29 10 310 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/062cc69005d64cce5ce3281cd7bffa1c.pdf dd62b3513adb4ccd8b109ea899be2df5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Trade Unions and Architecture Description An account of the resource Themes included action on asbestos and Health &amp; Safety, and involvement with Direct Labour Organisations and Building Unions. Following comparative research of possible options, NAM encouraged unionisation of building design staffs within the private sector, negotiating the establishment of a dedicated section within TASS. Though recruitment was modest the campaign identified many of the issues around terms of employment and industrial relations that underpin the processes of architectural production. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource TASS-BDS Subject The topic of the resource Some Ideas for its Development Description An account of the resource TASS Building Design Staffs branch ~ some ideas for its development . Although trade unions offer its members fringe benefits, the core of a trade union is the willingness of its members to make collective deci- sions and for all to abide by them . This will be somewhat abstract until we are in a position in one office tospeak and act on behalf of the work- place . Only when members can succesfully take on an employer, and through collective action obtain what would not have otherwise been possible , will we be in a position to show building design staffs in general that trade unionism is essential for them . We should place a lot of emphasis cn building at those workplaces where we already have members . Members should not simply try to sign up more menbers, but to consistently talk to other employees, with a wiew to establishing office meetings, evem if not everyone is in the Union. Although it might be a bit premature, it would be a good idea if each office elected a shop steward (or correspondingmember), to be responsible for keeping in contact with the branch, to collect dues, and to ensure that he or she regularly kept in touch with members in the office about Union matters . Whilst office meetings are necessary to involve as many workers as possible, and to discuss their particular grievances, the monthly Branch meeting is the democratic core of the branch . The Branch should elect an Executive Committee whose role woud be the servicingof the membership individually and collectively . Committee members should be allocated areas on top of their organisational responsabilities (treasurer, scretary,...) The Committee is to prepare the agenda of the Branch meetings and carry out the decisions of the Branch promptly . The first task of this Committee is the establishment of the London Branch . Its subsidiary role,in conjunc- tion with the May 14th Unionisation Committee, is to advise nationally on possible recruitment outside of London, and to promote a survey of pay and conditions to offer a material aid to members in dispute . General research should be done around the following points . * A study of pay and contions in the Public Sector to bring up the Private Sector to that level at least . * a figure for a nationally negotiated minimum wage ($70 p.w.e. is the pre- sent national average) to protect trainees against low pay . * Deceht overtime rates to be included in the contract of employement, and notice eeofjobs(againsttherightofemployerstogiveonemonth's Although there might be 500 architectural workers in private firms unio- nised, in general trade unionism is foreign to architectural offices . There are Msny reasons for this - including the relative mobility from one firm to another, the traditional nature size of most effices which encourages personal thanto other employees . But these factors union membership has never been higher, has been amongst white collar workers, particularly women . At some point each office will have to face up to gaining recognition, implicitly or explicitly, form the employer . We must take care that a confrontation is not precipitated before support of a substantial proportion of the workers . This is likely to be done on those points which unite everyone . The key to building an effective branch is across the board membership - collective action requi- res maximum unity - and we should not get bogged down in considering the differences between the various types of building dewign staffs (we don't want to produce several different leaflets to'appeal' to different categorie of the profession, the small loyalty to the boss rather are not immutable . Trade and the most spectacular growth we have at least the passive * A study of pay and conditions of Agency staff . We could then argue for their to secure and decent employment . The ‘closed shop' should be used to make agreements with employers to control the work contracted out 2 In general, we hope to be strong enough tobuila trade union which can represent the workers on all questiens affecting their work , and to veto any plans by the aprtners which harm the interests of our member- ship and other working people . «.A National Design Service to provide decent building design for ail based on need . This to be done in chnjunction with a nationalised buil~ Ging industry . 2) Wages . This branch is opposed to wage restriants . To improve our wagess, we should fight for : - the establishment of a national minimum wage , to protect the low paid . - Pay should not be eroded by inflation, at a minimum wages should be automatically guaranteed, - Across the board increases to improve the real value of wages . ~- Equal pay for women with no regrading of jobs . 3) Unemployent . This branch is opposed to ali forms of redundancies, wether compulsory or through ‘natural wastage' . To protect our members’ and other workers jobs we sheuld fight for : > Work sharing with no loss of pay to maintain jobs .» ~ the opening of books of firms creating redundancies, or not providing decent working conditions . ~ No subsidies, nationalisation of firms creating redundancies - - A programme of useful public works to create jobs . General policy motions .« 1) This branch is opposed to the social contract . It was sold to the labour movement as a guarantee to maintain jobs and the social wage in return for pay restraints . Insteed we see nearly 2 million unemployed savage cuts in the go gal services, We therefore support rede unionists who oppose a further round of the social contract . and prices racing ahead of wages oe . Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource TASS-BDS Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived John Allan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated 1977 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/8ee7418d360475df4c1352ff3d3d9b51.pdf 71737d6bd29a58464842d3bd4038bef3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liaison Group Including London Group Subject The topic of the resource Liaison Groups: NAM was initially structured as local groups. There was also a Liaison Group whose role was to coordinate the different groups, deal with correspondence and arrange the next annual conference. NAM campaign groups, which were largely autonomous, worked across local groups to develop their ideas. They arranged their own conferences and reported through SLATE and annually to the NAM Congress. The seven different campaign groups listed had members from a variety of local groups. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Various Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976-1979 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Challenge to the Architectural Profession Subject The topic of the resource Article by Anne Karpf about NAM following the first NAM meeting in May 1976 in Covent Garden “Professional Revolutionaries: The Challenge to the Architectural Profession from TwoRadical Groups of Architects--the New Architecture Movement and the Architects' Revolutionary Council'” Description An account of the resource ANNE KARPF looks at the challenge to the architectural profession from two radical groups years were developers’ pimps, skilled in of architects the New Architecture Movement and the Architect's Revolutionary Council. Both argue that architects are more identified with property speculators than with the workers were economically impotent by- people they should serve and that a more accessible, more publicly accountable architecture is necessary to counter the mistakes of current practice. Cynics might say that the rotten reputation currently enjoyed by architects isafunction of a similar condition in their buildings. Certainly the architect no longer represents to the public that enviable synthesis of artist and scientist, the practical dreamer operating in the moral vacuum of art. Indeed, since the community action eruption of the late Sixties, they have been lambasted by tenants demanding satisfaction, and now a group of radical architects in London are demanding that they be allowed to give it. standers. And some of those self-same archi- tects are now trying to use tlhe present relative slumptojustify past profligacy. On the public side, ever since ‘partici- pation’ became the fashionable palliative, you frequently hear miserable tenants challenging architects to come out from their tarted-up Islington terraces and try living in one of their creations. And when architect Erno Goldfinger did, it proved a Jolly publicity stunt which only threw into relief the incompatibility between drawing- board inspiration and the realities of indigenous working-class culture. Why did architects allow themselves to be used in this way and continue to be identified with ‘them’ rather than ‘us’? The explanations of NAM and ARC are an The New Architecture Movement (NAM) is a broadly-based front of radical architects Press meeting at the A.A for A.R.C, and arose out of a conference at Harrogate last November called by the more tightly- knit Architects Revolutionary Council (ARC). Both groups are profoundly critical party. of the profession in its internal organisation and its relation to the rest of society and would appear to be voicing the daily archi- tectural Brievances of much of the popu- lation At its most basic, they argue that archi- tecture cannot be separated from its political implications and social obligations; that art for architects’ sake is not an acceptable dictum by which to build Our cities that architecture, particularly as promulgated by the Royal Institute of British Architects {RIBA), has become an apologia for archi- tects and is not accountable to the people who have to live in and with their work They maintain that this has come about because of the System of patronage, both public and private, which effectively dis eniranchises the vast majority of the popu lation wl h has no say in the design Or use of profession as a homogeneous whole, equally culpable or blameless of the misdeeds per- petrated in its name. There are over 20 000 registered architects in Britain, distributed fairly equally between private architectural practices and the public local authority sector. In the private sector, only about 20% and that the present professional relation- uncompromising indictment of the structure of the profession and its institute. Firstly, it is wrong to conceive of the Developers’ pimp: Penitent architects seeking to exonerate rest — all those in the public sector and 80% ship excludes perhaps the most important That this has been deleterious is plain for all to see, since the turn-of-decade property boom obligingly furnished us with some particularly graphic examples. Legendary and often empty office blocks are the particular product of private patronage, while comprehensive redevelopment and high-rise tower blocks were the contribution are principal partners in firms and they of public patronage. themselves claim that they were only the icing on the speculators’ cake and that the meal could have been made without them. They only tinkered with its appearance, but were innocent in dreaming up the recipe. in private practice —are salaried, paid by the state or their bosses, the private principals. In the boom, the earnings of private principals shot up with the increase in building prices. The RIBA deny that archi- tects made a bonanza in these years, claim- ing that the increased costs of Tunning an rhis is belied by reality: one architect said in 1971, ‘the most successful architects are those who understand property values and architectural practice simply kept pace with he mechanics of property development’, inflation. NAM and ARC disagree; they ind another gave his name colloquially to a show that the increased profits during these series of planning loopholes which en- years were not equitably distributed to gendered maximum floor space. At their salaried employees and, moreover, that the the building-user are rarely the same being worst, successful architects in the boom bulk of the really lucrative work could only live in buildings, but have never employed an architect, fall into that category, indicating quite clearly that the architect’s client and $56 AD/9/76 procuring planning permission; tenants and are paid according to a mandatory minimum fee scale as a percentage of the construction costs of the buildings they undertake. The Dennis Crompton its environment. Those of us who use or RIBA-baiting Both NAM and ARC are in a sense most comfortable when on RIBA-baiting terri- tory. That is not to say that they do not have proper ideologies of their own, but it is evidently easier to ram against a clearly- defined enemy rock than to flounder ina sea of abstract theory. Perhaps NAM’s most effective marriage of thought and action arose out of its oppo- sition to the