Brickchat

Like the environment it serves, architecture is in a constant state of change. Projects come and go, competitions are won and lost, businesses succeed and fail. As long as humans inhabit the earth, our interactions with it will continue to evolve. So to answer the question, how do you win in architecture, you can't and you never will.

Maximising the potential of a site and helping to deliver a project on time and on budget is what makes architects valuable to clients. However the values we aspire to as a profession centre on promoting and delivering high quality architecture, not just building to a brief and securing return on investment. While architects can be seen to agonise over window details and material choices for a facade (the kind of issues that few others care about), we also agonise over public space, landscape design and whether our scheme works well within its context.

The highly competitive construction industry requires laws to be constantly reviewed and operators take risks to maintain their market position. This requires professionals like architects to be constantly reacting to circumstances beyond their control. Section 106 agreements, the Community Infrastructure Levy and Stamp Duty are but a few of the systems designed by the UK government to generate revenue from the construction and trade of architecture. The nuances of each of these policies can make or break a client's project before a single line is drawn, so it is firmly in architect's interest to understand them. Sadly however, this training is lacking from our education system.

Architects are required to constantly react to new laws and design trends, but we rarely get the opportunity to lead or instigate their review. This is managed not only by market demand, but by government officials who always have re-election in the backs of their minds. This goes a long way to explaining why successive governments have refused to confront the complexity of the housing shortage across the UK, preferring instead to simplify the problem into a question of supply and demand in an attempt to appeal to voters. To me this proves their blank refusal to confront the social, historic and economic reasons as to why we are where we are.

The government's attitude to housing policy is one example of the how over-valued, finite objectives can disrupt the architect's ability to be effective and useful to society. By reducing housing to a tradeable asset, the quality of the offering has diminished. The buildings and spaces left by each generation provide a record of the strongest physical exchanges between people and their environment. The last century has seen a rapid rate of change to our built environment but quality has not always been as tightly correlated to this rising demand. I'm talking not only about the quality of buildings, but the quality of places too.

Architecture, urban planning and the evolution of cities are all entwined in this seemingly never-ending process. The main problem is that we all have to focus on finishing projects in order to get paid, occupants have to move in and use the buildings we design, clients shift their focus to the next site. The architect's job is defined by finite goals from a business perspective but the struggle to be useful and produce good work is infinite.

Architects are playing an infinite game that we can never hope to 'win'. There will always be a struggle for design quality, just as there will always be a struggle for building on time and on budget. All that we can do is focus on producing good work that embodies our core value, which is to deliver architecture that offers wider benefits to society as a whole.