A new architectural heritage

A cultural revolution has swept through construction in the past couple of years, tearing down the bastions of power and privilege.

In the face of this change, architects and other consultants have at times found themselves regarded as enemies of the republic - an unproductive bourgeoisie standing in the way of Chairman Egan's new order. The more radical revolutionaries even talked of stripping them of their status and reducing their role to that of supplier.

There seemed little that the architectural community could do to wrest the initiative back. Little, that is, until last September, when the pendulum swung back unexpectedly in its favour.

Just as the standing of designers seemed poised to enter terminal decline, the Government launched a new champion of architectural quality - the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE).

As the Movement for Innovation's job with lean construction is to take the best and infect the rest, so CABE is intended to do the same for design excellence. To "infuse architecture into the bloodstream of the nation", as the announcement put it.

It will have statutory status and will have scope to shape the attitude of Government clients, planners, local authorities and eventually private clients and house builders. Its design panel will advise on strategically important projects - 50 during the first year - and in time it will develop a self-funding regional structure of 15 areas each with its own demonstration projects and KPIs. Sounds familiar? It certainly will to anyone who has been involved with M4I.

Oh great, you may think, another initiative. Just when I'd got my head around all the others, up pops one with an agenda that clashes with the rest.

Contrast would be a better word. Actually, the message of CABE is not at odds with that of M4I. It says pretty similar things about the need to improve the process, as well as the quality, of design. But it does so with an accent that is much more pleasing to an architect's ear than the utilitarian efficiency calls of M4I. Specifically, it focuses attention on increasing value at a time when others are talking about reducing cost.

It has been busily applying this principle. It has helped to shape new Treasury guidance to see that value, not lowest cost, is the aim of future PFI projects. And it has contributed to new DETR guidance to planners issued in May that will mould the project approval process.

CABE's first chairman is one of the industry's few household names - Stuart Lipton. As the developer of Broadgate, Ludgate Circus and Stockley Park, he has instant credibility in both the design and construction circles, as well as in the wider world.

Lipton's views are a striking counterpoint to those of other senior clients in the cultural revolution debate. He is clearly passionate about putting creativity back at the heart of the construction process, though not, like some, at any cost.

He is fiercely defensive of UK designers in general, including architects, and seems to lay much of the blame for industry shortcomings on clients and contractors who fail to match their abilities.

"We have probably the most distinguished group of designers we have ever had. They are more prolific in number, in output, in skill and are world-renowned. So why should we question their skill? We have to question the process.

"Having extremely competent designers we should be having innovation, we should be getting near the edge, because that is where innovation is taking place, and that means risk. And risk has reward, and we need reward in this industry."



Innovation is clearly a burning issue in CABE. And not just innovation in reducing cost. There is a passion for creativity in form and function.

"To ignore innovation is to ignore life. We are coming to a world where we will have endless energy, we will be wireless, you will be able to transform your own environment, you'll move wherever you want to, your office will be with you, the building will talk to you - we know all these things are on the horizon."

Lipton believes he has personal contact with 200 quality architects across the land, some small, some large, who are capable of such work. But he believes their talents are held back by the cowardly pragmatism of clients. The private sector, in his view, is the worst culprit.

"Many clients find it easier to seek very modest architecture because modest architecture is going to get approved. And this is where we have to join with local authorities. This is where Government is being very helpful to us. Government has said it wants better work. Government is also prepared to be a better client. It will take time, but it's happening.

"A private client typically does not have that aspiration. A private client seeing the debate that goes on around innovative buildings typically shies away. So we have expensive but very boring buildings being built. The use of high-quality stone is thought to be some kind of panacea for good design. Modest materials produce good design too."

In contrast, Lipton is full of praise for the Treasury, which he believes is committed to long-term improvement in value, and has the strength to take the rest of Whitehall with it. Naturally, its reasons for espousing quality design have little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with economic common sense.

It is a holistic argument that runs like this: environments affect the way people feel, work and act. If you can create a more conducive environment, exponential gains can result.

"People are suddenly realising architecture is about more than lines on paper - it affects the way people behave. We know for instance that patients tend to recover better in natural light. We know well-designed schools reduce truancy and vandalism. And we know that well-designed spaces reduce crime."

