Designing Better Building

Sebastian Macmillan, Sebastian Macmillan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134376988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Design is widely recognised as the key to improving the quality of the built environment. This well-illustrated book comprises 15 chapters written by leading practitioners, clients, academics and other experts, and presents the latest thinking on what design quality is and how to achieve it. For design practitioners and their clients alike, the book provides evidence to justify greater focus on, and investment in, design. It summarises the benefits that arise from good design - such as, civic pride in the urban environment, the stimulation of urban regeneration, corporate identity, occupant productivity and health in offices, improved learning outcomes in schools, better patient recovery rates in hospitals, as well as reduced environmental impact. And it illustrates these benefits through case study examples. Eight chapters focus on case studies of exemplary buildings in particular sectors - offices, schools, housing, and hospitals - and explain why and how they came to be designed, and the design qualities they exhibit.

Chapter 1

Design as a value generator

Sebastian Macmillan

There has never been a better time to address the issue of design quality and the value of design. Both are high on the political agenda. Government has endorsed the view that that everyone benefits from the buildings, towns and cities where we live and work providing efficiently constructed environments that promote health, productivity, and civic pride. And it is supporting initiatives to promote sustainable development, to improve the design of the built environment, and to raise the efficiency of the construction industry.

Although there are antecedents, these three initiatives largely began with the election of New Labour in 1997, when sustainability, the built environment and the construction industry were all the subject of political attention. The Deputy Prime Minister commissioned both a Construction Task Force led by Sir John Egan, and an Urban Design Task Force led by Lord Rogers. The Urban Task Force report (1999) called for a design-led urban renaissance: ‘Our analysis of successful urban design case studies emphasises how deeply quality of urban life is affected by good design,’ and

Design is a core problem-solving activity that not only determines the quality of the built environment – the buildings, public spaces, landscape and infrastructure – but also delivers many of the instruments for the implementation of an urban renaissance.

The Construction Task Force report (1998) made a number of recommendations for improving the quality and efficiency of UK construction, though it had little to say about design, indeed little to say about the product of construction other than that it should be completed on time and within budget. It was left to the Deputy Prime Minister retrospectively to introduce design as a vital component:

Good design is an integral and essential part of Rethinking Construction. It is a key to many of the performance targets; it is a key to reducing construction time and defects; it is a key to sustainability and to respect for the environment. In the broadest sense it is the key to respect for people, whether they be users of a building or passers by …

(Rt Hon John Prescott, 1999)

These sentiments about design were subsequently picked up, endorsed and expanded by the government’s Better Public Buildings Group. In the Foreword to the group’s publication Better Public Buildings, the Prime Minister commits the government to making a step change in the quality of building design in the public sector (DCMS, 2000):

We know that good design provides a host of benefits. The best designed schools encourage children to learn. The best designed hospitals help patients to recover their spirits and their health. Well-designed parks and town centres help to bring communities together…. That is why I have asked ministers and departments across government to work towards achieving a step change in the quality of building design in the public sector…. I am determined that good design should not be confined to high profile buildings in the big cities; all users of public services … should be able to benefit from better design.

However, the Foreword also makes it clear that it is the Egan view of ‘good design’ that is being endorsed:

It is widely believed that good design is a costly luxury. But this is simply not true. As Sir John Egan’s report Rethinking Construction demonstrated, best practice in integrating design and construction delivers better value for money as well as better buildings, particularly when attention is paid to the full costs of a building over its whole lifetime.

By effectively defining good design as ‘integrated design and construction’ the publication neatly implied that Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes, where design is integrated with construction, or often subsumed by it, are as able as conventionally-procured buildings to achieve design quality.

PFI is typically finance-led rather than design-led. In recognition of the risk that good design is sacrificed to financial concerns, the Treasury Task Force produced a guidance note in which the contribution of design was ringingly endorsed:

At its broadest, design is the process in which intelligence and creativity are applied to a project in order to achieve an efficient and elegant solution…. good design is not an ‘optional extra’, rather it is inherent in the way the brief is responded to from the very beginning. Design encompasses functional efficiency, structural integrity, sustainability, lifetime costing, and flexibility as well as responsiveness to the site and to its setting…. Good design involves creativity, and it should lead to simplification and to savings in cost…. it can increase outputs and add to the quality of service. It can also give the facility a competitive advantage in attracting both customers and staff. Good design can also contribute to wider policy objectives, such as those relating to the protection of the environment. Good design … adds value in the following ways: functionality; reducing whole-life costs; service enhancement; architectural quality and wider social and environmental benefits.

