Learn to love sprawl?

An article on Australia's ABC, highlighted on Twitter by Tim Waterman, asks 'Is there such a thing as good urban sprawl?'. The argument is that sprawling suburbs have plenty of space for solar generation and if that solar energy is then used to power electric cars, transport would be green as well. The piece is based on research in Auckland, New Zealand, that shows that the average suburban home can produce enough electricity from the sun for its domestic needs and to power an electric car. If solar energy is to be the main source of power, the researchers argue, then a 'dispersed city' will be more efficient than a concentrated one.
My gut feeling is that no power is really 'free' and that places where people can walk and cycle will always be preferable. But maybe this is post justification, a dislike of the idea of a spreading suburban rash.
I have been thinking about the edges of cities recently because, unusually for me, I have been doing a certain amount of travelling by car. And as we have driven in and out of various cities mine has been the plaintive voice asking 'Did anybody actually design this? Is it possible to design it better?' The nadir was lunching in the foyer of an Odeon cinema on a retail park on the edge of Dumfries - certainly not recommended.
It is very hard when you look at those nowhere places to really imagine how they can be sorted out, and to realise that much of our country is designed, if that is the word, to be driven through and used, rather than experienced and enjoyed.
A discussion thread on The Architect's Journal's LinkedIn group asks 'Are architects to blame for ugly towns as suggested by the public'? This references the recent Crap Towns survey, the one that had Hemel Hempstead taking top position. Asked who was most to blame for crap towns, the largest number of respondents said 'architects'. On the AJ group the usual responses are made, largely that most buildings are not designed by architects. But somebody certainly plans those out of town horrors, someone gets planning permission. And I suspect a lot of the buildings have architects, even if they are not the ones who feature much on the pages of the AJ. Architects could I suppose just regard themselves as guns for hire, giving the client what they want. But most have or should have a wider sense of responsibility. It's a tricky problem. We have some really great architecture and great architects. Yet much of the country really is 'crap' particularly away from the centres that the survey considered. Is there anything that architects can, or should, do about it?

What's in a name?

When I worked at The Architects' Journal, the news editor used to take especial pleasure in finding sobriquets for the latest tower proposal (he probably still does, but I don't see him so regularly). He was particularly proud of the 'can of ham', a title that was subsequently taken up by the Daily Mail. And no less a figure than Peter Rees of the Corporation of London claimed to have named the 'cheesegrater', Roger Stirk Harbour's Leadenhall building.
Rees may have been more aware of the significance of these names, but at the AJ we certainly thought of this as an amusing game. But according to the cultural critic Owen Hatherley, writing in the Guardian earlier this week, there was a sinister underlying purpose. The country, and particularly the left, has been suckered into promote tall commercial buildings, Hatherley argues,
Where once they championed the vernacular and 'community architecture' they came to love the idea of tall buildings with commercial sponsors, partly Hatherley believes, because Thatcher's government had taken away local authorities' spending powers, and this was the only way for them to make their mark. The ideas were promoted by Richard Rogers' report on cities, and by the formation of organisations such as CABE. And, Hatherley believes, the funny names helped us all to accept them.
'The Gherkin was clearly the first of these new cuddly skyscrapers,' he writes. 'Its originally much-vaunted green technologies barely worked, but its accidental masterstroke was its very name – its shape eliciting a cabbie's affectionate monicker. Subsequent towers all came ready-nicknamed – Helter-Skelter, Walkie-Talkie, Cheese Grater, Shard. Typically, they weren't much more public – the days when the tallest buildings could be council housing, like the Trellick Tower, or NHS hospitals, like Guy's Hospital Tower, neighbouring the Shard, were long gone – but they were definitely more populist.'
Hatherley is a very clever and passionate writer, with a strong agenda - he loves much of the brutalism that many decry - and his arguments need a careful unpacking. But like the towers he derides, they are seductive - and who knew that the poor AJ news editor had been suckered into a conspiracy of brainwashing?

