CABE

John Sorrell, Chair, CABE

27 February 2006

Publication: Quarter, Issue one, Winter 2005

100 hospitals built by 2010, every secondary school refurbished over the next ten years: Britain is undergoing the biggest public sector building boom for a generation. But pressures of time and money can threaten the principles of good design that are so essential in ensuring that we build to last, says John Sorrell.

What does the government's "respect" agenda have to do with urban design? Or public services with architecture? Well, Britain is building on a scale that hasn’t been seen for 50 years and in all likelihood won’t be seen for another 50. The fact is that the government's aspiration to bring about a lasting change in the cultural, political and social landscape of Britain is tied up with a very real transformation of the urban landscape - from hospitals and schools to libraries and housing developments. Look across the skyline of almost any town and the cranes tell you the scale of physical change under way. But the difference with, say, the office building boom of the late 1980s is that much of this activity is public, either in commission or execution.

Britain is witnessing the largest public building programme for at least a generation. Every city, town and neighbourhood will see a marked change in its fabric over the course of the next decade; many places already have. The question is whether the legacy is one we can be proud of, or whether future generations will look back on this period with little forgiveness, as a time of missed opportunities, or worse.

We face two challenges. We have to ensure that the building programme is fully integrated, with government co-ordinating to produce places that actually work, rather than just a series of individual buildings. And second, we need to find ways to ensure that those groups involved in delivering this programme - from developers to local councillors to health service managers - receive the right incentives to prioritise design quality. So what exactly is happening? Unsurprisingly, the greatest investment is in health and education. One hundred new hospitals are to be completed by 2010, up to 3,000 GPs' surgeries are to be built, replaced or refurbished. Every secondary school in the country, and the vast majority of primary schools, will be rebuilt or refurbished over the next ten years. All this will take place alongside a wide range of other cultural and civic building projects, from new magistrates' courts in Manchester to the Turner Centre in Margate.

On housing, John Prescott's sustainable communities plan - with its proposals for increasing housing supply in the south and housing market renewal in the north - represents the most significant government intervention since Stevenage was designated the first new town in 1946. The explicit aim is to create places that promote the government's wider goals in a range of policy areas from crime to environmental sustainability, and to bridge the huge gap between supply and demand. Over a million new homes are to be built by 2016; projections suggest we will need four times that many over the next 25 years.

And then of course there are the Olympics. £2.4bn will be invested, not only in world-class sporting venues, but in the homes, parks and facilities that the Lower Lee Valley needs for long-term regeneration. So much of the nation’s prestige and image will ride on the Olympic facilities being well designed and perceived.

This building programme is a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform Britain. The majority of buildings currently going up will be in use for at least the next 20 to 30 years; in fact they will probably still be used in 50 to 100 years. Around these buildings, the street patterns and public spaces we create will last for centuries - most towns, from York to Milton Keynes, change their original skeletal shape very little. Most of us are unlikely to be alive when the time to build on this scale comes around again; the structure of new settlements will effectively be permanent.

To illustrate the significance of public building on this scale, it is salutary to think of two previous periods when urban Britain experienced as much change. In the Victorian period, the need to get to grips with the unprecedented urban growth that accompanied the industrial revolution generated tremendous civic pride among the rising urban middle class, which manifested itself in buildings, both public and private, parks and squares. A century on, we still enjoy the results. Anyone visiting Manchester town hall or Lister park in Bradford will see why politicians seek the comparison with their Victorian forebears.

It is equally easy to see, when visiting somewhere like the Heygate estate in London's Elephant and Castle, why politicians are just as keen to distance themselves from the other great period of public building, which began after the second world war and continued into the 1970s. Here the legacy is mixed. While there were undoubtedly success stories - the Royal Festival Hall or the University of East Anglia campus - many people are still living with the results of poor planning and design. Attempts to build the utopian visions of Le Corbusier were exposed as fundamentally flawed in 1968 when the Ronan Point block of flats partially collapsed after a gas explosion. Four people died in the accident that came to symbolise the end of the modernist dream, and the architectural and planning professions have been struggling to regain their reputation ever since.

But we should not be distracted by the success of one building and the failure of another - there were of course plenty of truly dreadful 19thcentury buildings. The point is that we are still living with the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s - good and bad - to this day, and not only in terms of the look and feel of our cities, important as that is. Places matter, and the arguments over the legacy of the postwar boom, both for public services and for society more generally, are well rehearsed.

The modernist experiment faltered. That shouldn’t distract us from the role that good design can play this time around. The postwar building programme showed how easy it was to be driven by targets for spending and speed. These short-term targets squeeze out design quality and lead us to forget we are building for people, whether residents, staff, patients or students. The government cannot afford to make the same mistakes again. It must create budgets and timescales that build in the need for good design; the understandable push to deliver on time and to budget should not force us to compromise on quality. At the same time, the apparent success of the Victorian legacy must not make us nostalgic, afraid to create new forms for new times.

We know that badly designed schools, hospitals, surgeries, parks and homes cost us in the long run. They are expensive to run, unsustainable and hard to maintain. They hinder educational attainment, increase patient recovery times and cost more to police. Well-designed buildings and spaces, by contrast, are cheaper to manage and better cared-for by the people that use them. In schools, the quality of teaching environments and the amount of daylight in classrooms improves pupils’ achievement, while even the design of toilets can have a direct impact on bullying and truancy. In healthcare, something as simple as providing hospital beds with a view can radically reduce recovery times.

To realise these benefits - and minimise the costs - we need early and consistent investment in design. Doing design well requires an understanding of more than aesthetics. Of course looks are important, but the usefulness of the end product is what really matters. Good design is about ensuring that a product - be it a building, neighbourhood or even a city - makes life better for anyone who comes into contact with it.