(Treasury Task Force, 2000)

CABE, the Movement for Innovation, and Sustainable Construction

To help industry meet the Construction Task Force objectives, the Movement for Innovation (M4I) was established in 1998. Its mission was ‘to lead radical improvement in the construction industry in: value for money, profitability, reliability, and respect for people; through the demonstration and dissemination of best practice and innovation’ (from the M4I web site www.m4i.org.uk.).

To deliver the step change in the quality of public buildings and champion good quality architecture and urban design, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment was established in September 1999, replacing the Royal Fine Art Commission. Initially funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), it was subsequently recognised in the White Paper Our Towns and Cities: the future (DETR, 2000) as being relevant to the responsibilities of the DETR which became its joint sponsor (following government reorganisation, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister became its joint sponsor with DCMS).

The White Paper itself largely endorsed the call by the Urban Task Force for good design:

We want good planning and design in new development and renovation to be second nature for everyone, in both the public and private sectors. To achieve this we need to demonstrate the benefits of good practice through real life examples and encourage people to take the importance of good design and planning more seriously.

(DETR, 2000)

CABE has stated that ‘Good design is fundamental to achieving high-quality public buildings’ and has identified a number of steps that are needed to encourage it, including: raising client commitment to achieving design quality, setting project budgets based on whole-life costs and benefits, setting benchmarks for design quality, communicating design needs, ensuring full stakeholder involvement in the design process, and signalling the importance of design to the procurement process (CABE, 2002a).

The original Rethinking Construction report made no reference to sustainability, but the government initiative on sustainable development identified construction as a sector where improvement was needed. In the daughter paper Opportunities for Change: Sustainable Construction (DETR, 1998), a call was made for progress in two areas that relate to quality, even though the term design was not used. These are:

• appropriate quality, durable, built environments that are flexible and adaptable; …

• the provision of buildings which are resource and energy efficient in their operation, and which provide pleasing and efficient environments for living, working and leisure.

Both were endorsed in the subsequent publication A Better Quality of Life: A strategy for sustainable development for the UK (DETR, 1999). As Bordass (2000) explains, there is an urgent need to make buildings more resource efficient while also contributing to human satisfaction and to business performance; and these ambitions need not conflict.

Establishing the principles of good design

CABE has the remit to promote good design in towns and cities and has begun to establish the principles of good design. This is by no means the first attempt to do so. 2000 years ago, the architect Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture (Morgan, 1960), were respectfully addressed to the Emperor, and sought to influence the design of public buildings. He argued for six fundamental principles to be followed – order, arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, propriety, and economy.

In our own times, roles have been reversed as Prince Charles sought to influence architects. In his Vision of Britain (1989) he proposed ‘Ten principles we can build upon’. These were: sense of place, hierarchy, scale, harmony, enclosure, materials, decoration, art, signs and lights, and community. Five years later, the Royal Fine Art Commission published its enquiry into What Makes a Good Building? (RFAC, 1994) and identified order and unity, expression, integrity, plan and section, detail, and integration with neighbouring buildings as the criteria for a good building.

Other authors have also prescribed the attributes that buildings should demonstrate at the urban scale. Punter and Carmona (1997) review them, comparing and contrasting principles proposed by the Prince of Wales with similar lists from authors like Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Francis Tibbalds, the Urban Design Group, and others. Parfect and Power (1997) cover some of the same ground.

The Urban Task Force (1999) offered its own set of ‘key principles’ for urban design:

1 Site and setting

2 Context, scale and character

3 Public realm

4 Access and permeability

5 Optimising land use and density

6 Mixing activities

7 Mixing tenures

8 Building to last

9 Sustainable buildings

10 Environmental responsibility.

CABE’s emerging guides to good practice (CABE and DETR, 2000; CABE and DTLR, 2001) begin to identify and prescribe the principles of good design at both the individual building and urban levels (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Principles of good design as identified by CABE

CABE (2002b) What makes a good project?

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