Brickchat

It may be an eye rolling cliche, but the new start has shaken me. I'm surrounded by people who work hard to better themselves, and no doubt within that there is a desire to further improve their professional and financial circumstances. The kind of work we do has a social link that until now I had neatly packaged up in my head. It is easy to look from the outside and say, "oh the housing market, isn't it terrible," and over the years I have looked at words like regeneration, gentrification, social housing, build to rent and scores of other phrases in complete abstraction, never getting below the letters on the page or the soundbites on the radio.

The challenge now is to understand what each of these terms actually mean and understand who they affect and finally, work out how I can make myself useful. I am embarrassed that I haven't engaged in this sooner. Our culture wraps us up into our own worlds, and I am guilty of succumbing to this over the years. I have kept myself insulated within a small and unpunctured bubble.

I don't know if the sudden shame or impulse to improve is as a result of travelling and meeting people who are worse off than myself, but the feeling is stronger than before. It's hit me this last week, that I know nothing about what life is actually like for most of the people in my own country. How can I ever expect to be a useful architect, if I only aim to work for the priveliged few?

Sadly this is one of the practicalities of our profession. Only the most priveliged and wealthy can afford an architect. Developers and local authorities, for whom housing is an asset class in need of constant analysis, investment and maintenance. The asset itself is risky and requires large capital outlays, so this is a game that only the most robust companies can play. So despite the desire for social responsibility to lead the charge, this agenda has to be exercised within a capitalist highly framework.

On this basis the job of the architect is based on compromise. Creative negotiation if you like, but there is a reconciliation to be made between people and profit. One reason for this is that our own social and moral codes are qualitative. It isn't written down in statutory codes of conduct that we must uphold and fight for the common good at the cost to our client's bottom line, because how is the common good defined exactly? Instead we have a suite of duties of care, to our clients and to future building users that pull us again into this confused middle-ground.

So is it a conscience thing perhaps? Do we believe in the architect as an 'agent of social change?' The criticism from outside the profession might be that this is just a marketing veil for a profession that has long been the facilitator of aggressive urban expansion and private sector profiteering. The counter to this is that there are lots of architects out there working hard to improve the built environments for fellow citizens, and if we weren't there, no one would fight for these things.

We can try to quantify housing quality based on metrics like energy efficiency, storage space, daylight, access to and views of green space etc. These design principles have been taken over by the planning authorities and have become prerequisite. Design then has lost its sense of uniqueness as clients and investors are only interested in meeting minimum standards. We have become limited by specific building uses in specific locations, with very particular requirements for car parking, open space, bin storage and the like. The result is buildings that are compliant, but are not beautiful. Few projects are allowed to break up to that next level of intricacy and beauty. It is very much design by committee and design by lowest common denominator. Hit the required number of units, meet planning and building regulations and then stop. Hence we get waves of buildings across cities that are 'of their time'. The generic concrete blocks of the 70's and 80's are memorable for their ugliness and perceived poor quality. How will the buildings of our time fare in years to come?

The fight for quality is time honoured but there is an inherent aggression in the construction industry that demands constant activity and ongoing production of new stock. Some of the more beautiful projects of recent years have come from a group of designers committed to a higher standard than what is required. It is really hard to do everything that is expected of you in a fast paced and complex industry. In order to be excellent you have to do more than everything.

Another problem is that developer business models are predominantly built around short-term profit, so what incentive is there to invest in quality, when provision is the only requirement? So architects are trapped, because they want to deliver better quality homes, but the lack of supply means there is no competitive incentive for clients to raise standards. The reality is that budget will always be the most solid of constraints, so the best way to improve housing quality is to hone current practice within current budget constraints. So creative negotiation it is!