The Government has come to the view that if the built improvement can be improved, huge savings can be made that will make mere reductions in capital cost pale into insignificance. "The NHS says buildings are 4% of its cost. Staff are 80%. Move the efficiency 1% and you are talking about huge savings," says Lipton.

Reclaiming public areas in sink estates would be another example. Make the landscape lighter and brighter in communal areas, and people feel safer. Result: they come out more, the space becomes safer still and people are fitter and happier and so spend less time visiting their GPs.

Lipton's own taste in architecture is on the avant garde side. He trots out provocative examples such as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Foster's Ipswich building for Willis Faber and Dumas. But he claims he is not out to push a particular style, and stresses, too, the importance of public space, of proportion and of buildings knitting together.

Lipton says: "We are aiming for design excellence. That doesn't mean every building should be a firework. Life is not like that. Think of the Crescent in Bath, it's set up as a piece, or Regent Street, it's a piece, and the great squares. Peter Foggart, the architect for Broadgate, said that you can't have too many fireworks. What you see when you go into a great square is the spaces in between buildings, the sky."

Lipton argues that innovative design can and should be efficient to build - take, for example, Lake Point Tower in Chicago and the Willis Faber building - both were unusual curving shapes, but still straightforward to build.

CABE's message is that buildings have to be interesting and affordable to build. And that's not just initial capital cost. With sustainability rising ever higher up the agenda they must be efficient to run and maintain.

Lipton adheres to the orthodox view that this demands integration of the design and construction processes. "In any other industry you wouldn't ask the question [who leads design] because they would have said we are building an integrated product, which is a design for production. It is symptomatic of the problem in the industry."

However, Lipton's view of how this integration should be achieved and where it will lead has a different flavour to much of what is being said now. To begin with, he believes builders, not designers, are inhibiting the process.

"The entire process should be a process in harmony. It should be about a group of people sitting down and within days getting a concept that works. Whereby the specialists involved in the process, the M&E engineer, the fa‡ade engineer and structural engineer, led by the architect, then the constructor having the ability to match their skills. And so often they don't. I've worked with some excellent people, but they are not the norm.

"A lot of emphasis is needed on the construction team being up to the debate. They are often not prepared to sit at the same table as the rest of the team.

"Why doesn't the industry make any money? Because it hasn't got the expertise. We know that typically 10% of the value of a building goes out in a skip, and 10% is wasted in design or construction mistakes. That's 20% available for distribution. If the industry makes 1%, a good proportion is from cashflow. Builders have become financiers.

"If they don't make decent margins they aren't going to research and innovate themselves."

Lipton would like to see sites run with more mechanisation and the smooth logistics of a supermarket. "The technology is there. But we're just not doing it. There isn't a passion for this. There has to be a passion."

The need to design for manufacture is being widely recognised across the industry. However, Lipton's spin on this appears less radical than the thinking being spawned within M4I.

A recent M4I workshop spun out the idea that design for manufacture should logically lead to buildings being 'bolted on' to a services and plant room core. This would lead to a minimum of clashes and optimum efficiency in assembly. Maybe, but Lipton is not impressed.

"I think that would be disappointing. Buildings must be contextual but they must work. My version of that would be that 70% of a building's component parts are very similar from job to job. However, to say that every building must be the same would be crass and boring.

"Standardisation is misunderstood. If a building is honest one piece of steel sits on the next, and if it's honest it uses components that typically are standard. However, its fa‡ade and its emotion should be different."

This contrast in emphasis could well prove trivial. Then again, it may not. M4I is striving to focus people on cutting capital costs, while CABE is directing them to softer notions of increasing value. One message will appeal more to builders, the other to designers. There could be a risk of the two sides polarising, instead of integrating.

While Lipton is critical of both builders and clients, he saves his deepest criticisms for private house builders.

"The blot on the nation in this country comes from house builders. However many offices we build, the office world is changing - it's responded to new ways of working, and office building in general has improved. Housing hasn't changed.

"People like individuality. They are demanding change. Builders don't seem to be interested - 'build a box' is their response."

