Building for authority - Comment - Cover Story

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2003

This issue is about buildings made by governments, both national and local, to serve the needs of citizens--the people who pay for the results. In these pages are good examples, but the British government seems determined to ignore any notion of quality.

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Do democratic governments have any role at all in architecture? If democracy is rule by the people rather than an individual or an oligarchy, what kinds of building and cityscapes should represent the state and its citizens? Few would deny that governments have to assume a role in providing certain kinds of building. Even the most right-wing regime needs barracks, police stations and prisons. Should these be provided as mere shedding at Guantanamo Bay? Or should they, Habsburg-like, have some kind of symbolic presence? What should the range of public building be? Does government interest in the appearance and atmosphere of buildings indicate an unhealthy return to imperial thinking? Do governments have a legitimate role in deciding about the quality of building, rather than just its provision?

Certainly some governments believe they should have. In Norway, for instance, there is an elaborate code intended to improve the quality of all publicly funded buildings (AR August 1993, p7). France has a vigorous competition system for young architects to encourage new thinking in public works. In countries like Germany and Finland, all important public buildings are put out to competitions, in the case of the most important work usually with completely open entry, sometimes with controversial and even unpopular results, like the Kiasma art museum in Helsinki, won by Stephen Holl (AR August 1998). Of course jury decisions are sometimes open to question, but at least such competitions are set up to improve the quality of the public realm.

In contrast, the British Government has largely taken the line that architectural quality is irrelevant as long as there is appropriate quantity. The Labour administration has embraced with fervour an invention of its Conservative predecessor, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), under which most official work of both central and local government is handed to the private sector. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this in principle. After all, the private sector built the terraces of Bath and Edinburgh, the Rockefeller Center and the great consumer malls of North America (which even if they are ecologically disastrous and scarcely great architecture, are at least immensely popular).

The PFI is a means of transferring the cost of assets we achieve in the present to the future. In a sense, this has always happened, yet the PFI is a much more complicated process than the simple one of a speculator investing capital and hoping to get a decent return during the lifetime of the resulting building. In its simplest interpretation, PFI means that government or local government commissions a building from the private sector but pays nothing initially. All construction and commissioning costs are borne by the contractor. Then the government leases the work from the builder for a fixed term of years, during which it has to be maintained by its maker.

Not so simple

Apparently, this is an absolutely brilliant system: we acquire assets for which we pay as we use them; the government does not have to increase its borrowing; taxes will not increase; maintenance is dealt with free by the maker. But PFI is not so simple. Because the government must be sure that the deal is correct and competition for a job between providers is totally fair and appropriate, the process of bidding for PFI work is immensely expensive for contractors. So virtually the only values involved in creation of PFI work are financial. Accountants, quantity surveyors and bureaucrats rule--a brilliant recipe for mass-producing shedding for the lowest price per cubic metre, but not one for generating even architecture of mall quality. The designers are not directly contracted to the client and design work is largely part of the bid process. Contracts for as many as 50 schools can be awarded at a time: results are predictably totally without cognizance of locality, orientation or community.

Now that the first fruits of PFI have been up for a few years, it is clear that all are far from free of blemish. Some PFI buildings do not work properly; some are the cause of litigation; some are clearly going to have maintenance problems throughout their lives. Not very different perhaps from the results of conventional, old-fashioned means of building procurement. But there is a very important variation. Virtually no products of the PFI system have architectural quality, and most are little better than the very crudest publicly funded buildings of the 1960s, the last time when the building industry was unleashed with considerations of quantity far overwhelming those of quality. Now we view the rotting hulks of much of the utilitarian public work of that era with horror, and are trying to find ways of affording to demolish or improve them. PFI will be used. The dreadful circle will continue.