RIBA’s recent submission to the Monopolies Commission on the case for minimum mandatory fees. They them- selves acknowledge that this stimulated them to focus their opinions. They submitted a carefully worked-out counter-report, which concluded that ‘the current fee system is not intrinsic in the system of architectural ser- vices (which the RIBA had maintained) but a gratuitous market device procuring uni- lateral benefits to architects’. Where the RIBA held that the minimum fee system gave the client a network of assurances which guaranteed high quality work, NAM showed that such assurances are part of the normal legal safeguards which operate quite apart from any RIBA quid pro quo. Where the RIBA claimed that the absence of a price floor would create under-cutting, which’in times of slump would put archi- tects out of business, NAM suggested that architects, because of their low level of capital investment, have the capacity to withstand such fluctuations. Likewise, there is an acute conflict between the wish to maintain a federalist, loosely-grouped, locally autonomous struc- ture and the need to present a concerted becoming bureaucratic? How to inculcate into alienated and passive tenants the con- fidence and ability to take decisions? Will they be of any value without corresponding changes in land tenure, for what use is power over building without control over land? And how to deal with the truly national decisions, some of which will always have to And where the RIBA was adamant that This multi-story car park is part of a proposal f the low elasticity of demand for architects means that a reduction of fees would hardly increase the volume of work — architectural sharply-defined plan of action, which has the costs being only a small percentage of total virtue of attracting support and might help costs, and architects, without rival substitutes, being unable to attract work from other sources NAM put it that lower charges would enable potential user-clients who can only afford small sums to initiate small-scale schemes and that was the whole point. All well and good. NAM argues its case with quite sharp legal logic, but disarmingly concedes that the whole subject is hardly quintessential, but simply a good one to get stuck into. to build a mass movement. To what extent is that possible? NAM sets itself an ambitious target: if it does not succeed in carrying with it 10-20% of the architectural electorate within 5 years, then it feels it may as well disband and join the tighter-knit caucus of ARC. National Design Service In the crude language of advertising, they need a selling pitch. Perhaps their notion of And this raises some quite fundamental a National Design Service (NDS) serves this conflicts endemic to any group lobbying for function but, though admirable as a pure change in capitalist society. One might concept, it is fraught with difficulties. protest that NAM’s Report to the Mon- The argument runs like this: You counter opolies Commission is hardly more than a the remote, unaccountable nature of archi- reasonably sophisticated, highly enjoyable tectural practice, both public and private, by exercise in pretend-litigation, a polemic, and that any serious move to radically alter the profession and its place in society must start by looking outwards at the rest of society, the financing of local building to feed this for change within the one is ineffectual without change in the other. And up pops that ‘Socialism in One Country versus World Revolution’ tussle, popularly transmogrified into a chicken-egg conundrum. NAM and ARC both concur on this one, and hold — if only to maintain their buoyant sense of optimism that ‘to change every- thing else involves a milennial struggle: in the nicaulime, what do architects do at their brought about? How to prevent it from drawing-boards? You operate from 9 to 5 as an architect, and that is your sphere of action; there is limited yalue in being an evening-class politician’ (NAM member). 5 Ny hal grafting on to local authorities a freely available National Design Service, decentra- lised and controlled by the people. You alter service. And thus you pervert the tendency of private practice to answer to owner rather than user and the inclination of the public sector to, at its best, put the national interest before the local. It is perhaps unfair to put NAM’s serious proposals into political baby language like this, since they are acutely aware of the questions therein begged. How can this be en See 557 _be handled by sizeable practices. Since only 1500 of the 4000 private firms in this _Country have more than 5 members and far s fewer are large enough to handle the really Major schemes, the substantial benefits a ‘accrued to a small but powerful minority. ip at makes this minority doubly PoWerful is its position in the RIBA. On the last RIBA Council, the largest single group _Were the principals in private practice, who Constituted 34 out of the Council’s 60 members. Of the replacements to the Council announced on June 3rd, 1976, once “#€ain_ the private principals dominate, exceeding the aggregate of all other groups (public sector, salaried private sector). How _can the RIBA speak for the vast majority of _architects who are salaried (80%), asked a Council member recently, when so few are = the Council, and when the voting system invariably favours the big names? The RIBA concedes that its head and lungs are domi- hated by the senior partners of established practices, but puts this down to the un- willingness of salaried architects to become involved and to the reluctance of employers to release their employees for RIBA duties. All this goes a long way to explain ARC’s angry criticism that the RIBA failed to come Out on the side of ‘the people’ in those demolishing years. Dog doesn’t eat patron. —arr Ree — tethroneet——ee or the comprehensive re-development of the central business area of the London suburb of Ealing. It has the full backing of the local council, but not the majority of residents. If it is built, it will mean the destruction of what little remains of Ealing's village character, the rehousing of local residents and the economic ruin of existing small businesses. be made, unless a magic wand waves in a pre-industrial mode of anarchism which renders al such considerations irrelevant? On this last, they suggest a parallel with the division of labour between general practitioner and hospital, mutually inter- dependent, but taking responsibility for dif- ferent kinds of decisions. Their extended analogy between their hoped-for NDS and the existing National Health Service might provoke wariness, if not cynicism, in patients who feel that the present health service expropriates their capacity for self- -determination quite as much as being an impotent tenant. Sensibly, NAM plans to work on more concrete and immediate themes for the time being. They aim to do a treatment of the RIBA code of conduct, on the lines of their Monopolies Commission Report. They intend working on the possibility of in- creased unionisation for architects, either to better their membership of and represen- CAPTIONS FOR PROFESSION REVIEW however piecemeal and undramatic, Students of Brian Anson, a teacher at the Architectural Association and founder of ARC, have been working for a year with tenants in Bootle, his home town, managing to reverse a local authority clearance order and now devising a rehabilitation scheme where tenants control the design, financing and rate of building. ARC have been work- ing for free with the Ealing Town Centre Action group, designing according to their behest and needs. The ASSIST group of Glasgow has been organising public- participation rehab in the Govan tenement area, responsible to the local community association. The Support group, now in embryonic stage, plans to engage in a similar kind of community architecture. And in private practice, Rod Hackney in Macclesfield helped the local action group create their own improvement proposals and implement them. Says Hackney, ‘people working for me have to live with the question is not ‘what forms?’ or ‘which ference in Hull. They claim that such shock described in the morally neutral currency of ‘aesthetics’, devoid of political content for the people affected, the more elitist and the more removed from the political review of ordinary people become the experts who use this currency’. Nevertheless, conclude NAM, “we've got to grasp that nettle at some stage or other’. in all this? In a sense, theirs is an easier situation. They see themselves as a small, tightly-knit module, the vanguard (and therefore able to exult in their romantic, architects do all the acting, can be just conspiratorial closeness). This relieves them another way of disenfranchising the power- of the need to attract wide support (and the less: as planner John Turner has said, ‘while conflicts which this entails). They created acting for the poor may be very rewarding NAM for that. They have also been lucky for the professional, it effectively minimizes and industrious in having practical the necessity for any of the Tules of the schemes to engage in local communities, to game to be changed so as to include the poor demonstrate the practicability of their themselves’. techniques?’, but ‘who are my patrons?’, for it is this which draws up the whole chain’. In this, they follow planner Robert Goodman, who is aware of how distancing art-talk can says NAM, ‘either more brave than us, or be and that ‘the more architecture can be theory and to show themselves as more than just the debating society which both groups dread becoming. absorbed into the political bloodstream and simply help it flow smoother. Similarly, he was. Now, will we listen? community action, where supposedly radical This is not what NAM and ARC want nor does it have to happen. Indeed, there are several small-scale, locally-based experiments going on at the moment which indicate how They have just produced their first broad- side, ‘Red House’, and, with enviable realistic architect accountability can be, $58 AD/9/76 tote re eercart LAL eee } Ealing residents have called in ARC to fight the communities. And if the residents don’t like tation within the existing unions — UCATT (construction workers), ASTMS (manage- ment) and NALGO (local government officers) or to create alternative struc- tures. (‘Architects are somewhere in the Stone Age as far as awareness of their real-life political predicament’, one of them International. They are working towards co-ownership working relationships within has said), Another group is looking at what they hope will eventually become a offices similar to Yugoslavia, where the law architectural education and eventually they new school of architecture and intend to limits practices to no larger than 5 and will take up with aesthetic matters. This latter is hard for them: since their inception, they have mustered much of their energy from debunking the supremacy of the ‘artiness’ of art. As they say, ‘the radical hold a dress rehearsal in the form of a decisions are shared. : council-backed redevelopment scheme (top). After public meetings and extensive surveys, ARC drew up an alternative (bottom) and are now preparing evidence for a government enquiry. our work, they ring our doorbell at midnight and tell us it’s a load of rubbish’. Concomitant with these external changes, optimism and the support of foreign NAM wants the profession to heal itself colleagues, they make plans for an ARC inside. This would include co-operative and summer school next year. Meanwhile, critics might unkindly allege, they can amuse themselves with radical foreplay, such as their disruption of the recent RIBA con- Behind al these changes is a fundamental change of attitude. Tom Woolley, teacher at the AA and part of the Support group, puts it like this: ‘Professionals, not just architects but doctors and others too, think they know what people need, and this becomes insti- tutionalised. People hand over responsibility to the professionals, and we want to get people to take it back into their own hands. We’re not saying there’s no expertise involved in building, but we see ourselves as ‘enablers’ to help people to think about their environment and make the decisions about it themselves’. : One hundred years ago, William Morris said, ‘the architect is carefully guarded from the common troubles of common man, building for ignorant, purse-proud digesting machines’. He thought architecture could tactics are a quite legitimate means to an end — to decrease the credibility of the RIBA and eventually to destroy them. They are, more naive, depending on your point of view. In any case, they have burned their professional boats, which we haven’t’. Nevertheless, both groups — whatever their self-confessed problems — do perform important functions and provide a critique of the inadequacies of the present system of value to more than just disaffected young architects. For instance, they are rightly scathing about current public relations exercises in nominal participation which only be reborn when it became part of the Vanguard And what of ARC: where do they stand harm than good: radical antibodies are are no more eccentric in their analysis than masquerade as the real thing and do more life of the people in general. NAM and ARC ANNE KARPF isafreelance investigative journalist working in London. She previously worked OD research for TV documentaries for the BBC: Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anne Karpf Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived BD Article Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 19-Oct-77 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/198fceb8c65d8770b4877dff3ae1ca52.pdf 1e76797c6df366b97d1ab268605c7e78 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Professional Issues Description An account of the resource A cohort of NAM members became engaged with the professional registration body, standing as elected councillors on the Architects Registration Council and its various committees. Hitherto entirely dominated by the RIBA bloc, the Council began to yield to a new dynamic through NAM's involvement, enabling fresh perspectives on such issues as mandatory fee scales, greater lay representation on the body, ethically-based standards of professional conduct, etc. