Common Decency

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2000 by Peter Davey

National and local governments are building anti-architecture to show voters how economical they are. Future generations will be cursed with the muck we are creating. It is time to rediscover essential human dimensions.

Most modern governments have strange values when it comes to procuring buildings. They want to make their mark: the public demands schools, hospitals, infrastructure projects and much else. But there must be no sign of wasting taxpayers' money. Historically, throwing money at building was one of the signs of successful government. From the Pharaohs to the Enlightenment, rulers emphasized their regime and the presence of the state by investing massively in buildings that were both celebrations of power and instruments for imposing it. Roman emperors created ceremonial arches under which their subjects had to pass in ritual homage; Louis XIV created Versailles as a huge physical and ritualistic mechanism for keeping the restive nobility in order.

Tellingly, modern French presidents (perhaps the most individually powerful heads of a modern European democratic state), have been able to create the Grands Projets as monuments to their tenure of office. Only in Berlin has there been a similar investment of resources in building for the government. But that was because it was necessary to recreate the city as the capital of the most powerful nation in Europe, and to sew together the horrific past, the troubled present and a hopeful future with as much grace as possible.

Barcelona has set a splendid example of urban regeneration using civic rather than national resources (AR August 1992 and AR September 1999), but elsewhere in Europe, and the rest of the world, most governments (national and local) have developed methods for reducing the economic, and visual, impact of their investments. In Britain, there is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby developers are asked to bid for public projects, to build, own and maintain them at an annual fee for 30 years, after which the building reverts to the state. Clearly, the scheme is wonderfully politically advantageous. It allows state spending to be spread over a long period, and during the same time obviates responsibility for maintenance. In some kinds of construction, particularly large civil engineering works, such contracts clearly have advantages.

But they involve very serious problems, principally that total control of a project resides with the contractor. This is perhaps very sensible when building a dam, tunnel or runway, but where construction affects the quality of human life -- in buildings -- there is a strong case for questioning such methods of procurement. Contractors have to bid to gain each project, and preparation of such bids is very expensive (indeed, it is not yet entirely clear whether or not the process does actually offer societies good value in the long term). Naturally, anything which might stand in the way of providing the maximum amount of enclosed and serviced volume for minimum cost has to be left out of the equations. So architecture -- if it figures at all in the recipe -- is reduced to patterning up the elevations and ensuring that fire-escape routes conform to the building regulations.

Architecture offers more

Architecture is more than this: it can offer tenderness and particularity, nobility and generosity, not qualities easily accounted for in a PFI bid, and ones unlikely to be seen in the proposed new wave of British hospitals which are being built under the system. There is an uncomfortable echo of the last time the British government became very cosy with the contracting industry: the '60s, when system builders were expected to be able to fulfil a massive social housing programme. In Britain, as everywhere else which adopted similar strategies for producing maximum volume at minimum cost, results in terms of physical and social decay are now only too apparent.

PFI and its equivalents like BOOT are not the only systems used by governments to dumb-down architecture. A short while ago, I went to the first European Community offices to be erected in Greece, at Salonica. The poor architects of the project did their best against a system which required a turn-key project -- under EC rules, they were not allowed to consult the users (themselves EC employees). The accommodation schedule grew mightily, while the budget fluctuated in a completely unpredictable manner. And then the architects were denied supervision of construction. No wonder that the resulting building was diagrammatic in planning, and often crude in construction. Through no fault of the architects, the building will need major maintenance in a few years' time. The EC certainly has not got good value. All the more reason, cynics will say, for using a PFI contract, which ensures that the contractor pays for repairs in the first three decades instead of a form of design and build under which the contractor ca n depart as soon as the first key is turned.

But does a democracy really have to choose to build brutish, dull, utilitarian buildings when building for itself? There must be room for decency, for values that can be added to delivery on time and to minimum cost. Democracy may not be a remarkably efficient system of government, but as Churchill remarked, it is the 'worst form ... except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. As modern liberal democracies evolved, they were certainly capable of producing fine architecture that continues to move and inspire us. The great town halls of the Victorians, the noble housing achievements of the German speaking countries in the 1920s, classics of the second half of the twentieth century like the Sydney Opera House or the beautiful Lutheran churches of post-war Scandinavia, and much, much else show that democracy can produce decent buildings. Why can't we continue the tradition and enrich it today?