CABE, among others, has a key role to play in this. We were set up in 1999 as the government’s "design champion," promoting the role of quality design in new buildings. We work to raise the aspirations of clients, developers and the public, and to provide practical, expert support to those building new hospitals, clinics, schools and housing developments. We also aim to highlight success stories, and there are some wonderful buildings being produced across the country. But where things do not pass muster, we are prepared to say so, to put down a marker for what is acceptable and to argue for better uses of public money.

Two thousand years ago the Roman architect Vitruvius suggested three essential elements of a well-designed building: utilitas, firmitas and venustas. Henry Wotton’s 1624 translation - commodity, firmness and delight - remains the classic criteria by which building design is judged. A well-designed building, or anything else for that matter, should be functional, well made and beautiful. But true "delight" goes beyond the issue of beauty; it involves the whole experience of those who use it, and the way it affects the lives of those in the community in which it is based.

As the debate between Charles Jencks and Deyan Sudjic in the June issue of Prospect showed, the idea of the "iconic" building has begun to annoy some architects, and there is little sign of the public clamouring for more of them. Still, we shouldn’t deny the power of the creative architect to come up with something magical that gives the client and the users a result that goes beyond what had been asked for, or even dreamed of.

One interesting idea is the "little icon" - a building or space that becomes a local hero, that locals feel has been designed and built for them. Will Alsop's Peckham library, which opened in 2000 and has proved hugely popular, is a good example - a building which has lifted the spirits of the local community and led to a dramatic increase in the number of library users. And Alsop's recent Fawood children's centre in Harlesden, shortlisted for this year's Stirling prize, looks like another example of a building that will bring brilliance and cheer to a neglected corner of London. These are joyful antidotes to the lowest common denominator projects that are still being produced. They work because they represent a belief or an idea.

The idea has pedigree. The Finsbury health centre, which opened in 1938 and which remains in use and popular today, is an excellent example of a building that represented a belief in a better life for people in what was then an overcrowded and unhealthy neighbourhood. The centre’s architect, Berthold Lubetkin, wanted to create a building that would persuade people to lead healthier lives as well as treat their ailments. As a result, the centre, with its Gordon Cullen murals and lecture theatre alongside its TB clinic, was one of the first integrated health centres in Britain.

Lubetkin remains a valuable model. He was passionately committed to architecture as an art form, and at the same time devoted to creating improvements to a city which would benefit everyone. He used to say, "nothing is too good for ordinary people." That may sound patronising now, but is it such a bad thought for an age in which we are still churning out schools and surgeries that look as if anything will do for ordinary people, as long as it does the job?

Of course the current levels of investment are welcome, but we cannot take it for granted that the money will be wisely spent when it comes to procuring new buildings. For every success story - such as the Jubilee library in Brighton, winner of this year's Prime Minister’s Better Public Building award - there are many projects that are not as good as they should be. The level of care and ambition that creates the best is needed for all new buildings, not just those in city centres. Not all new buildings can be local heroes, of course, but that does not mean we should return to the days of mediocrity. Every new building must be built to the same high standards of the award-winners.

This applies nowhere more than for new housing. The government predicts that nearly 4m new homes will need to be built over the next 25 years. Its vision is laid out in its sustainable communities plan: "places where people want to live and work… They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive [and] well planned, built and run."

But turning this vision into reality will not be easy. When you look at the new homes built so far across the country, the future seems anything but bright. House-building is an industry in transition, and things are better than they were even five years ago. But CABE's recent housing audit argued that most new housing developments are not up to scratch; in the south of England we rated as good fewer than 20 per cent; in the north the figure was fewer than one in ten.

It doesn't have to be this way. We already have a viable alternative: medium to high density mixed-use and tenure development built near public transport hubs. High-quality architecture and good urban design can make places that feel like places. Some of the most popular urban areas, from Edinburgh New Town to Mayfair, already fit this model and have done so for centuries.

Recent research by Mori demonstrates the impact of the built environment on our quality of life. Homes, schools, surgeries, streets and parks combine to form an area's "physical capital." MORI found that two thirds of the factors that determine quality of life can be predicted by the quality of an area’s physical capital. If we are concerned about improving quality of life then we must focus more attention on the design quality of our urban fabric.

If there ever were a time for joined-up thinking, this is it. The government's building programme should require the individual elements of the programme - schools, hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, libraries, parks, and housing - to take advantage of each other, and should encourage the relevant departments to find new ways to work together. This might mean, for example, healthy-living centres and schools where services were provided together, and where health and education professionals would be able to see children as whole human beings. But opportunities for doing just that are being lost, even as the new buildings which could enable it are being put out to tender.

About 700,000 children will be born in Britain over the next year. Most will be born in a hospital. They will go on to live in the houses, learn in the schools, and work in the offices we are designing and building today; and they will play, both as children and then with their own children and grandchildren, in public parks, both old and new. There is still time to ensure that the current building programme uses design to give these children a better environment to grow up in.

As the prime minister approaches the end of his time in office, there is much talk about the Blair legacy. One of the most durable - and concrete - will be that of today's public building programme. Building on this scale will change the fabric of urban Britain for at least two generations. Ministers throughout government have committed themselves to making sure all these new buildings and public spaces are well designed, and Tessa Jowell, who has recently been appointed "government design champion," will, we hope, act as a focal point, but co-ordination and aspiration need to permeate throughout government, nationally and locally. And the importance attached by ministers to good design must be reinforced through real incentives to deliver it. The challenge will be to ensure that the other pressures, for speed and economy, do not distract anyone from recognising that it is not enough simply to build; we have to build well.