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Monopolies Commission Report Subject The topic of the resource NAM's evidence to the Government re. the Fee Scale Description An account of the resource Report of the New Architecture Movement to the Monopolies Conmission investigation into the supply in The United Kingdom of Architects t servi ces. THE NEW ARCHITECTURE MOVEMAT 14th May 1976 THE CASE AGAINST MANDATORY FFÆS CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION 1 . THE HOLLOW mRGAIN THE FALLACIES AND THE FACTS PUBLIC INTEREST INTRODUCTION This report is submitted by the New Architecture Movement to the Monopolies Commission to assist in the investigation it is currently undertaking at the order of the Department of Trade and Industry. It is understood that the Royal Institute of British Architects is submitting its own report, "The Case for Mandatory Minimum Fees" , which claims to carry the support of all the other architectural bodies who were consulted. The New Architecture Movement (N.A.M. ) was not consulted, and does not support the R.I. B.A. t s case, and therefore is presenting its own arguments independently. The N.A.M. consists of a substantial body of professional architects and laymen who share a consensus of views on all aspects of architecture as well as the activities of the R.I. B.A. differing radically from the official orthodoxy. Since, however, the Conmission t s terms of reference relate specifically to the question of the fee scale and the public interest, N.A.M. has sought to confine its submission to those matters germaine to the Connnission t s enquiry. This report may therefore be read alongside that submitted by the R.I. B.A. and counter — arguments have been closely cross—referenced. N.A.M. 's report may be summarized as demonstrating that the current Fee System is not intrinsic in the system of architectural services but a gratuitous market device procuring unilateral benefits to architects; that the R.I. B.A. 's detailed argument contains serious contradictions and flaws; that the statistics and the resulting inferences have been misleadingly or incorrectly drawn; and that 2 the central concept of the 'public interest' on more searching analysis may be shown to be severely prejudiced by the fee scales t mandatory status. The recognition of the arguments made in this report entail action for change on the basis of the following descending hierarchy of priorities Abandonment of the mandatory minimum fee scale entirely. Retention of the fee scale as a recommendation only, but abandonment of its mandatory element. i i i) Retention of the mandatory fee scale but the establishment of a permanent independent agency to review the levels of the scale. Such agency to include at least 5(Y//o non— professional representation. It must however be noted in the context of (i) and (i i) above that since the R.I. B.A. has argued that any such changes to the present fee system would necessarily entail a wholesale review of all aspects of the system of architectural services, any recommendation by the Commission on these lines would place on the R.I. B.A. the onus of undertaking the review mentioned or of justifying its change of mind. N.A.M. trusts that this report will constructively contribute to the sum of material on which the Commission will formulate its reconmendations, and we would confirm our willingness to participate in any further debate which the Commission may wish to pursue. - 3 - PART 1 THE HOLLOW BARGAIN It is understood that the Monopolies Commi ssion has a duty to satisfy itself that arrangements restricting the competition in any given market for goods or services do not operate to the prejudice of the public interest. The market in question is that for archi— tectural services. These, as practised by architects, have for various historical reasons become assimilated into a closely defined system governed by the R.I. B.A., which is itself a body of architects, such that the purveyors and their practices have acquired the status of a profession. The definition of a professional differs widely depending upon whether one is referring to, say, golfing or surgery, but in the context of architecture it is proposed that the distinctive differen— tiating element is that of "disinterested counsel". The status of this undertaking to provide "disinterested counsel" is of central interest, since it is the constituent five assurances — the guarantees of this essential disinterest — which, we are told, are advanced to clients in return for their acceptance of the fee scale. (p. 3.2.5) The fee scale and the assurances are argued to be mutually inter— dependant, such that either connot stand without the other, and removal destroying the entire structure of the R. I. B.A. arrangements — code, conditions, registration, etc. A major portion of the Commission's attention will therefore be directed towards the status of the assurances, and the necessity/ dispensability of the linkage between these and the fee scale. For example, in demonstrating that the link is necessary it would have to be shown that clients may be confident of the fulfillment of the assurances by accepting the fee scale, and that architects by insisting on the fee scale are held to the assurances. If, however, the contrary can be demonstrated, then the proposition that clients should accept the fee scale in return for these assurances is in fact not a bargain but a deceit; there will be no necessary connection between the two; and architects will be seen to derive an unjustified market advantage at the expense of their consumers. Let us start with the first assurance. In what way does the validity of the promise of integrity require the support of the fee scale? The status of this assurance is more in the nature of an oath than a contract. The content of an oath is not a good or a service bought, with money. The reference is either to the familiar concept of good faith, which is a normal requirement of any parties entering into any sort of legal or commercial contract and thus not special to architects, or it is a promise of honour somewhat akin to the medical Hippocratic oath, which is. not a divisible commodity costing XO/b for a "high degree". In the latter case, the acceptance of the fee scale is of little avail to the client who has the misfortune to employ a dishonourable architect. Dismissal or censure is part of the policing function of the R.I. B.A. Conduct Committee who rightly seek to maintain the code — much as ABTA upholds certain standards of good conduct in the practice of travel agents. If, therefore, we interpret the first assurance as an oath, the Institute itself will administer the measures following its non— fulfillment; if we interpret it as simply the mens rea of a contract the client has recourse to the normal legal remedies following a breach of contract. Either way, the fee scale is neither necessary nor sufficient — it is a gratuitous element serving the interests of architects while securing no compensatory advantage to clients that are not already provided by other means. The second assurance is even more plainly dissociated from the fee scale. The provision that architects may not limit their liability is derived directly from The Partnership Act, 1890, (Section 9) which establishes the legal grounds of the most common form of architectural association. It is worth noting in this context that the legal definition of partnership (sec 1.1) as "the relation which subsists between persons carrying on a business in common with a view of is somewhat at variance with the image of disinterest promulgated by the R.I. B.A., and that the failure to make such a profit may be construed by a court (sec. 35.e) as grounds for dissolution. In none of the other less common forms of association available to architects — unlimited liability companies, limited partnerships, consortia, etc — can the liability of principals be limited, so that the client who is dissatisfied with his architect's fulfillment of the second assurance has simply to seek legal remedy under the terms of the appropriate Act. But, apart from these inalienable legal provisions, it is well known that the concept of diligence being reinforced by unlimited liability is substantially modified by the universal practice of carrying professional indemnity. This ability to artificially defer personal liability is in fact normally taken as a criterion of whether a given architect's practice can be established or maintained. Similarly the third assurance, relating to competence, is also substantiated not by the fee system but by the legal requirements of the Registration Acts, Building Regulations, Planning Controls, etc, in addition to the abundant technical standards and recommendations published either by external agencies, such as D.O.E., B.R.S., and the British Standards Institution, or jointly with the R.I. B.A. itself, as for example in the case of the National Building Specification. Except for Registration, these are constraints upon any design agency working in building construction or related fields, and not simply upon architects; and the client achieves no additional advantage in the latter case by accepting the fee scale. 1 . 1 1 It is worth noting that, in view of recent reports of building failures since the war, projects involving architects have not fared noticeably better than those without, suggesting that clients may be ill—advised to take the third assurance simply at face value anyway. 1 . 12 The fourth assurance, insofar as it differs from the first, is a simple repetition of the cornmon laws of agency and contract in which it is generally not the agent but the employer who accepts liability for the actions undertaken. In other words, the assurance largely confers upon the client not an advantage but an obligation, to which the fee scale bears no relation. 1 . 13 Moreover, the architect's activities include several important tasks where he must actually refrain from making "his clients' best interests the dominating consideration", notably in the exercise of quasi— judicial functions under the building contract, to say nothing of the further dilution of the assurance entailed in the architect's retention of copyright of his work. . 14 The final assurance raises questions relating to the public interest at large involving supra—client matters beyond the terrrus of contract that are unenforceable on the basis of the fee scale and perhaps even at all. Further discussions of this assurance is included in Part 3. The summation of the foregoing arguments is that the client is currently invited to accept the fee scale in return for the assurances as though only by so doing can he be confident of their fulfillment. A deeper analysis, however, shows that he is being offered nothing to which he would not be entitled anyway, or for which effective means of reinforcement do not already exist; hence that the fee scale is simply a gratuitous market advantage to architects. The R.I . B.A. claims that the removal of the mandatory minimum fee scale cannot be accomplished without the entire remaining package being re—fashioned. NoA.M0 proposes that it may be removed, the remaining package staying invtact with market equity being thereby restored to consumers. If the Commission accepts any or all of N.A.M. 's arguments, then the onus is clearly on the Role B.A. to explain what wholesale changes it would propose. �PART 2 FALLACIES AND THE FACTS Through the process of developing the preceeding argument came the realisation that the entire rationale behind the professional ethos of the R.I. B.A. was either a kind of farce of muddy thought and disingenuous invention or an attempt to confuse the issues by an extravagant masquerade. Whether it is a farce of self—deception or a masquerade of deceit, it has lead us to be rather •circumspect of the detailed arguments presented in the R.I. B.A. text and to query the statistical evidence. That such evidence is effectively muted by qualification does nothing to dispel our doubts as to its use and inference. We therefore consider it advisable to examine closely the subject matter and to expose its more blatent inconsistencies. It caused little surprise and some amusement that the inconsistencies should expose three key issues, namely the structure of the fee scale, the notion of competition, and the abolition of the mandatory fee. 't In such circumstances (negotiation on a recommended fee scale) the effects of a change to recommended scales would be little different from the effects of abolishing the scale altogether". (Appendix 1.33, p. 11) "If the fluctuations in the demand for architects' services could by some means be eliminated, fees would no doubt settle down at something like their present level even without a mandatory scale". (7.4) The first statement implies that a recommended scale is really no scale at all, from which we can in turn deduce that a scale only has validity if it is a mandatory one. Were the second statement true, then the scale is valid per se and its mandatory element is effec Led through market forces. Thus we have incompatible notions of whac constitutes a mandatory scale — that the mandatory element is indispensable and that external market values effectively maintain present levels. 