Let's be sensible about housing

 Michele Hanson's latest 'A certain age' column  in today's Guardian is a corker. After telling us about her friend Clayden being attacked by cows on Hackney Marshes, she says she thinks she is trying to make herself think of urban life as rustic to compensate for the fact that planning minister Nick Boles wants to concrete over most of the countryside.
'How I wish I was planning, and housing, minister instead of Bolesy,' she writes. 'My plans are more sensible: use all brown-fill sites [I think you mean brown-field Michelle], fill all couuncil voids, cap rents, sto VAT on renovation of existing dwellings, and decriminalise squatting. That should help.'
It certainly should. And seems like plain common sense. Someone else who is advocating common sense is Piers Taylor in The Architects' Journal last week touched a nerve when he wrote a column 'An architecture of circumstance would help local character evolve'. OK, the title isn't all that catchy but he was arguing for planners to stop 'meddling and micro-managing' the appearance of housing. Britain should be more like Almere in The Netherlands, he argues, where builders have certain restrictions on volumes, space between buildings etc and then can build what they like.
The interesting thing is that the illustration he shows from Almere is of houses that all look like a family - as did streets of Victorian houses built in pairs by speculative builders. There might be an argument for more restrictions if the result, over the last few decades, had been lots of lovely houses. But it hasn't. Most houses have been ugly, shoddy, small and inflexible. Looser planning restrictions wouldn't necessarily put an end to that. But if they allowed us to build more houses, the market might kick in and people would no longer buy the worst. So here's to more freedom - but not to build over all our green land.

Make yourself at home

Smugness is not attractive so like everyone sensible I try to avoid it. But if I were to be smug about anything it would be about where I live. My small, not terribly convenient flat is in an inner London suburb where, if I were buying now, I would not be able to afford to live. There has been a ripple effect in London where successive waves of buyers talk wistfully about areas that their elders found barely acceptable. Now it has reached the point where first-time buyers, even in well-paid jobs, cannot afford to live in the capital at all unless subsidised by serious rich parents.
Housing starts are at an all time low, much of which is built is ugly and cramped because housebuilders can build anything they like, knowing it will sell. This despite the fact that potential buyers still find it hard to get loans, and even those living in social housing in London are being priced out. There was a touching interview on Radio 4 yesterday with a woman who is working part time and having her benefit cut. She is looking at moving to Birmingham or Glasgow but this would mean giving up her job and becoming even more dependent on the state. In The Guardian yesterday, Steve Rose wrote a feature headlined 'Squatters are not home stealers,' saying that the government has misrepresented their position in order to pass its laws on squatting.
In fact everything the government is doing in regard to housing seems to be driven by either rigid ideology or blind panic. Not enough housing? Let's tear up the Building Regulations. Still not enough housing? Let's allow people to build everywhere and disregard the green belt. House builders are not short of sites, and are not prevented from building by Building Regulations. Instead the situation is far more complex, tied up with the market and, it is true, by planning problems in dense areas.
In this dense tangle, what can architects do? According to The Architects' Journal, quite a lot. One of the comments on the launch of its More Homes, Better Homes campaign says that what we need are not more homes but fewer people and a redistribution of employment across the country. Maybe, but that is a big ask. In the meantime what we need are homes built now (or converted from existing buildings) in places where people want to live and, crucially, homes that people want to live in now and in the future. This means decent space standards for activities we can't yet contemplate, higher ceilings to retrofit fans that can cope with climate change, and the creation not just of reasonable individual homes but of proper functional neighbourhoods. It is a big ask, but the special intelligence of architects should help unravel it. The AJ is planning to publish a manifesto. It should be fascinating and, one hopes, influential.

Does twitter make you absent?

The IBP awards last week, which recognise the best in the construction and property press, were a really enjoyable occasion. I should declare an interest, since I judged two of the categories. The guest speaker was Daniel Moylan who is now Boris Johnson's airport expert, arguing for a single hub airport to the east of London. He was an ideal after dinner speaker, passionate about his subject but also very funny, whether dissing the current disaggregated nature of London's airport provision, saying 'bring it on' to any more architects who want to punt airport ideas, or confessing that 'I can't really see the point of the countryside'.
There was great jubilation among the winners of the awards - a particularly good harvest by Building, Property Week and The Architects' Journal - and some disappointment from those who were not successful.
In a taxi on the way home I caught up with what those present had been saying on Twitter. They were generally pithy, relevant, sometimes funny and sometimes moving. But I wondered if they were truly present? I did not tweet from the event because I wanted to chat, cheer and enjoy the atmosphere and it really doesn't seem possible to do both.
Years ago I used to feel that one could either experience a holiday or photograph it but not both. Is the same now true of Twitter? And who exactly follows those live tweets? I don;t know the answer but I think the question is important.

