Governments Get The Advice They Pay For

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As my quest to obtain reimbursement of not insignificant travel expenses owed to me by the European Commission enters its seventh month, a couple of things have occurred to me: not only are governments of all descriptions and flavours completely out of touch with small business, but they undoubtedly also get the quality of expert advice that they pay for.

Back in the early part of the year I gave up two and a half days, unpaid, to attend a European Commission Science and Technology foresight workshop in Brussels, organised by Anne Glover, the EC Chief Scientific Advisor. The aim of the workshop was to scope the potential impacts of disruptive technologies so that European funding could focus on areas that would create the greatest benefits for European society. This was surely a worthy aim, but I believe that the execution reveals a fundamental flaw at the heart of such policy consultations.

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At least I got to travel on lovely Brussels trams, even if the EC hasn’t made good on its promise to pay expenses.

Originally I was invited to address the gathering on developments in smart and sustainable cities, which was to be a short scene setting piece along with contributions from other experts from a wide variety of fields. In the end however, the workshop format was changed and I ended up, along with the other invited experts, merely contributing to discussion groups where we were outnumbered about 6 to 1 by euro-apparatchiks of one form or another.

This was a moment of revelation for me: The people who advise governments through such consultations are either from other institutions or from large businesses, not the people who really know about the issues; the pioneering small businesses. The average small business leader generally has more pressing concerns, such as ensuring continuing revenue and the ability to pay staff, to participate in unrelated, unpaid activity. Thus, unless policymakers are prepared to pay for the time of experts, the vast majority of people that they hear from will be those either paid to push a particular agenda or otherwise seeking influence.

This issue becomes increasingly problematic when it comes to trying to anticipate the impacts of new and potentially disruptive technologies. Disruption occurs when innovation leads to a revolutionary way of doing things, replacing the current business, social or policy paradigm. Disruption is impossible to predict from the viewpoint of the current paradigm which is embodied in current policy and established business practice. What I noticed in particular during the foresight workshop, was that many participants were simply regurgitating received wisdom, but the real insights came from the independently thinking small businesspeople, often from alternative fields.

The UK Technology Strategy Board (now rebranding as Innovate UK) does pay experts to help in seeking out innovation, at least through evaluating bids for public funding. The pay rates offered don’t actually cover the opportunity cost of the time commitment, but at least they allow us to convince ourselves that participation is not to the entire detriment of our businesses. The fact that we are paid experts also, I believe, engenders goodwill when it comes to our giving pro-bono support to help scope future competitions and contribute to the organisation’s wider aims.

On another tack, UK Government is regularly heard to lament the lack of innovation in publicly procured projects. It often blames this on the failure of SMEs to engage in public procurement, whilst continuing to set barriers to entry that preclude many SMEs based on finances and size of business. Looking at this picture as a whole, is it any wonder that so many small businesspeople are entirely disengaged from the public sector?

So, my message to governments and other policy organisations is that, if you want to receive meaningful advice and support from the expert small business community then you need to engage meaningfully with us, rather than simply expecting to be able to exploit us when it suits you and ignore us otherwise.

Maybe one day the European Commission will finally cough up my travel expenses and I’ll be so grateful for small mercies that I will be flooded afresh with goodwill towards governmental institutions. On the other hand, maybe the offhand way in which they have repeatedly dismissed my concerns mean that I might just continue to feel that my goodwill has been callously exploited.

Curating Place 2 – Reflections

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Last week I was happy to join several teams of architects in a site visit to Fall Hill Quarry in Derbyshire, the location for the first project to be imagined by Curating Place. Old, abandoned industrial sites such as quarries always make me feel somber, mainly for the loss of the skills and productivity that they represent. I am also desolated by the impact we have made on the natural landscape and invigorated by the restorative power of nature in about equal measure. I believe that channelling such emotional responses will be key to the success of any development at Fall Hill.

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All architecture is designed to be experienced, but it seems to me that in commercial architecture this is so often reduced to a narrow palette of visual appliqué. Yet we all know what it is to be moved by truly great architecture.

I often refer to architecture as requiring a ‘business plan’. By this I don’t mean a bald accounting of rental income versus construction cost. Instead, I mean designers must understand and empathise with their public to create an offering that will be genuinely attractive. To do this the design must expand beyond the simple physical stuff of building and engage with social and humanistic issues to deliver both service and a truly meaningful experience. Only this rounded approach will lead to the architecture enduring. Vitruvius had it right all along, we just seem to have forgotten it in the rush to simple commodity.