2.3 "The R.I. B.A. has not sought to limit the rate of entry into the profession". (3.12) "Concern with improving the quality of architects' training has been a feature of the R.I.B.A. t s activities from the early years and a major step forward was taken with the 1958 Oxford Conference and the introduction of the two GCE A—level entry requi rement t'. (6.10) The Institute may claim that it has no control over the supply of trained architects and yet by controlling entry qualification has the means and intention of doing so. "It is exceptionally difficult to measure technical efficiency (efficiency in production) in a profession which is characterised by sharp fluctuations in activity rates and whose output is so difficult to categorise 't . (6.9) "The R.I. B.A. believes that action following this report (The Architect and his Office) significantly improved the technical efficiency of the profession". (6.100 Does the R.I. B.A. wish us to believe that efficiency is measurable or not? Perhaps the yardstick is by the sale of the Handbook to offices that hadn't a clue, and the non—sale to offices that knew it all anyvay. 2.5 't In practice the result of cutting the design fee by a third would be a substantial rise in construction costs". (3.8) "Indeed, an architect's ability to reduce his client's costs is one of the most powerful competitive weapons available within an highly competitive framework". (5.2) We have a bald and boring argument throughout the report that the quality of work will decline as a result of fee cutting and with consequential poor cost control. Yet we are led to believe that the prime virtue of the professional service is effective .cost control. Are architects likely to trade in "a powerful competitive weapon" for a third of their fees? Are architects likely to cut their fees at the expense of their throats? 2.6 "The option has always been available to clients to choose a commercial form of architectural service". (2.1) "This low price elasti city (of demand) is a consequence of the absence of any substitute for the skilled design services which architects provide". (3.7) t The option t postulates that there is competition between the professional and the commercial services. t Low price elasticity' is a consequence of the absence of competition. For both statements to be true either the commercial service is not skilled (which is untrue) or the professional service is complementary rather than competitive. 2.7 "It is clear also that the two sectors are in competition with one another, for every public authority has to make a choice on each building project • (Appendix 1.12) "The Institute believes that the two sectors have different but complementary roles to play". (3.18) In fact the public and private sectors are complementary in very rare circumstances. The competitive act is supplanted by the complementary in a closed shop. 2.8 The presentation of empirical evidence exhibits simi lar fal lacies and distortion. Great play is made of the fact that due to extremes �of supply of new work, abnormal economic circumstances impinge on the provision of services. Curiously, a graph showing new commissions is used to demonstrate uneven revenue. Revenue is earned continuously throughout the design and construction process. Broadly one third of the income is earned at the design stage, one third at working drawings and one third at the construction stage. In fact the input by the office at large is decisively different at various stages of the job, and the arrival of new conmissions is arbitrary. Many, for example, are in the form of feasibility studies on which fees are payable even if abortive, and on which revenue is earned relatively quickly. The only true measure of the mythical cycle is one of revenue. This will be of a broadly similar profile to work certified. The revenue cycle of abortive commissions is high frequency, while the time scale of a commission fully achieved is a long one and the effect is the opposite to the trend that the original graph has attempted to show. 2.9 A similar falsification is to be found in the evidence of the R.I.B.A. that purports to show that architects do not earn monopolistic profits. The confusion in this instance results from substituting the earnings of the profession at large for the profits earned by principals in private practice. The earnings of 8(YÅ of the profession represent the cost of the provision of the service, not its profit. Profit would be represented by the partner earnings and drawings. We endeavour to show that the profit margin has continued to rise with the trend to larger practices. This deceit has been arrived at by using the interquartile range rather than the first quarter. The level of salaried architects' remuneration is set by the competitive price for labour in the public sector which is arrived at by collective bargaining. Such evidence and argument continues to portray the myth that architects as a group are one and homogeneous. The level of salaried architect' remuneration is independent and irrelevant to the profiteering revenue of private practice. 2.10 We believe that what has been presented by the R.I. B.A. is a masquerade which attempts to conceal a primary economic objective of. a price floor for prestigious architectural services. We interpret this as self—interest. The classic model of this enviable situation creates the following conditions: a guarantee of minimum revenue whether for good or bad services; the power to determine price and hence profit; the power to limit the public disclosure of financial evidence; a control over the level of service (only the purveyor of the service seemingly being able to qualify it); the power to determine and identify efficiency in its own terms (thus enabling real gains of efficiency to be returned as profit); and the power to immunise the market share of the building design from the vaguaries of the market, to the unfair advantage of competitors and to the detriment of allied professions, thereby retaining an otherwise vulnerable leadership of the building team. 2.11 We therefore pose a series of questions. i) Is there any validity of maintaining a price floor under anv circumstances? Clearly society does so in terms of, say food; but to extend such devices generally distort the free economy. Should such a device be extended beyond the provision of essential services? This would only be conceivable if society held that such a commodity or service was indispensible or very highly desirable. In such circumstance.s it would be tantamount to a fraud if the case was made by the interes Led party. We would consider that the case for architecture to be so treated would be invalid if it required architects to articulate the case. Should such a device be extended to the private sector? Only if by doing so the profits from such an enterprise were either controlled by society or used to society's benefit. Clearly the profits made by most architectural firms would not meet these criteria. What peculiar conditions of the market would justify the price floor? If there exists a crisis such that otherwise the service would collapse. Plainly if private practice ceased to function then the practice of architecture would continue in the public sector. The P. I . B. states that extremes of demand and supply constitute peculiar conditions. Do these conditions then affect the business of architecture? Only in as much as they effect the construction industry generally. The construction industry is broad—based and has high capital investment. It is likely that architecture which has low capital investment would survive periods of stagnation with a greater degree of flexibility. 2.12 We are constrained by the needs for clarity and succinctness to limit the exposure of these detailed fallacies in the R.I. B.A. t s evidence, and the resulting questions provoked. The basic alternative statis— tical interpretations are, by contrast, now explored further as follows. 2.13 THE TENDACY TOWARDS BIGGER PRACTICES Table 1 Distribution of Private Practices by size 1958—1972 Source: R.I . B.A. Submission to Monopolies Commission May 1976 From 1958 onwards there is a clear tendency for the percentage of small practices to decrease and for the percentage of larger practices to increase. In 1967 the National Board of Prices and Incomes found that medium and large practices, while forming only 38% of all offices, had an 81% share of all fee income. The tendency towards larger practices and the incomes shown in Table 2 are therefore indicative of the extent to which principals in private practice are, through the fee scale, reaping increasing profits for no measurable improvement in service, and the way in which such larger practices thereby distort the distribution of patronage . 2.14 LARGER PmCTICES YIELD GREATER PROFITS Table 2 Average Annual Income per Architectural Partner by size of Architectural Tea.m Sources : (i) National Board for Prices and Incomes Repoft• on Architects Costs + Fees 1968 Updating Factor — RICS Building Cost Information March 1976 Notes: Fees directly related to Building Costs Value of New Commissions in 1966 and 1974 comparable source i i Percentage distribution of practices by size approx. similar (Table 1) Definition of Income as per source i 2.15 SALARIED ARCHITECTS HAVE NOT FARED SO WELL Table 3 Average Salary of all Employed Architects in all Private Practices Source : Ibid Note: All tech. salaries in 1967 formed 34.5% of costs; R.I. B.A. Handbook suggests approx. similar figures. We have been unable to discover reliable data relating the income of salaried architects to size of office. The average salary used throughout will consequently be rather high for small practices which generally pay lower salaries than do larger practices (see 1968 NBPI Report). Nevertheless in small practices the actual difference in income between partners and salaried technical staff has remained fairly constant between 1966 and 1974. In 1960 of all salaried technical staff worked in medium and large offices although those offices formed only of all offices. (See The Architect and His Office: 1962 RIBA Survey) By 1972 the percentage of salaried technical staff working in medium and large practices had risen to while these practices still accounted for only 36.4% of all offices. And it is in those offices that incomes of principals and staff dramatic extent in offices with the increasing gap between the is most apparant, rising to a more than 25 architects. PART 3 PUBLIC INTEREST 3.1 The central element in the entire debate on which the attention of all parties is focused is "the public interest". Rightly, it is the talisman in any attempt to judge the degree of equity in professional activity. But what is the public interest? Who are the public? Who, if anyone, are not the public? How is their interest defined, and where and by whom is it represented? 3.2 The broad assumption, it appears, is that the public interest refers approximately to the "open market" — in this case the consumers or potential consumers of architectural services. Theoretically this should embrace the population at large, outside the architectural profession, which of course itself consists of men and women who are members of the conmunity. Even such a brief definition conjures up a vast aggregate of groupings, whether class—based or by colour, locality, occupation, etc., etc. — a heterogeneous mass of almost unimaginable diversity. It is difficult to see how any person or group in this mass could be legitimately excluded from the "public" if we are endeavouring to identify whose interest is to be safe— guarded; and the principle that could be formulated from this premise — that 'l a decent envirmment is a basic right of everybody" — would appear, in the context of this democratic free society, to be virtually self—evident. 3.3 Any assessment of the equity of a fee scale would clearly have to include the test as to whether the existence of such a scale introduced any kind of selectivity or discrimination into this mass of equally entitled potential consumers. - 3.4 How does the R.I. B.A. mandatory fee scale fare in such a test? The answer is not well. It is immediately clear that unlike, for example, the medical profession whose services are available to any— body simply on the basis of need, the "public interest" in architec— tural affairs is in fact a portmanteau term concealing two very different types of consumer — the client and the user. 3.5 The occasions when these two parties are in fact the same person or group are indisputably the exceptions to the rule. Indeed, it would be more reasonable to characterize the distribution of architectural services as a system in which the users are not the clients. In the field of council housing for example, perhaps the overriding priority building type, it is axiomatic that the residents cannot avail themselves of the services of architects. This anomaly pervades the whole of the market under scrutiny. In contrast with the medical profession whose services are available equally to of the population, the services of architects are purchased only by one fifth. This discrimination in the market is not of course solely due to the existence of the mandatory fee scale. Questions as to dominion over land, finding capital costs of construction, etc., are also to be invo Ived. 3.7 But it is not within the Commissio i s terms of reference to criticise the R.I. B.A. for elements within t e system over which it has no direct control (or opts to exert n direct influence ) . We are confined to studying only those a rangements that act or may acc as barriers to potential consumers o architectural services over which the R.I.B.A. does exercise contro thereby interfering with free market forces and the public interest. learly the fee system is such an arrangement; for by denying architects the option to charge less to those potential user—clients who would be less able to pay, and allowing them to find any necessary balance from other types of work, the fee system acts as a barrier to those architects whose capacity or conscience favour small scale initiatives in preference to the corporate or bureaucratic clients whose sectional interests at present totally bias the market. If the ratio of this bias was less disproportionate, this state of affairs might assume less significance; but the fact that user—clients currently include only the wealthy sponsors of private villas, while direct community architecture is practically non—existent, indicates that the "public interest" in the market for architectural services is only fractionally served. In the troika of medical, legal and architectural professions, the architectural profession is conspicuous in its failure to develop alternative systems of remuneration to prevent this sort of distortion. 