The social context for architecture

The reaction to 11 September 2001 makes for a social context hostile to innovation. What began in the 1980s as 'What If?' spreadsheets on Wall Street led, in the 1990s, to a religion of Risk Management. Since the events of 9-11, society's fear of risk has soared further, and this is affecting the already risk averse construction industry directly.

Grand architecture, it is held, makes us more vulnerable - like grand technology, or big brands. A great amount of self-doubt, and in some places a lot of self-loathing, now accompanies the achievements of Western civilisation: when Silvio Berlusconi or Pim Fortuyn said that Islam is backward, they were excoriated.

Fear of risk has been globalised and generalised. For anti-capitalists, and indeed for many scientists, the technology, knowledge and experiment genie is out of the bottle. As the example of biology shows, that genie is held to be more powerful, and more dangerous in its effects, than politicians or history or the future.

Because it is fearful and irrationally attached to 'nightmare scenarios', this contemporary social context for architecture is therefore quite hostile to innovation. Genuine innovations in architecture - in process, product, organisation and business model - still occur. But while we celebrate innovation, we need to be discriminating about it. While mud bricks and microflats are all the rage, not enough really substantive innovation is happening.

Four years after Egan, and despite his lament earlier this year about the lack of progress, we face a real crisis in UK residential construction. But Lord Falconer's out-of-the-blue proposal for prefabs to house teachers and nurses only underlines how, in terms of innovation, the building trade remains a backward industrial sector. It also remains a moot point whether construction will join other sectors in reaping productivity gains from IT, albeit in the pursuit of Business Agility.

The idea of agility among businesses has its origins in Risk Management, for it has come to mean agility in the face of external events like 11 September. In its different dimensions, Business Agility captures much of what the architect's typical client will be like 10 years from now, in 2012.

At its best, agility is not just physical prowess, but mental alertness; not just efficiency, but effectiveness. So the typical client of 2012 will 'sense and respond' to new developments, and will be able to quickly enter new markets. It will also have a highly organised attitude toward buying. By 2012 most European clients and most small architectural practices will be using broadband telecommunications as a principal channel for buying. However, will architects embrace the wider innovation that IT, along with advances in materials, makes possible ?

The potential of IT goes further than applying it to transactions, Key Performance Indicators and marketing. There is more to architectural life than scoring high in the computer game of CABE benchmarked Design Quality Indicators.

IT is not just a matter of CAD teamworkers, digital walkthroughs and the expensive, if investment-free delights of virtual space; nor even of the new engineering made possible by CAD. For if it was backed by serious investment, IT could also raise productivity on-site, among the gritty realities of the cement mixer and the brickie.

Architects must decide whether they want to adopt agility in this progressive sense. Society and individual clients are looking to see whether, beyond pastiche styles, heritage or eco-projects, urban regeneration through icons and buildings as brands, architects and the construction sector deserve to retain their legitimacy, by now delivering a lot more great but inexpensive buildings - fast. If these things are not delivered in the near future, the relative backwardness of this sector compared with, say, the car industry may prove too much stigma for the profession to bear.

On the railways and in IT, cost overruns are under the microscope. The same fate awaits the complacent architect, unwilling or unable to be an actively innovative party in Supply Chain Management. IT - some of it built into components and materials - will help businesses control inventory. Through Supplier Relationship Management, IT will allow businesses to be more able to:

• get involved in property development early, and so ensure that specifications are improved
• forecast demand and so ensure that inventories are minimised
• balance the ordering of supplies between centralised and decentralised buying units
• specify the global and local places where orders should be both assembled and delivered.

Clients will maximise agility by getting intimate with suppliers - and not only over important issues of remuneration, insurance and appointment. Architects must ask themselves if they are ready for that intimacy, and for the role that IT can play in achieving it.

It will be good if 'partnering' means architects understanding clients' concerns earlier and better. If it means subordination to clients, or confused liabilities, that's bad.

It would be naïve to imagine that cost will recede in importance to clients. However, the world in 2012 is likely to be not just deflationary, but also very risk-averse. A trusted, reliable brand, as represented by people who clearly know what they are doing, gives a new salience to the old slogan 'Nobody got fired for buying IBM'.

At the same time, government regulators look set to impose still further constraints on companies, particularly in relation to environmental concerns. Compliance with 'sustainability' regulation will be among the most important criteria for buying architectural services in 2012. As the New York meeting of the World Economic Forum showed, the establishment's conversion to the 'triple bottom line' of not just economic, but also ecological and social goals has been complete. The international conference on sustainability to be held in Johannesburg later this year will confirm the point.

That could prove problematic. Compliance with UK and EU regulation on sustainability, along with the local scale and labour-intensive nature of that enterprise, will tend to add to costs and make architects' adoption of the agile approach quite difficult. Anyway, do we really want to minimise our impact on the natural environment ? Is that, like saving energy and materials, the right goal for architecture in 2012 ? For a Dutchman coming from a country built out of dykes, I find that hard to accept.

In the IT sector agility is anyway more and more interpreted in terms of businesses being prepared enough to survive an event like 11 September. Regulation that mandates plans for business continuity and disaster recovery is growing.

A recent London Transport conference on bioterror hinted that it's more essential to embed resilience in infrastructure than it is to do something useful about customer or staff issues on the Underground. Architects must ask whether saving lives is really the buying criterion on which they want to be measured. Equally, must individual architects in 2012 insist on salving their consciences, conforming with New Labour policy, and being regenerative, inclusive, transparent, educational, healing, holistic and playful ? I thought architects were supposed to engage in engineering, not social engineering.

Despite the irrational pessimism that now surrounds IT, all forms of IT have a lot to contribute to architecture and construction. Forecasting and entering UK and export markets will be a mark of agility among architects. So will the adoption of key technologies.

Through Continuing Professional Development the architectural profession can retain its reputation - not by consciousness-raising about universal access, the users of buildings or the need for learning and healing within them, but by a solid struggle for that mental vigilance and discrimination that characterise business agility. The fate of BA's Waterside offices shows us just where New Age silliness leads. The dynamism of, for example, Shanghai's architecture, for all its problems, shows us where we need to go. James Woudhuysen 29 July 2002

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org and all material is Copyright © 2004 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.