Harsh financial truths about architecture

Last week The Architects' Journal published the AJ100, its annual survey of the UK's biggest practices. Much of it is a celebration of success, with awards, new entrants and even the respondents feeling reasonably upbeat about the future. But it also contains some sobering truths.
I found the most sobering aspect to be the table that showed the architectural fees delivered out of UK offices per member of architectural staff.
At the top was Populous with a very respectable £271,000 per architect. Foster and Partners, which everybody sees as a high earner, was in fourth place at only £171,000 per head but one must remember that much the work delivered out of the UK is built overseas and so was not eligible. What was really worrying was the bottom end, with several practices reporting earnings of less than £60,000 per architect, and the lowest, Reiach and Hall, scoring only £50,000. What makes this really disturbing is that, while Reiach and Hall has 21 architects, it employs a total of 37 staff - a fairly average ratio. So the fee earnings per member of staff are just over £28,000 per staff member - a figure that is certainly not sustainable, given that accommodation, tax, national insurance, computers etc all have to be paid for.
If this were a one-off it could be seen as a criticism of an individual practice and of bad management. But the other low-earning practices are in a similarly difficult position - and these are the UK's biggest practices and, by some measure at least, the most successful.
If you want an indication of just how quickly things can go wrong, then read BD's interview with Ian Simpson. His is a practice that was seen as, and really was, hugely successful. Yet the interview is headlined 'How I lost millions in unpaid fees'. Simpson describes how his world 'caved in' in one week in summer 2008, as he was, ironically, celebrating the practice's success. Jobs just stopped and on some he never saw the fees again.
He survived by cutting fees to the bone. 'We didn’t want to be discarded because we were too expensive so we always do a really detailed analysis of time and resources so we can determine where the money’s going,' he said.' I even know what we spend on pencils,'
These are hard times, and it is not surprising that we are seeing a rash of business failures. It is heartening though that Simpson, back on his feet, is now helping another practice that ran into trouble.

Should we be allowed to get up to no good?

Horticulture Week reports that Richmond Council in southwest London has rethought its new policy of leaving parks unlocked overnight. Apparently it introduced the policy on 1 April, only locking one particular garden after that date. But it has now bowed to pressure from residents (and no less a figure than local MP Vince Cable) and is to start locking three parks again.
The concerns were about antisocial behaviour, noise and litter. Richmond Council says it has done this because it is a 'listening council'. And fair enough. But it does raise questions of how polite we want our public spaces to be - not to mention whether they are truly 'public' if they are locked at night. Litter is of course an issue that can be dealt with by more frequent collection and clearing. Noise? well, city streets are already noisy, and if people are misbehaving in a serious way they can be dealt with. The interesting issue is antisocial behaviour. I live near two commons and I am not sure that I would walk over them alone at dead of night. Quite a few antisocial things go on there. But it does not mean I think they should be fenced off. If people know the risks and are willing to run them, so be it - and if they want somewhere to cruise or misbehave in other ways, then the semi no-go area of a darkened park or common seems a reasonable choice.
Of course nobody wants to have to avoid discarded needles in the morning, but locked parks also usually are locked to early morning exercisers. And cities are a mix of types and activities - even the law-abiding may have had a less than upstanding period in adolescence. Shouldn't we accommodate everybody and allow there to be some less than perfect places in our cities?

Could biogas be the answer?

There is something very appealing about the use of biogas to generate energy. Animal waste is a great source of pollution (not least with methane, which is a terrifyingly potent greenhouse gas) and yet it could be a 'free' source of energy.
The idea is not new.350 homes in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, for instance, receive their electricity thanks to the excretive efforts of chickens.  As so often, once one gets beyond the pilot plant the difficulty is cost. A report by YourIs. Com, the European research media centre, looks at the impact of the EU's Farmagas programme, which finished in 2011.
The purpose of the programme was to disseminate information to farmers, particularly in Eastern Europe, about Biogas. But, the study finds, take-up has been low in Hungary, Romania and Poland despite these largely agricultural countries having considerable potential.
The problems it identifies include high intial costs, the relatively low price of electricity, and the regulatory framework. And its recommendation? Government subsidy. We know this can work. Germany built its PV market in this way, and subsidies here had an enormous impact as well, even if they did skew the market somewhat. Whether in these straitened times those subsidies can happen remains to be seen. But the cause is such a good one - not only generating 'free' energy but also removing a pollutant, that we have to hope it will. Unlike growing crops for biomass, biogas production works in tandem with food production, not against it.

Is the Orbit really too small?