3.8 In searching for the linkage of architectural services to this substantial "disenfranchised" sector of the market, one is reduced to considering assurance No. 5 of the R.I. B.A. package, namely that the architect will do his work within the framework of a set of social and artistic values so as to ensure that the interests of society — as well as those of his client — are served by the best architecture he is able to create". 3.9 In none of the other assurances exchanged for the fee scale does this majority of potential consumers appear. It is the fee scale, we are told, that safeguards the content of the assurances; but it is hard to see how this can be so with respect to assurance No. 5, since the party who is seeking the assurance is not the party with the power of withholding the fee. 3.10 Even if it could be argued that the exclusion of the majority of potential consumers from the market was legitimate — an absurd proposition — what residual safeguard to their interest is thus provided? And through what method of representation, what system of checks and balances, is this safeguard operated or maintained? How does, how can, even the diligent practitioner ensure that, in the absence of direct contact with the intended beneficiaries, he is working within the appropriate "framework of values" to ensure "service" to these social "interests"? 3.11 Clearly since it is their contention that the fee system does guarantee the assurance, it is for the R.I. B.A. to provide the answers to these questions: but in the meantime, N.A.M. ventures to suggest that not only is the link tenuous in the extreme, but that the bulk of the evidence from this majority, over let us say the past decade, as to their satisfaction with this derivative "benefit" of the fee system — the bulk of the evidence is not encouraging. 3.12 Indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the regard with which the profession and its products are held by the public at large (the true market for services) has seldom been at a lower ebb. The reason for this is neither the lack of architectural interest amongst the public, nor the want of imagination amongst architects, but the series of arrangements, of which the fee system is a part, which prevents the relevant interest being harnessed to the appropriate imagination. For the synopsis of the principle arguments covered, and N.A.M. 's conclusions, please refer again to the Introduction, parts and 5. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource JA/ DR Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived JA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/32be27cbeefac3170e8236557890b9ec.pdf 747ff52bd736aee4527f19a51b03b852 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource Many NAM members were engaged in the field of architectural education, either as staff or students, and pursued new ideas for course content and pedagogy, reassessing existing course structures and priorities in conventional architectural training. The concern to focus on socially necessary buildings and to find new and meaningful ways of engaging with building users and the wider community- both central NAM themes - illuminated much of the discussion. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Month Subject The topic of the resource Comments on NAB/UGC Report (1 page) Description An account of the resource Professor Andy Macmillan, Home students could suffer as a Vice-President of the RIBA's Education and Professional Development Committee and result of NAB/UGC report Head of the Mackintosh School in Glasgow, told the Journal that many schools are IMPLEMENTATION of the tempted to accept large numTransbinary Architecture bers of overseas students who Group report could lead to a pay much higher tuition than situation where all overseas home students. students are allowed access to Part Il courses while only a Teachers lobby fraction of home students are allowed to continue towards a Macmillan continued: "My professional qualification. department can earn {100,000 That is the warning of Cho per annum by bringing in Padamsee, formerly head of Nigerian students on urban the Hull School and now design courses, and the univerdirector of an MSc course at sity pressures me to take them. the Bartlett School. If there's a quota to be placed on home students, there ARCUK letter should be one placed on over- seas students." In a letter to ARCUK Macmillan: overseas quota. "Teachers," says Macmil- Padamsee: real danger. Board of Architectural EducaIan, "are a lobby to protect tion Chairman Professor John Tarn, Padamsee results explains from thatthe present• done abroad a portfolio to the ARCUKof work and made will aware separately of the anomaly,consider their is a lobby jobs, just to protect like the qualityRIBA the anomaly the implications prior to a and numbers." The view of Admissions Committee for TAG report having confined or to the fuller discussion and decisions many teachers, he claims, is: itself to home students. The Part Il exemption RIBA Special Entry Commit- on implementation later in the "We don't care whether they total intake of home students to Part Il courses should be exemption tee for partial from Parts or completeI or Il or spring. only (students) want to get fill jobs our or places not, andwe reduced to a maximum of 700 Overseas quota get as much money as possiper annum by 1989, it says. In both. "It is a privilege not It is possible that some form ble." 1982-83, overseas students afforded hitherto considered to British students,unneces- of quota on overseas students Macmillan suggested: comprised 19.4 per cent of all sary, since they were free to will be enforced. At present, "Perhaps there should be a students passing Part I and institutions set their new category of membership, therefore eligible for entry to enter Part Il courses". individual in relation to the RIBAO, for overseas memPart Il. Padamsee argues that Professor John Tarn told the own policies do Part if the TAG recommendation Journal: "It is a loophole numbers of places offered to 2 bers, here where and Part they 3 might in their home were carried out, and the same which could be used. We could overseas students. But if im- and would not be number of overseas students be taking on a lot of overseas plementation of the TAG re- country, were eligible to enter Part Il, students on a purely commer- port is to achieve its twin of aimsthe allowed Alternatively,to practise Macmillanhere." they would then comprise 25 cial basis. The RIBA's view of increasing the quality its argues, "there might be an Act re tstration to home per cent of all students on would be that if this was a backit profession numbers, the while RIBA reducing itself may of Parliament to diploma courses. Padamsee door to qualification, then says: "Schools of architecture, must be stopped." be drawn into recommendihg Stu ents." in order to protect their re- NAB and the UGC will be a quota on overseas •students. source bases (in particular specialist and studio staff), and at the same time achieve a 10:1 staff-student ratio, would be tempted to make up student numbers by recruiting more overseas students. In some cases this could reach as high as 50 per cent of the diploma course." Overseas students The result would be that only some British students would proceed to Part Il and obtain a British qualification, while all overseas students would. In addition, an over- Rank Hovis McDougall HQ at Windsor by Edgington, Spink & Hyne, who recently celebrated their seas candidate is eligible to 129th anniversary. The development includes 60,000 sq ft of oflices and parking for 250 cars. RIBAJ March 1985 7 NORTH EAST LONDON POLYTECHNIC Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Holbrook Centre School of Architecture Holbrook Road Head of School London El 5 3EA Nathan Silver MA(Cantab) BArch(Columbia) RIBA 01-590 7722 4 October 1985 Dear Councillor of ARCUK, In one respect it is hardly necessary for me to lobby you about architectural education, because of all the formally concerned professional bodies, ARCUK has already taken the most unequivocal and admirable stand. To paraphrase, this was that the Council, according to its enabling Act of Parliament, was concerned only with the standards that were met by registered architects, not with the numbers of registered architects. Splendid . I think ARCUK's progressive view will be remembered and respected a generation from now when far more architects are engaged in community architecture, building rehabilitation, interior design and (even) new buildings, than the Esher report had the perception to foresee. What ARCUK now needs to do is to make sure that all the new roles emerging for architects can be filled by architects, not by those who are unqualified, or who are half—trained, or who in desperation have been hired in from abroad. That was the mess the doctors of medicine got our nation into when their misguided attempt at manpower planning a generation ago finally bore fruit. As for my School 's own fate, I confidently expect that NELP 's effort to get off the current NAB/UGC Working Party's hit list will be short and sweet. We can amply prove our excellence, efficiency and worthiness, and comments are going forward through official channels in this respect. The one point I wish to make that is of direct concern to ARCUK is that the closing of ANY good school of architecture doesn't improve the balance, it worsens it. I hope you will see that further time spent by the Council leading to comment along these lines is very much part . of ARCUK's central concern about standards. My great compliments, and best wishes. Yours sincerely, Nathan Silver Head of School Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource RIBA Journal Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived John Allan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource March 1985 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/bdb5e9cb2e9f7559217304f4bee83fc4.pdf dc28c305ca5dac7724e782731dd36847 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Public Design Group Description An account of the resource <p><span style="font-weight:400;">Argued that it was only through the public sector that the majority of people could have access to the land and resources needed for housing, education and other essential services. The task was therefore to reform the practice of architecture in local councils to provide an accessible and accountable design service. The Public Design Group proposed reforms to the practice of architecture in local councils to provide a design service accessible and accountable to local people and service users. The following 6 Interim Proposals were developed which were later initiated and implemented in Haringey Council 1979-1985 by NAM members. </span></p> <ul><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Local area control over resources </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Design teams to be area based </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Area design teams to be multi-disciplinary </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Project architects to report directly to committee</span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Abolish posts between Team Leader and Chief Architect </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Joint working groups with Direct Labour Organisations</span></li> </ul> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The National Design Service Subject The topic of the resource Minutes of meeting of NDS Group on 19.5.77 Description An account of the resource NEW ARCHITECTURE MOVEMENT The National Design Service Group Association. to the metropolitan death-wish syndrome, which dampened optimistic change. Minutes of Meeting on 19.5.77 at J.S.A.'s. Present: John Allan, John Murray, Neville Morgan & David Roebuck JeA. introduced meeting, suggesting that following the endorsement of J.M.'s work at Blackpool, our current task was to develov the work to the level of concerted action and be in a position to report real progress at the 3rd Congress. Much like the Unionization Group we had now to build on the foundatioonf theory already acheived by approaching outside bodies and taking interim steps towards the albeit indefined ultimate goal. DR. agreed that it should now be action's turn to influence and modify the theory. change: Community Groups, SERA, Supports ete. Jeli. recommended that our approach should be twofold, reflecting the two agencies involved in the process of institutionalised social building; on the one hand to the architects et al. by means of the public sector unions, and on the other to the tenants and communities by means of such bodies as the National Tenants NM. urged, to general agreement, that NAM's method was generally to work within the structure towards achieving change, rather than by "direct action’ on the streets — the latter being too easy prey to various sorts of official control. D.R. suggested that the preferred means was to 'de-officialise! the official types of services, while at the same time coordinating the 'unofficial' agencies of Ji. thought that criteria for selection of a particular Local Authority for development of our ideas, should include the readiness amongst the rank and file architects, housing officers etc. to act collectively through their union to acheive changes, the existence of a state of 'institutional instability’ ( e.