While the house builders have been tardy in accepting CABE's challenge, the response has been good elsewhere. Lipton is confident that in five years time the commission will have 15 self-funding regions carrying the torch for quality and running successful demonstration projects. "Once we have a dozen or so projects in each region things will start to build rapidly."

He can expect plenty of interest from the public sector, urged on by its political masters. But for private clients to come to the party, the projects will have to show clear business benefits. Lipton believes the collaboration CABE can foster between all sides in the debate will make this a cinch. "If collaboration produces consensus there will be hard commercial benefits. Buildings will receive planning consents faster, because they have been co-ordinated better. There will be fewer mistakes. I mean, what do mistakes cost the housing industry? And if there are fewer mistakes, there might be some extra profit."

It remains to be seen if CABE's five-year plan achieves all this. If it does, it will have done more than turn the revolutionary guard from the architect's door. It will have created a new architectural heritage for the country, and, in all probability, a new place for the enemy of the republic in the nation's heart. A meeting of minds is how Lord Norman Foster describes the work carried out by his architectural practice and Electronic Arts at its £20m European headquarters at Chertsey, Surrey.

"This building is a culmination of the common ground between Electronic Arts and my practice. We share a lot of similarities," says Foster. "Both stand or fall by our level of creativity."

And there is no doubt that creativity is the mot juste for the new campus tucked away in the Hillswood Business Park at Chertsey. A curved 15m glass wall arcs elegantly around an eighteenth century lake to front a building designed on the guiding principle of environmentalism.

"This building is not intended as a symbol of how far we've come, but how far we're going to go," says David Gardner, managing director at Electronic Arts, a multi-national computer games software development company, whose products include FIFA 2000 and James Bond games.

The intention was to set a new standard for working environments for Electronic Arts, whose headquarters are in Redwood City, California.

The relationship between Electronic Arts and Foster started in January 1997 when Foster was invited to design the masterplan for the company's European headquarters. Foster says he was immediately drawn to the project when the brief was issued - although he did have an incentive.

"My son, who was 11 at the time, jumped up and down when he heard we had been invited to put forward a proposal," recalls Foster. "As an avid customer of EA, he told me this was one contract we had to win."

Sited in 10,000m2 of woodland that has been converted to a business park, the building is the first phase of a two-phase development which, when completed, will give 17,968m2 of office space. The newly-completed phase one comprises three prongs, or units, of office accommodation with each prong connected by a central atrium and a series of interconnecting bridges.

Despite such a large area to heat and illuminate, the architectural team has given plenty of thought to heating and lighting systems that will be capable of delivering what the client wants - a saving of about £50,000 a year.

One measure helping Electronic Arts achieve these savings is the careful positioning of the building. The curved glass frontage of the structure faces south, maximising natural light penetration while eliminating direct solar gain. Giant brise soleil structures along both sides of the building also provide work areas with protection from solar glare. The plant rooms face north, thereby acting as a solar buffer to reduce the cooling requirements.

As well as ensuring the building is energy efficient, both Electronic Arts and Foster are keen to reduce the likelihood of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS), which is believed to cost UK companies £4bn in lost man-hours.

According to Electronic Arts, one of the key methods of preventing SBS is to give employees control of their working environment, so staff at Chertsey have windows that open and individual control of the heating and ventilation systems in their workspace.

The building also incorporates an interesting architectural first. It has 3.5-storey sliding doors that form part of the front curved glass wall and are thought to be the first to use aircraft hangar door mechanisms outside an aircraft hangar.

Along with incorporating state-of-the-art energy efficient measures, Foster has clearly relished the unusual requirements of Electronic Arts' UK headquarters. "For 30 years I have been driven by a passion to improve the quality of the work place and to break down barriers," says Foster.

In this case, barriers does not simply mean partitions between employees or different departments - it is the creation of an egalitarian working environment. Open work areas are all visible from a central communal atrium, known as 'the street', a focal point for all social activities.

"Our best concepts have never come from one individual working in isolation and we believe they never will," says Gardner.

This egalitarian floor plan also includes Gardner. He gets to sit in the same open-plan office as the staff and has the same opportunity to use the social elements available to everyone.

These include the 140-seat restaurant, two bars, a gym, a five-a-side football pitch, online shopping service from Waitrose, barbecue terrace and a games arcade. And people call this work?