The most contentious statement at a seminar that I chaired last week came from Clive Dutton, executive director for planning, regeneration and property at the London Borough of Newham, host borough for the Olympics. 'The only thing wrong with the Orbit is that it should have been three times as big,' he said about one of London's most contentious and least-loved landmarks. Few would think of this twisted red metal object as 'landscape' but that was how Dutton defined it, in a discussion entitled 'Why invest in landscape?' The event took place at the offices of architect Patel Taylor, whose work includes the recently opened Eastside Park in Birmingham. Andrew Taylor, one of the founders of the practice, explained that for him 'landscape is the medium that brings buildings together'. The design codes for the athletes village were mostly related, he said, to how they helped to define the external spaces. there was a divide between the speakers, with Dutton and Mark Davy, founder of culture and placemaking consultancy Future City talking about special landscapes that can add excitement, often in a temporary manner. In contrast Sue Illman, president of the Landscape Institute and urban geographer Jonathan Smales,founder of Beyond Green, were more interested in having good landscape everywhere. Illman outlined the advantages that water sensitive urban design (WSUD) can bring, not only creating nicer places to live but tackling the triple whammy of floods, pollution and the urban heat island. Smales is a firm believer in densifying cities, but said that this can only work with great landscape design. There was a lively discussion from an audience of design professionals, developers and local authority members, particularly over who would actually pay for and maintain such schemes. Ceding control to private developers may in some cases be undesirable but, given current finance, can local authorities be trusted over maintenance?

Remembering the ever-youthful Rick Mather

It was sad to see on the AJ website today that the architect Rick Mather had died. Sad because one never likes anybody to die, sadder because he had done and was still doing some excellent work. And somehow even sadder because, although he was in fact 75, he seemed so young. I remember that when Mather was elected to RIBA council in 1998, we ran a news story in the AJ saying how nice it was to see some new younger faces. Simple arithmetic tells one that Mather must have been 60 at the time. A fact that was pointed out to us by Sam Webb, the campaigning architect who was the most fierce critic of the large panel systems that led to the Ronan Point collapse in 1968. Webb was already a veteran of RIBA council and, by implication, a member of the old guard. Yet he was in fact, he said, a year younger than Mather. What a shame that Mather's youthful countenance couldn't guarantee him a longer life.

Antarctic proves a great school for design

Last week's AJ published my review of the Halley Research Station in the Antarctic, a curious piece to write, not least because I haven't been there. Normally the rule when writing a building review is that you have to visit to see for yourself, but Halley is so remote that a visit would take several weeks and cost thousands of pounds. Instead, I had to make do with talking to members of the winter team on the telephone, a surreal experience since you simply dial a Cambridge number (that is where the British Antarctic Survey is based) and find yourself talking to people at the bottom of the world. I had a long discussion with the cook about how long he keeps eggs for - around 14 months is the limit, but before you try this at home, you should know that he has a top-class fridge and turns the eggs every few days to stop the yolk from settling. It's more bother than you could face, but then he doesn't have the option of ordering a curry or buying a ready meal. Hugh Broughton, the architect for the project, has stepped into another league by winning and executing this building. Along with the team at AECOM (individuals who were also untried in Antarctic design, although members of the practice in the US had considerable experience), he has become the go-to designer for similar projects. But evidently these are few and far between. Broughton is interested therefore in exploring the relevance that this design may have to work in less challenging environments. There is a superficial resemblance of his buildings on stilts to Ron Herron's 1960s walking city, but the wider lesson comes from his careful analysis of what people need in order to live well, effectively and happily. One can see this careful approach transferring to other enclosed communities, such as a residential school, a hospital or a prison. Both architect and engineer rediscovered the roots of their professions on this project, thinking from basics, experimenting to come up with solutions that work, and not being bounded by regulations. It was an odd combination of the most sophisticated thinking and planning, with a return to first principles. Whether it wins them more work or not - and it certainly deserves to - it has enriched the professional experience of all those involved.

Small is not beautiful - when it comes to homes

In the latest blast in its campaign to see more spacious and lighter homes, the RIBA has issued the results of a poll by IPSOS Mori showing that natural light and space are the most important consideration in our homes. 80% of the public would be more likely to choose a home with minimum space standards and, damningly, wanting more space and light is the main reason why people in new homes would consider moving. This is part of the RIBA's HomeWise campaign for better homes and coincides with its launch of a new and rather snazzy website. The kneejerk response is of course that we can't afford anything better than the minimum. But this is madness. Despite the very real financial crisis, by most measures this country is more affluent than at almost any time in history. Some of Victorians were horribly overcrowded in slum dwellings. We should not go back to that way of living. It is no coincidence that mean residences so quickly can become slums - it only takes a small change in the way we live to make such a dictatorial residence (only one way of using it) uninhabitable.