People will pay handsomely to create memories that will last them a lifetime. Think about your own experiences and what you are prepared to pay. It could be enduring a night in the rain and mud to hear your favourite band, or a month’s salary for a meal in a Michelin starred restaurant. On the other hand, no-one would consider MacDonald’s or Burger King as providing a great experience and so they are reduced to competing with each other over price. If our creations fail to provide memorable experiences they will simply become commodities to be traded at lowest cost, but otherwise ignored.

The reality is that all buildings need a purpose and, more often than not, a large part of that purpose is to generate revenue. True, there are examples of grand 18th Century follies, which apparently have no purpose, but that is of course far from the truth. Follies were built with the specific purpose of creating experiences. If the conjunction of architecture and business in the modern world can offer experiences that exceed expectation then customers will not only return in the future, they will tell their friends, thus ensuring the success of the business and the architecture.

I have come across many developers and developments that labour under the misapprehension ‘build it and they will come’. This is a disastrous fallacy, as has been demonstrated by numerous Millennium Commission funded projects from the National Centre for Popular Music to the Millennium Dome. No, we must only build what we know will prove to be attractive and enduring. This actually requires some long, hard thinking about the people who will use our designs, what they need, what they want and what might surprise and delight them. Once you have identified and designed the means to delight your customers then you will have developed a ‘business plan’ that will sustain your architecture.

Tribute to Paul Hinkin

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Today I was devastated to receive the news that Paul Hinkin, my longest standing collaborator, had died unexpectedly over the weekend. Paul and I grew our shared passion for sustainable architecture over nearly twenty years, numerous projects, nascent schemes, dinners and daft ideas.

Paul graduated from the Welsh School and read for a masters in bioclimatic design at Portsmouth before joining Chetwood Associates when I was at Max Fordham. We were thrown together by the project to design a groundbreaking store for Sainsburys that could win an English Partnerships competition to secure the site on the Greenwich Peninsula to serve the Millennium Village. We had, by then, both served our apprenticeships and for each of us this represented a major independent project and a chance for individual expression. We honed our ideas on each other during that project and have more or less done so ever since. The project, by the way, went on to receive a Millennium Product award and a place on the Stirling Prize shortlist.

I moved on from Fordhams, whilst Paul remained at Chetwoods, but he still turned to me for a number of projects including the boutique Zetter Hotel in Clerkenwell, where we tapped groundwater for cooling, which was of such good quality that they ended up serving it in the restaurant. We also helped dream up the Eco-Template for distribution shed developer Gazeley which ultimately led to the Blue Planet warehouse, the first building to achieve a BREEAM Outstanding rating.

Working with Paul was was a brilliant challenge for an engineer as he never let up with the question “Why?”

“Why?” is the perfect question to weed out original thinking from received wisdom and I quickly found that Paul often knew the range of possible answers at least as well as I did. It was this constant quest to achieve only the optimum performance outcomes that made it such a joy to work with Paul. That, and his openness to true collaboration, I honestly could not say that there was an individual author of our designs.

In Paul I found not just a kindred spirit but someone who was like the opposite pole of a battery to me, when we worked together there was real energy being generated. I remember in the early days of our collaboration breaking at least one phone, dragging it from its perch whilst urgently gesticulating with the handset in a desperate attempt to share a vision without paper to sketch on. Working with Paul was also constantly amusing. In the early years Paul developed a particular liking for Polyolefin and at the drop of a hat would promote its use as a roofing membrane. I have never been certain that Paul was genuinely convinced by the material properties, I suspect that he simply delighted in the humorous potential of dropping such a deliciously ridiculous sounding word into dry and dusty technical discussions.

I started my practice a couple of years before Paul, but he caught up in no time and we transitioned to supporting each other with business advice.

Paul was never a casual dresser and Black Architecture was clearly a reference to his ubiquitous, carefully co-ordinated black jeans, turtle neck and jacket. Black Architecture achieved both critical and commercial success. Paul and Chrissy bought and restored a 1960s waterfront house at Emsworth Harbour, winning awards for it of course. Paul decided that the house needed to be accessorised for the magazine photographers so he bought a sailing dinghy. Learning to sail it was a secondary consideration! Paul bought a Porsche, black of course. I recall seeing it regularly in the carpark at Bath University, instantly recognisable as the cabin was dominated by a tatty dog blanket and chew toys. I believe that this was Paul’s way of telling the world “I can if I want, but actually there’s more to life.”