Doom and gloom or a new way of working?

Things can't be good if you can encapsulate the state of the construction industry in a tweet, as Simon Rawlinson of EC Harris did a few days ago. He wrote: 'Workload has fallen in real terms in 5 of the past 8 quarters. Value of work awarded over last 12 months back to pre-1980s boom levels.' There is no way you can spin that to be positive.
Yet it is notable when talking to architects that many of them are desperately busy - often too busy to talk. For some this means that they have found their niche or have a fantastic reputation and are bucking the trend. For others it is a rather febrile busyness - a lot of pitching for work, doing the same jobs for less money, or replacing bigger jobs with smaller ones. Staff numbers may have shrunk, and they are trying to keep the output going with fewer people. One architect I visited recently started giving the team free lunch in the office to make up for cutting wages (although they had subsequently reinstated the wages - and kept the free lunch!).
The struggle to survive is not always successful. One of the latest failures, as reported in the AJ (sorry, subscription barrier) this week, was Manchester based MBLA, a multiple award winner with a 24-year track record, so scarcely naive or inexperienced or untalented. It was sunk, apparently, by a bad debt.
Yet the magazine also reports every week on the establishment of new practices, of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply. Some of these may be 'virtual' practices, with no offices and the principals also doing  other things to make ends meet. Anybody setting up a full-on practice is creating a hungry animal that needs constant feeding. Even a small office and a couple of staff rack up the costs, and there is inevitably a gap between establishment and receiving fees.
I was talking to somebody this week who has been analysing some of the larger practices' figures and reckons that many of the 'successes', the ones we would never doubt, have worrying levels of debt.
Young architects are willing to duck and dive; an increasing number of the more experienced are becoming independent consultants, lending their expertise to projects with no risk. But what about those who should be mid-career, growing an office, or progressing through one? These are difficult times.

The campaign against Olympic gagging

I can't stop smiling at the photograph of Hattie Hartman, sustainability editor of The Architects' Journal, sporting the Olympic protest dress.

The absurdity of the ban on designers promoting the work they have done on the project becomes more obvious by the day. I was with the several members of the landscape team on the Olympic Park yesterday. Visitors to the site have been stunned by just how gorgeous the landscape is, and it will be an indisputable treasure of the legacy - in an area starved of outdoor space it will be a tremendous asset, and it is also a pathfinder for sustainable design. Yet they, like the architects and engineers, have been subjected to these ridiculous gagging orders. Only now are some of them starting to relax their constraints a little.
Let us hope that by the time we get to the Paralympics we can celebrate everybody - athletes and also the design teams without whom none of it could have happened.

Sustainability in the fast lane

Today's post is a blatant plug for a book by my friend Hattie Hartman, who is sustainability editor of The Architects' Journal and has written a book called London 2012 Sustainable Design. It has been out for a while, but I have only just received my review copy. Even for somebody who hates sport and is still not entirely convinced that bringing the Olympics to London was a good idea, the book looks fascinating. It looks at each of the venues and facilities, at the competition process, at design and delivery, and offers facts and figures. The joy of this is that there is so much real data, in contrast to the sea of greenwash in which we risk drowning.

How relevant is this to other projects? It is true that we are not likely to build many more Olympic scale stadia, although the lessons on flexibility are important. But temporary facilities? Energy centres? Schools? Housing? Parks? Most certainly. The ODA may be horribly controlling, but this tendency does at least mean it can gather data properly. How encouraging to read a paragraph such as 'Park-wide savings on embodied carbon associated with the Olympic Park's concrete strategy are approximately 24 per cent compared to the industry average. The two key factors determining these savings were cement substitution and the use of sustainable transport.' The industry should read, and learn.