¢. going through a process of being rehoused in new offices, or work=sharing with other agencies) and the likelyltiood that non®London authorities were less prone RESOLVED P.T.O. /2 NAM NDS. Meeting RESOLVED: 19.5677 her colleagues within the Authority. Gopies of this minute to: Next NDS. Meeting: John Murray's, 5, Milton Avenue, N. 6. Thursday, 2nd June, at 7.30 pm. ISA. 29/5/77 Cm Other avenues: Canvass suggestion that Tass / Building Design Staffs Union National Advisory Committee's task of making comparative study of the public and private sectors takes into consideration the N.D.S. proposal. ixplore possibilities of using Birmingham Authority as N.D.S. testbed by building on G.B.A.C. contacts and encouraging D.R.'s friend Claire to rally J.M. to investigate and make contact with National Tenants Association and Shelter. Jelie also to reread his papers with a view to producing a concise discussion paper for use in approaching outside bodies. JeA. to investigate the National Building Agency. DR. to investigate the Housing Corporation, N.l. to investigate NALGO ACTION as a possible vehicle for achieving changes. John Murray, Neville Morgan, David Roebuck, Mary Scott & NAM Liasom Group. Drag tna yf ne SuednQ ADH Ry . Res emASA, Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource JSA Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived John Allan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 19.5.77 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/e9295a20acb175a49b97dd161ffd0ad0.pdf 3ac3103298559f52e4baeea7d7407a94 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Professional Issues Description An account of the resource A cohort of NAM members became engaged with the professional registration body, standing as elected councillors on the Architects Registration Council and its various committees. Hitherto entirely dominated by the RIBA bloc, the Council began to yield to a new dynamic through NAM's involvement, enabling fresh perspectives on such issues as mandatory fee scales, greater lay representation on the body, ethically-based standards of professional conduct, etc. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Next Step Subject The topic of the resource 6 pp. part of larger (missing) document re. fee scales, with proposal for lay-controlled ARCUK Description An account of the resource 2. THE NEXT STEP The Comnission's recomendations are unequivocal and demand immediate action. The Minister, Mr Roy Hattersley, has already asked Mr Gordon Borrie, the Director of Fair Trading, to discuss with those bodies now required to change their rules how to give effect to the Cornmission'B proposals. The first priority is to ensure that in devising the new system for the payment of architects all constituencies within the profession, and not just the discredited RIBA, are properly represented. This clearly means that the professional focus must now shift to ARCUK, the true 'parliament' in the government of the profession. Likewise, the argument for the mandatory fee scale being now entirely discredited, attention must move forward to consider our opposing viewpoint out of which will be created a new fee system. The honorary officers of ARCUK, all of whom belong to the dominant constituent body (RIBA), and acting without authority of ARCUk Council, have seen fit to issue (at great cost) a statel lent to all registered architects — which in effect supports the RIBA t s rearguard action to discredit the Report. We urgently hope that nobody will be deceived into seeing this as a proper or democratic action. Many observers may still be unaware that ARCUK has already established a sub—committee of Professional Purposes to review the Code following the advertising debacle. A motion put forward by the Unattached representatives that this conmittee should contain lay—representation was, alas, defeated. Now that the terms of this corrmittee are widened immeasurably by the monopolies issue, it is even more vital that its composition reflects our recommendations . The Comnission, aware of the RIBA's dominance of ARCUK, has suggested that an independent agency be established, (para 286, vi) cons iB ting of a small number of government appointees. '(hi1st agreeing with the Commission's feeling that the profession cannot now be left to concoct its own new fee system (para 281), we find the above proposal insufficient because it misses the opportunity of establishing a new and equitable 'parliament' with majority lay—representation and reviewing all aspects of professional services, which would have placed the present enquiry into its proper context. We are convinced that an equal if not majority representation of lay—members is needed if this process is not simply to become another group of professionals legitimising their own interests. It would be patently absurd for the public now to be denied a presence in a body supposedly to set up to procure and protect their interest. We believe that the draft proposals for a reconstituted ARCUK published in November 1976 by NAM North London Group in its Private Practice Report and appended hereto, would provide a suitable starting point to this debate. The essentials, however, are clear. Prom now on it will not suffice for architects to assure the public that their promise' will be kept. The public must manifestly see it to be so. 3. EXTRACTS FROM THE MONOPOLIES COhff1SSION REPORT i) Chapter Seven : The views of bodies representing architects 214: The New Architecture Movement does not support the RIBA t s case, and therefore submitted its own arguments independently. [ihe substance of the Movement' g case iB that the current goale fee system is not an essential ingredient of the provision of architectural services, but is a market device procuring unilateral benefits to architects. Th e Movement criticises arnurnents and statistics supporting the RIBA's case, and considers that the public interest is severely prejudiced by the fee scale's mandatory B to tug . It proposes changes to the system based on a t descending hierarchy of priorities' as follows : abandonment of the mandatory minimum fee scale entirely: retention of the fee scale on a recommended basis: retention of the RBndatory fee scale, but with the establishement of a pemanent independent agency to review the levels of the scale; such agency to include at least 50 per cent non—professional representation. Chapter Eight, IV : Recommendations 286: (i) The requirement of the ARCUK Code of Professional Conduct that an architect shall not contract with his client except on the basis of Conditions of mgagement and a scale of charges published by one of its constituent bodies should be abolished. The rules of ARCUK should be amended so as to permit an architect fræly to quote a fee in competition with other architects and so as not to prevent competition for business on the basis of fees. The RIBA and other associations of architects (and associa— tions of architects and members of other professions) should cease to require architects to comply with scales of charges for the supply of architects' services. The rules of the RIBA and other associations of architects (and the rules of associations of architects and members of other professions) should be amended so as to pemit an architect feely to quote a fee in competition with other architects and so as not to prevent competition for business on the basis of fees. (v) The publication by the RIBA and other associations of architects (and associationg of architects and members of other professions) of scales of charges for architects' Bervices should be pemitted provided that: they are not mandatory; they have been deterrnined by an independent committee; and all documents in which the scales are published state prominently that the scales are not binding in relation to any particular transaction, that architects and clients are free to settle fees without reference to the scales and that an architect may quote a fee in competition with other architects. ( vi) The cornmittee referred to in recommendation (v) should consist of a chaiman and three or four members appointed by the Govemment on a personal basis and not as representatives of architects or clients. The same committee miült conveniently perform similar duties in relation to recommended scales of charges for surveyors' services to the extent recommended in our report on the supply of surveyors' services, (vii) Until the independent com•tittee which we recomend has been set up and has had time to determine scales, the publication of the existing scales by the RIBA and other architects' associations (and associations of architects and members of other professions) should be permitted provided that: the scales are not mandatory; and all documents in which the scales are published state prominently that the scales are not binding in relation to any particular transaction, that architects and clients are free to settle fees without refemce to the scales and that an architect may quote a fee in competition with other architects. APPENDIX Draft Proposal for a more Representative, Lay-Controlled ARCUK Assuming 60 members of ARCUK, should represent the "profession" end 55%, the "lay" public. D? the 27 architectural representatives, 2 should be chosen by students of architecture and 3 elected by architectural technicians and assistants. The remaining 24 should be elected by registered architects. Each of the four groups of architects listed below would be apportioned seats on ARCUK in direct relation to its share of the total number of architects. Each group would then directly elect the required number of representatives from among its own number. The four groups are, architects who employ three or more people, other self-employed architects, salaried architectural management: chief architects and their deputies in public practice and private industry and architects with positions of a comparable level in architectural research, education, etc., architectural workers: all other salaried or unemployed architects. The "lay" contingent would be open only to anyone not eligible to be elected to the "architectural" group. Of these 33, 14 should be trade unionists nominated by the T.U.C. No more than half of the 14 should be union officials. At least 4 of the 14, likewise split into officials and "lay" trade unionists, should be from the construction industry. The other 19 lay members, for lack of e better system, could be nominated by the Secretary of State for the Environment, as follows: 1 . Five of these should be elected politicians, including two m. p. t s and three local councillors. Of the three locals, one should be from the GLC or a London borough, one from another urban county, and onn from a rural county. Atleest one of these three should be from Scotland and another from Ida les, unless ARCUK is to be devolved into ARCE, ARCS, and ARCW. Two ghoul d be chosen from tenants' associations. Two should be chosen from self-managed housing associations. Two should be chosen from voluntary associations. Two should be chosen from industrial and trade (employers) associatione. Two Should bp chosen from among building control officers, district sur— vevors and public health officers. 7. Four should be chosen from other professions (e. Q. , engineering, law, medicine, planninq and surveying), giving preference to those profession. not already represented. These 19 should be nominated after the other 41 have been selected and accordinq to the f n l ] owinn conditions. The 19 nominations must he used to redr ø se the balanr.e in the total council of 60 to ensure, as far as possible, 1 1 that. the followinq groups are not under—repreeentgd on the Council in proportion to their percentage of the population of Britain: 1 . women, (non-management) employees, and people under the age of 45. Although all this mey seem complicated, the principles are simple: lay control of the profession and a Council as democratically—representative as possible of the various interest groups within the profession and within society as a whole. ARCIJK t s education and admissions committees should be constituted to agous princirl n s. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource JA/DR Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived JA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/421dd1fcd7236a3a0cbb02d7f821413d.pdf 7cc68d498abadfb12308c5fc25815437 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Miscellaneous Subject The topic of the resource Miscellaneous issues Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Various Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1976-1980 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Politics of Aesthetics Subject The topic of the resource Buildings and People essay updated for NAM Description An account of the resource bull A \) \ } pragrescne:architectareof ag asdyad byft cityauthoritiesin FOREWORD. This essay is incomplete in that it is not a finely polished final product but merely as much of a statement of my current thinking as I have bothered to set in print, Phe'Introduction' and ‘Where do we go from here', the final section,were written in November of 1976,95% of the rest was written in January 1975.The original title to this essay was ‘Buildings and People* and the thoughts were drawn by the question 'In what ways is the architec ture of a society related to its social structure?! It has long been my intention to use this material in a book tentatively entitled 'Buildings,Madness and Ecology' and it still is,but I got involved with the New Architec- ture Movement,somebody in the N.A.M. read the January 1975 essay and then I was sort of delegated (in a manner I don't clearly recal]) to produce a paper on aesthetics based on it.I supposed that the important thing is to have the material available for discussion so as a total rewrite of the original would have been too tedious all I have done is graft on new begining and end to make 'Buil- dings and People' into 'The politics of Aesthetics’. Paul F. Downtén,Cardiff,November 1976 Criticism and suggestions for additions to this essay would be appreciated,please address correspondance to: c/o I-o-8 Bookshop,lo8 Salisbury Rd.,Cathays,Cardiff. This material is subject to normal author's cOPy sieht except for non-profit reproduction, Printed by Gwasg Seren,Commercial and Community Printers, 141,Richmond kd. ,Roath,Cardiff. © ~SPOREWORD® CONTENTS sy 1 PEOPLE MAKE BUILDINGS...More Technology= Tool + Use of Cities and Doorknobs. 2 THE MIDDLE 'MAN',,,Semantics Vs Dialectics...Expertise “CONTENTS : : 4 FOR. EXAMPLE (A CIPHER FOR 414, SYA5ONS)...Pedestrian or or less Automatically... th=.Tcosl,..The Silent Witness... Consumer...On A Lighter Note...Screws...Let In,.»Without Question, ILLUS!\ATION...Mass 5 MASS HOUSING (THE BUILDINGS Nuts and Bolts...Sterility For And Evil...Demokeracy...Cracie2...Cranks COMMERCIAL BREAK THE MOBILE SOCIETY...The Gods of Progress...Valid Jams _and Defence 7 CAUGHT ON ENDLESS CARTWHEELS Sf INSANITY...War And Wealth And Weapons...Taking Stock...the Disease Takes Hold... Nightmares. ILLUSTRATION,,.Mobile Society And Hierarchitecture. 8 HIERARCHITECTURE...Poison Pcower...The Funeral Marches On., Laypeople Lose...sMaking Light It All. 9 THE ENEMY BUILDS WITHIN US...Myth Is Reality...Electric fortress...Circumscribed Souls. ILLUSTRATION,..Future And Electric Fortress. 10 WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?..,.Bankrupt...Corblimey!.. Connections...Lifestyle...The Urge To Create... ILLUSTRATION,..Libre APPENDIX KEFERENCES, 6 RISE AS THE PEOPLE FALL)... Everyone...Ugly Heads the Sunshine Housing. In The Meantime Vs Ability...Wasted lives,,.Data Retrieval...Megalomania Tocls Of Repression...5+inginy $4 All Back Home. 3°FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTIO,N)L!aw anv Order,..Myth and Purpose _“Mass?.Housing...Back on the GitCets Again...(Fxpletives - Deleted) ILLUSTRATION, 4.Everyingag's The’ Same. INTRODUCTION *'Long before the Jews were murdered it all had been expre- sed in my buildings't- Albert Speer. Aesthetics is the theory or philosophy of the perception of the beautiful.Well,that's what my dictionary says. In general use though it is a word which refers to how things look be it beautiful or bad. It is not, however, a word commonly used by the layperson. Only an elite use the word ‘aesthetics! and in fact the word conceals a political dimension, 'The Poli tics of Aesthetics' is an unfamiliar phrase because politics and aesthetics are not normally explicitly associated with one another, Historically,aesthetics is assiciated with the art of the elite of society, an art which would claim to be ‘above' politics though it manifested the privilege provided for the few by economic domination of the many. The cottager would not have thought to refer to the aesthetics of her cottage although she might well find it a beautiful place. The beauty of the cottage comes through the application of a craft by a person needing to apply that craft to achieve a practical end, not through self- conscious design, not through the application of aesthetic theory. The concept of aesthetics is elitist. In this essay the word aesthetics is used in a manner which I think may be generally understood by anyone trained or conditioned to use the word at all. By aesthetics I mean ‘how things look', this is about the Politics of How Things look} if you like. Words,Words,Words. ‘Design is the application of a language. Architectural design is a language that is expressed through the manipulation of building technologies. A language it can be used. A person needs be it verbal or non- verbal, before they can know what is being said and thus feel comfortable by being in communica tion with the people whose language it is. Surrounded by an alien language in one's own country one would feel ill at ease and if those aliens were felt to be invaders one would feel oppressed. In modern city centres the buildings which form virtually the entire environment use a design vocabu- lary foreign to the bulk of those buildings! users and they thus feel alienated and oppressed. The'concrete' jungle! has become a popular metaphor because it suggests an alien and agressive environment, a concrete forest does not sound half as terrible, Cultural Vision. If a person sees a thing as irrelevant to their needs they are unlikely to find it beautiful, The perception of need is itself a culturally induced concept, so that one person might find a brightly decorated, chromium- plated hot- rod fantastically beautiful and the ancient Egyptian carvings of a Pharao.4's undertakers dealthy ugly, whilst another person's view might be quite the opposite and both things might be said to have no practical use at all. The relation- ship a person has with an object defines their perception of that object, and the percption in turn defines the relationship. Thus if someone sees a thing as ugly and it is also undeniably necessary to them, they discover a con- wr 2g needs to be learnt before to understand a language, flict within their self irresolvable without suppression or change. Cultural form is created lution of such conflict, and destroyed in the reso- Splits. i It is said of people in Manhattan, New- York, that they enjoy the skyscraper cityscope, but people in London generally ; dislike even the ‘short! tall buildings that probe the sea of sulphurous pollution in their historic streets. Manhattan's skyward thrustings reflect the reach for the moon and money aspirations of their go-getting congregations. The Mammon in London has in the past been a tamer beast than its American counterpart, so its recent rampaging across the historic heart of industrial capitalism has offended the sensibilities even of those people whose path to riches is paved with prime-site precast concrete slabs of commerce. The concrete, steel and glass, blank- faced boring buildings which epitomise the common vision of our urban centres bear little or no relation to the ideas of ‘home! and 'town! which the layperson carries. They speak a different language even though the building society which builds Joan Smith's latest city centre horror might well be financing the pur. chase of her cosy new home. There is necessarily a direct relationship between the form of a human society and the form of the buildings that society produces, A particular way of organizing human activity requi- res particular artifacts pertinent to that activity. Bureau. crats need offices. The technology developed by a society has to be accepted as being needed by that society. Peace loving bureaucrats need atomic bombs. Such statements might appear to be mere truisms; but they only read as such once stated and normally they are not stated. For industrial society requires and cultivates a very compartmentalised mental atti tude, requires the perception of things always separate to other things, requires the bolt not to know the nut but only allow itself to be screwed. In the real world that approach is necessarily inadequate as a way of understandinp events because it provides no clear means of seing the connections between things, particularly if those connections are non- mechanical. Once scewed together the nut and bolt might un- derstand their function relative to one another, but kept apart in the meantime they know only grooves without reason, Thus in order to discuss aesthetics sensibly it is essential not to divorce it from a social and political context. It is not that aesthetics cannot be divorced from its political context, that is in fact the conventional way to view the subject, it is that it should not be so divorced. For view a culture in bits and pieces is to not view an homogenous cul- ture at all. Such a view is a partial view, a split, alienated view of a whole reality. In order to consider the role of aesthetics in architecture it is necessary to consider how and why architecture is made, in short, to look at the rela- tionship between architecture and society, between and people, buildings More or Less Autcmatically.... Technology = Tc !*Use Of The Tool It was the thesis espoused by Lewis Mumford in the 'Myth of the Machine! that human history is most importantly related to cultural attributes and social exgantsstion , rather than just the growth of use and invention of tools. first of people's minds. uildings are the products of tools, but - See He PEOPLE MAKE BUILDINGS The difficulty in deeling with the question of how architecture in a society is related to the society that produced it, is the breadth of the topic. 4llbuildings serve some purpose, and that purpose is tee defined by the requirements of the people who prodtice the buildings. Peopje make up society, the type of society is defined by its struct:ve and that structure contains the social paterns in wliich people live, which is then, mere or less automatically, made manifest in their building paterns. ; "Each landscape and townscape is an intri¢ately organised expressicn of causes and effects, of challenges and responses, of continuity and therefore, of coherance. It all hangs together, makes sense, fits one way or another - for good or bad, loosely or tightly. It has sequences, successions, climaxes. It reveals paterns and relationships forming and reforming." (1) The development of the social organisation ¢f humanity in its various forms has of neccessity come before any technological. development. People had to establish effective means of communicating ideas and information to their comrades before those ideas could be corporately Rut into operation. Thus language was the first great invention, a social tool which then enabled knowledge to be recorded, pooled snd transmitted to people in other places and other times once the ir:'s cultural attributes had been established, when the state of intellec:.:;:? development was sufficient to communicate complex and abstract ide ‘once conceptual tools' had been formed, then the development of material tools, of technology, could come about. Building is a technological development. The erection of a building requires the use of tcols and the co-ordinated deployment «7 human skills in useing these tools. The type of tools used and the =tructuring ef the co-ordinated deployment of human skills dépends upon the form, type and structuring of the society producing the building, The materials used in the making of the tools used both to produce the building and to co-ordinate the skills depends upon the history of development of the society and consequently of its technology, up to that time. Medieval masons did nct use electronic calculators, Centre Point would never have been carved from stone. Buildings are generated by a way of life and realised with its concomitant technology. Primarily buildings fulfill a social need. As we see, society must exist first, humanity being gregarious by nature and neccessity, and the need for communal shelter is then realised by communication between the members of that society. A roof needs to be thought of before it zan° 2 3. be built and named. The function of a structure is thus reoted in Symbolism and is culturally generated. Technology becomes then part of the cultural language in its broadest sense, its use communicates sentiment, emotion, ways of thinking and feeling. Buildings can move people to write poetry or break down and cry. The manipulation of technology for aesthetic effect is a very particular application of the language. It is the' art! of architecture. The Silent Witness Once architecture has been made, once building has taken place, it reinforces the prevailing social ethics and paterns of human inter- action because the physical environment is know in accord with the social environment, at least inasmuch as it is expressed by the’ holders - ee and perpetrators of the ruling ideology of a society. Hence the conceptual reality of an entrenched, institutionalised, bureaucratic regime is immortalised as a physical reality in its various offices and government buildings (see Hierarchitecture, and 'Making Light Of It All') into whose departments any number of anonymous persons prepared to accept a role in the now unquestionably eontrolling ideology. 