We both grew to recognise that sustainable architecture, more than any other expression of the art, must be subservient to the people. Nothing can sustain unless it is truly fit for purpose and, to make architecture that is fit for purpose, you must truly empathise with the occupants. Paul was always focussed on the experience of the building user and this led to many of the interventions of light, space and organisation that gave rise to efficiency and ultimately sustainability. The finest expression of people centred design that I know is Romero House, Black’s new headquarters for CAFOD in Lambeth. This building changed the corporate and individual behaviour of an entire organisation and yet never achieved the recognition it deserves as it does not conform to narrow conventional metrics for sustainable design (more about that here).

Whilst he had little time for fools and charlatans, Paul always had boundless energy for helping people and doing the right thing. During the recent lull in commercial work for his practice in the UK, Paul committed a good deal of time to a charitable project to develop a sustainable school in Uganda, took a campaigning position on numerous issues and had recently begun to make a significant impact on third year studio at University of Bath.

I will miss Paul enormously, his wit and humour and all the ideas that we had to yet realise. My deepest sympathy goes to Chrissy and his family and to Steve, Tony and all at Black Architecture.

Sustainable Hypocrisy

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If you have read my posts or tweets over the last few months then you will probably know that I am pretty peeved with Sainsburys over the future of the Greenwich store that I helped design for them back in the late 1990s. Sainsburys want to move to a more profitable location and, apparently, to stop any competitor gaining a foothold in the area they have placed a legal covenant on the land at Greenwich to prevent it from ever being used again as a food store.

The building was specifically designed to be the best and most energy efficient food store possible, mainly through a passive approach but also by recycling heat from the refrigeration plant and cooling the surplus with groundwater. To prevent this groundbreaking building being reused for its intended purpose is the anthesis of sustainable development.

The passive design features of the building (daylight, thermal mass, natural ventilation) would equally benefit many other retail uses, but the only party currently interested in purchasing the site is IKEA, who apparently cannot imagine how to adapt their big blue artificially conditioned box model to use daylight.

Both Sainsburys and IKEA have defended their respective positions. Their people in charge of sustainability have stated that the store was a prototype, things have moved on since 2000 and both new stores will incorporate the latest sustainable technologies. Well I think that shows just how little clue these corporate sustainability wonks really have. As far as I know daylight has been around for a while, is pretty well proven as a concept and is not likely to be superseded any time soon.

In IKEA’s case they state that their new store “will achieve a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating and will include technologies to help minimise the store’s carbon footprint such as photovoltaic (solar) panels.” Funny that they consider this to be an advancement in sustainability when, 15 years ago, the original building achieved the first ever retail BREEAM ‘Excellent’ without any contribution from solar panels. IKEA goes on to state how they are reducing their carbon footprint across stores by 11% through switching to advanced LED lighting. Hmmm.. the Sainsburys Store reduces lighting energy consumption by around 80% simply using daylight! I think it is unlikely that IKEA will ever recognise the irony of generating electricity from the sun just to run their technically superior LED lights.

Then, the other day, I read an article about Sainsburys proclaiming their latest sustainability hit, a new store powered entirely by food waste, presumably the kind of approach that represents a “significant advance” over passive energy conservation as used at Greenwich. It seems that a new store at Cannock in Staffordshire is to have a private wire connection to a near by anaerobic digestion and generation facility and will send its food waste there for conversion. Yes this will divert food waste from landfill and put it to a better use, but this is not a sustainable solution. Food is for eating! What will happen when energy demand at the store increases, will Sainsburys start to deliberately divert food to the waste stream in order to keep feeding the anaerobic digester?

The supermarket retail model is largely responsible for the waste of around 40% of food. This is a HUGE problem! A business that was genuinely focussed on sustainable development would be working to reduce the food waste problem at its root: packaging, handling and overstocking. To try and greenwash a problem like food waste with pseudo energy efficiency really is the worst sustainability hypocrisy that I have ever come across.

If Sainsburys and IKEA want to demonstrate that they are genuinely concerned about sustainable development then they will have to try a lot harder, or they should simply shut up. At present all they are achieving is to demonstrate that they really are only prepared to pay lip service to sustainability in the pursuit of profits.

Curating Place

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I had the pleasure recently of being invited to help out at the formation of a new social enterprise: Curating Place. Curating Place aims to support young construction professionals with a platform to both work and learn their crafts. This platform will cut across the traditional divisions between conceiving and making and will be funded from any means except the traditional development finance model.

