HE) to decide whether or not a building should be listed.

Such is the lack of consensus about which post-war buildings are worth keeping that I was recently asked by a developer whether they should apply for a COI for a complete dog of a 1960s building that is as far from being listable as one could possibly imagine. When I asked why this was being considered, it became apparent that the view of the developer, on the basis of recent cases, was that pretty much any post war building might be listed.

I don't think Robin Hood Gardens (seen in the photo above) should be listed, but as an architect, I can understand the case being made that it should be. That isn't true of most people who are not architects - particularly those who, unlike many of its supporters I suspect, have actually been to see it.

Is conservation for the haves?

A tweet from Edwin Heathcote today...

Economist offices in St James protected.  Robin Hood Gardens social housing condemned. Class system enshrined in architectural protection...

As it happens he's quite wrong about this case, in my view, since the Economist offices were worth listing, and Robin Hood Gardens isn't - but the general point is worth exploring.

Many years ago, helping to mark some geography homework, I found that in answer to the question 'what is a conservation area', one child had answered 'a conservation area is where conservatives live'. I had to give this a tick, unsure whether they were mickey-taker or dimwit.

There is a statutory duty to 'preserve' or 'enhance' listed buildings, and conservation areas and their settings, and local authorities pay correspondingly greater attention to these parts of the built environment, with dedicated staff, considerable time devoted to conservation area appraisals, and so on.  We can be fairly sure that it is the haves rather than the have nots who benefit most from this. When conservation areas are 'threatened' by new development, objectors, usually well heeled, will pray in aid the statutory duties - a set of weapons not available to, say, the residents of the average council estate if they think their homes will not be enhanced by a scheme the council has planned for them.  The latter must rely on prescriptions about the importance of 'good design' in policy and guidance - just as vague and open to interpretation as requirements to preserve and enhance, but not framed as a legal duty.

Where this is particularly relevant is in the proliferation of conservation areas to cover areas that do not really meet the required definition of 'special architectural or historic interest'.  The word 'special' is there for a reason.  The NPPF says that 'local planning authorities should ensure that an area justifies such status because of its special architectural or historic interest, and that the concept of conservation is not devalued through the designation of areas that lack special interest' - a recognition, obviously, that the problem of over-designation exists; but a piece of guidance that is widely ignored.

The result is conservation areas - typically those most recently designated - consisting mainly of coherent, stable areas of housing of the middling kind that does not meet the definition of special interest, but whose residents would like to keep them the way they are - you could think of them as 'residents association conservation areas'.

Put simply, a lot of planning effort, required by law, goes into keeping nice places nice, and generally nice environments are the preserve of the better off.  Less effort, and less resource, goes into ensuring that less favoured places are made better and not worse when changes are planned.

In planning committee reports you will sometimes find an 'equalities impact assessment', usually saying little or nothing of interest, largely cut and pasted from a previous report. But such a report is meant to address issues of gender, race and so on, where there are yet more legal duties (in this case favouring the disadvantaged, but only in specific, rather than general, categories).  It is not required to report that 'this recommendation for refusal will work to the benefit of those lucky enough to own homes in this area already, and to the disbenefit of those who would like to find somewhere to live'.

Does conservation regulation as practiced favour the haves over the have nots?  What do you think bears get up to in the woods?

New London housing - design by regulation

A 'new normal' is emerging for the design of dense urban housing in major projects in London - more as a consequence of following the rules than as a brainchild of any creative mind.

That state of affairs is not novel or unusual - it is how many building types emerge.  Much of the way that buildings are shaped has been determined by regulation rather than design intent, ever since there were regulations. Examples include the New York 'set-back style' for tall buildings - a consequence of that city's Zoning Ordinance of 1916; and London's interwar mansion blocks, many of which are 8-10 storeys high simply because of the height limit imposed at that time for reasons of fire safety, with developers 'maxing out' within the rules no less than they do today.

The building type that is emerging in London is a free standing apartment building of eight flats per floor, with a linear plan of four flats each side, with the block's long axis north-south.  These characteristics result from the housing standards now being insisted on by the GLA: no more than eight flats per lift and stair core; no more than 50% single aspect flats (therefore four corner flats plus four along the sides); no single aspect north facing flats (therefore oriented with long sides facing east and west).  You can't join the blocks up into terraces because you lose the corner flats. But the form can go as high as you want (until the planning authority, structural engineer or QS stop you for other reasons). Some schemes offer fewer flats per floor, giving you a form that is more tower-like than slab-like when you go tall - but many clients will want to know why they can't have eight flats per core like everyone else. 

This plan form can produce decent buildings.  The general idea, executed at a high level of sophistication and cost (and fewer flats per floor), can be seen in Rogers Stirk Harbour's scheme at Neo Bankside.  But as Le Corbusier's Unités (as seen photographed in sunshine) morphed into 1960s council housing (as seen photographed under storm clouds), we may fear that imitators will not pull off the model so well.

The form when repeated leads to arrangements of free standing buildings - rather at odds with today's (revived) urban design precept of buildings being used to define external space.

The GLA rules don't tell you to build in this way - it is just where the rules seem to take you. Other housing typologies - deck access, scissor flats etc - are available, but do not seem to find favour.

The New York Zoning Ordinance was turned into art in the 1920s by the genius of Hugh Ferriss, in his studies of what could be achieved within the new rules.  London's housing today needs an equivalent.