The first activity organised by Curating Place was a design charrette to re-examine the idea of Country House in relation to a site at Fall Hill Quarry in Derbyshire. The scale of the ambition to do things differently, set out by Ashley and Darren, founders of Curating Place really got me thinking about how things could be, rather than how things will continue to be in the absence of visionaries like these two.

One of the requisites for new country houses under present planning controls is to do something exceptional in the sphere of sustainability. Ashley and Darren have stated an ambition that the development at Fall Hill should be Off-Grid if possible, meaning of course some degree of self sufficiency. However the conjunction of ideas contained in the overall ambition of Curating Place really got me thinking about what could it mean to be truly Off-Grid in the 21st Century.

I believe that we often bandy terms such as Off-Grid without really stopping to examine the true meaning and implications of such terms. To me the term Grid implies any rigidly structured network. Traditionally a grid is comprised of perpendicular elements and so convergence is impossible. Recently, Grid has come to mean the central delivery of services such as electricity and water or the interconnectedness of central financial systems. So I wondered what other grids could affect future development?

Here then are some grids that I believe we really should think about a bit more deeply in relation to future development:

The Energy Grid

By Energy Grid we mean the centralised supply of fuel and power. Going Off-Grid is of course quite different from simply going Carbon Neutral which, typically, relies on the Energy Grid to absorb surplus generation and deliver new energy to meet our peak demand. Clearly therefore, going Off-Grid requires local energy storage to deliver the necessary temporal shift. The expense of storage technologies requires a complete re-think about how we actually use energy, rather than using Carbon Accountancy to simply gloss over our continuing energy profligacy. In the future we will need to be much more aware of, and tap into, the natural energy flows around us.

The Water Grid

To be Off-Grid means that we must also address how we use water, where it will come from and how we will dispose of sewage. Traditionally we would tap the water table with wells to supply us with fresh water and utilise the biology of the land surface to treat effluent before it reaches the water table once again. Developing within a quarry, below the level of the general land surface and closer to the water table raises intriguing questions about water management, which are directly relevant to cities which have little green land surface to absorb effluents. Clearly we will need to be much smarter in creating closed loops of water and nutrient flows in future development.

The Resource Grid

The network that serves the extraction, processing and transportation of building materials and components has a substantial, mostly hidden impact. We are starting to learn about these impacts through measurement of the embodied Carbon, but this is only one small aspect of the total impacts which may include toxic emissions, environmental persistence or land degradation. As a first step, perhaps we could incorporate the concept of material miles alongside measures of embodied carbon to encourage the use of locally found materials and the preservation of the traditional craft skills to convert them.

The Financial Grid

We are all now confined by a Grid of debt which keeps drawing tighter. Debt enabled the rich to become richer whilst distracting the poor with instant gratification consumerism. Without the need to pay bankers’ bonuses, we could probably still exist on the basis of trading what we have for what we have not. Skills and materials are both tradable commodities and some Transition Towns are establishing their own currencies to promote such trading within their local economies. Peer to Peer lending represents the ultimate disruption to the traditional banking system, and ordinary individuals can now become business angels, as communications technology allows us to connect with far wider opportunities.

The Social Grid

Peer to Peer services, such as crowd funding, shared ownership and social networks, are rapidly undermining the rigid Grid of the capitalist social structure. Owning a car or a lawnmower is becoming almost pointless as you can now borrow these (or rent them at low cost) whenever needed, without incurring the cost of ownership. The construction of traditional housing is one of the most fundamental demonstrations of society based upon exchange and barter. In past times when a family needed to build a house their neighbours would all help, knowing that the favour would be returned, thus engendering community. Real life social networks, when individuals strive towards a common goal, are even more valuable than currency.

The Eco Grid

The Eco-System is the essential network that sustains life, providing us with oxygen, water and food whilst absorbing our waste (mostly). For generations we have pillaged the Eco-System with little thought for what appeared to be an infinite resource. Now we realise that our profligacy will haunt us for generations. We need to get off our rigid Grid of thinking about development on the one hand and environmental protection on the other and aim for convergence between human activity and the Eco-System. As designers, we must put biodiversity, natural resources and waste management at the forefront of our thinking, and I don’t mean just the odd bit of green roof green-wash.

So, perhaps, we could take Off-Grid to mean 21st Century development that is not reliant on centrally delivered services or pre-conceived intelligence, which matches people with opportunities outside the conventional socio-financial structure and which allows convergence of ideas and outcomes between traditionally conflicted spheres.That sounds to me like a proper ideal for the establishment of a new enterprise such as Curating Place.