'Lay: e>ple Loge! can be slotted Because the built environment in a so ciety is ultimately a product of the ruling ideology, after a few generations of generally uninterrupted consolidations that environm ent, with its attendant ideolugy, will be all pervasive, Political activity in demucracies, for instance, becomes rel- egated to the triviality of party games. No-one can stand up in the British Parliament, posit alternatives to the presently imposed status quo, and expect to be taken seriously (in fact such a Person would be The contention is that’ the general social structure ofa society shows in its building, so that the form and layout of individual buildings, villages, towns and cities are, in effect, diagrams of the social relationships in that society, and that the structures that make up Cities and Doorknobs society of which they are willing or unwilling members. There are big paterns and little paterns, cities and doorknobs, institutions and friends. Tne MIDDLE VANE The process of making architecture and its prerequcite, making architects, supposes an ahi ‘ity to compartmentalise the thinking process so that the designing of buildings and the manufacture of aesthetic styles and tastes are divorced from the reasons as to why the buildings exist in the first Place. Traditionally, architects do not question the brief they are given for a building design, but wholly concern themselves with making a design from the inform- ation, teols and money they have been entrusted to juggle, fitting their thoughts and actions the meanwhile, into a theoretical structure inherited from their education and divorced from any other reality, Architects' concerns are with the semantics of their design vocabulary not with the dialectical analysis of their role as designers, Expertise vs_ Ability. Architects are trained as intellectual 6lites, by intellectuati Elites, their role is increasingly specialized, ever-more rigidly defined, they are trained to devote their attentions exclusively to the part- icular. Successful architectural organisations (public and private) acquire and sustain their Success by specialising in certain - | . building types, As their expertise increases, their ability to tackle other design problems decreases, Architects design offices OR factories OR schools OR housing, a whole string of standard solutions result with the well-known resultant of the sterile, monotonous, predictable environment we increasingly inhabit. Wasted Lives, Over the years since the onset of the Industrial Revolution (when the forced flight to the city produced the first 'masses') and particularly within the last 50 years, these solutions have been expressed in architectural Philosophies which have in fact been no more than aesthetic dogmas for the consumption of intellectual élites. Unfortun- ately, these dogmas have been an important contributory factor to the creation of the urban wastelands against which backdrop so many miilions of lives are wasted. These dogmas are major cogs in the machinery of repression, milled on the mental lathes of indifferent intellectuals and turned by the ready hands of the alienated academics, The growth of technological indulgence and the human population in moder industrial societies has increased the size of tke self- Nata Retrieval People have been reduced to data in the operation of the architectural machinery of our mass society. All aspects of building performance and the potential "building users! requirements are subject io PSeudo-scientific testing and analysis by the omnipotent ‘experim- ental method! - laboratory models instead of the real thing. Architectural Scientists, Sociolegists, Behavioral Psychologists and specialists of every hue are busily going about splitting the Spectrum of human society in order to make manageable, so that architects can assimilate such information s ee can to produce yet another compromise solution to the Problems of a society already so much @ product of compromise the mass so- ioty nasotre ileoenomeaninigformanyofitsmembers.Architects Pecialize in Co-ordinating specialisms, Semantics vs Dialectics * *DIALECTIC - "testing truth by discussion, art of investigating thetruthofopinions", oF re - a Concise’ Oxtord Dictidriary Megalom ania The effects that modern architecture has had on people once the machinery of repression has been turned, have been more visibly dramaticinsomecasesthanothers.Aprimeexamineohees i ral form and ideology failing to serve peop e by i aNhe wae in Venezuela peereet 1954 and 1958 during the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship when ninety seven 15 storey 'superbloques were constructed to rehouse 180,000 slum dwellers in Caracas. Virtually complete social disorganisation and resultant rioting» proved the project a monstrous failure. The Pruitt Igoe high-rise housing project in St. Louis (cover), was sucha disaster that much of it was demolished as social breakdown and crime unnerved the citys' leaders. One of the architects on the project said at its inception:- ~ . ‘ "As an architect, if I had no economic'or social limitations, I'd solve all my problems with one storey buildings. Imagine how pleasant it would be to always work and plan in spaces overlooking lovely gardens filled with flowers. framework of our present cities this is impossible to achieve s Why? Because we must recognise social and economic limitations and requirements. A solution without such recognition would be meaningless. "(4) Yet we know that within the Architects submit to an ideology which ensures their active participation in the social mechanism of repression as responsive fully stimulated appetite for power by presuming to supply them with the ability to mould the world by ‘design'. Submission to this ideology has been as common in recent years as it ever was, perhaps more self-consciously now than previously. The belief that architects, and planners, can manipulate people via their environment is what has been called the ‘architectural belief system'Y'’Whilst it is quite untenable that people should be manipulated in this way or any — other, the existence of this 'belief system! is well recorded and is integral to the architectural dogmas discussed above. Buckminster Fuller, catalyst for such concepts as the 'World City! and doyen of the technocrats, holds this belief close to his heart and indeed it is basic to his philosophy - "don't try to reform man, reform the environment", Paulo Seleri is another present day architect with distinctly megalomaniacal tendencies; he has subordinated evolution, man, and cities to his personal vision and and proceeded to design accordingly. Soleri's case is an extreme One, but it is such men who set the scene for lesser mortals who may wish to act out similar roles. -Instilling a "holier than thou! attitude into the minds of young designers has been a major theme in the architectural schools of the western world, and despite recent shifts of emphasis, the theme remains and ig certainly Operative in the current practising of architecture. It is important to understand the workings of an architects mind and and the social context in which it works, because the architect is the'middle man'in the process whereby society expresses itself in building. 'pe Tools ofRepression A classic example of an architect attempting to. justify his two- faced position in a system where he is controlling and being cont- rolled, one face for authority one for public, acting as nothing more or less than a tool of repression by making literally concrete the insanities of the power élite that created his situation, (and supply his daily bread). Bringing it all back home Nearer hora the cronic failure of the System of myopic specialists and ego-centric demi-gods to deliver the goods, continues to produce completely avoidable human tragedies. In 1974 dozens of people died in the fire at the Isle of Man pleasure centre, unproven technology and irresponsible "responsible’ people were held to blame: the Flixborough nylon factory explosion, another technological 'mishap', raised the death total even higher; and an Old Peoples' Home (the idea of which is only possible in a com partmentalised, institutionalised culture) was swept by a fatal fire only months after its compietion. Meanwhile the legacy of the Ronan Point disaster has been changes in the rules of the game of people packing which will ensure that the clum sy meshing together of specialisms which produce future housing will at least produce gas-oven ex- Plosion proof housing. The whole point in having experts is, supposedly, to avoid mistakes which might harm people, but these examples, spectacular and horribly familiar, should they serve as salutory reminders of just how incompetent this society of experts really is, and how that incompetence can disastrously effect peoples lives. Law & Order Myth & Purpose FORM. FOLLOWS FUNCTION The relationship between the lives of people and the buildings they vse is conditioned by, and is a response tc, the social mechanisms that delineate the spheres of actuality of an individual in that,society and the degree of interaction available with other individuals within: that sohere of activity and in others. So criminals and police officers use court rooms more often than car workers or bakers and a better knowledge of the actual processes of law enforcement-exists with the users of the Court howse than with those who merely pass by it on their way to work. To the passers-by though, the Court house signifies many abstract qualities, justice, trith, the rule of law, order etc., the building fulfiils a highly significant purpose just by being there, just because of its invariably emotive arch- itecture, constructed as it is, as a conscious Symboiic embodi ment of some of societys' bulwarks of faith. The relationship between’ the users of the Court: house and the passers-by is thaS conditioned by the lack of contact between meanings that the building evokes for the disferent parties. the two and the subtely different The Court house operates on a functional and on a symbolic level. Functionally, in that it provides shelter for the activitiés that take place within it, symbolically, in that it is a monument to the central themes of a cultures! professed ideology. Not only So there are primarily two ways in which architecture reflects the social structure that produces it:- does it act as a token to that ideology, but the planning of the rooms and attendant artifacts of witness boxes and so forth, ultimately presents a physical model of the organisation of the various functions that the Court house contains. FUNCTIONALLY - a way of life requires certain mechanisms and shelters and a certain way of distributing those artifacts. SYMBOLICALLY - the forms of the mechanisms and shelters may transcend their purely functional requirements and become infused with, or even wholly gen- erated by, myths and symbols. The flat roof never appeared in temperate climates until the dual goals and aspirations of advanced technology and fashion (always slightly absurdly beyond the limits of its contemporary technology) produced a 'machine aesthetic’, derived from superficial, glib philosophising by myopic, élitist culture heroes like Le Corbusier, The technology then became competent enough to deny the common- sense idea of chucking water off a rock by using a pitch, so that flat roofs were used. Functionally nonsense, but definite symbolic totems of the newly-arisen machine culture. "ARIES - Why this flat roof... ? PISCES - The sacred cause of planning freedom, It also robbed the buildings of a visual 'lid' and conveyed the idea of extendability -'indeterminacy'. It cost more and let the water in more easily. I studied this as a student » and it was my first inkling that there was something twisted and disconnected about their ideas,'' (s} Back on the Streets again - So too: with domes, especially geodesic domes; in the mid-sixties they became totems of the counter- culture, psrticularly in the U.S.A.The domes are hard to waterproof and were conceived of by Buckminster Fuller for very high technological application and mass production, ‘but they were used because they were symbolic ofa breaking-away from conventional roles in social behaviour in that domes break away from the conventional notion of buildings as post and beam 'box' constructions. Domes possess a structural integrity, a ‘oneness’, there are no walls or ceilings, so domes were seen as symbols for a society with that same integrity, that same where there are no rigidly defined roles for the societies members much as a dome lacks 'walls' and ‘ceilings’, but still stands up. 'oneness' "',.The dome is expressive of our new approach to the universe... The dome seems in some way to be more conducive to the mental and spiritual harmony of the dome dweller, perhaps because its more natural shape helps to attune him with nature instead of alienating him from it. Boxed houses belonged to an age when men stood in opposition to the world around them, in corhpetition, as it were, with nature and the universe, ." (6 Mass ? Housing Solving 'mass housing! problems requires people to share a spurious objective assessment of the 'problem!' to be solved. In In fact every individuals' response to the need for housing is going to be unique to that individual, the objective reality of each persons response to any situation will be that persons subjective response to that situation. None can ever fully know what is in anothers’ mind, none can presume to fully understand the needs of another person, therefore, ultimately, each-individual must be free to shape their own destiny, no-one else can do it for them. To assume that there is a 'solution' to the housing 'problem!' is to assume that that'problem' is a thing with a reality outside of the consciousness of any person involved in it. A problem is defined by each individuals' view of a situation and just as no-one person can know anothers! real needs, then no-one can presume to tell another what to do. No-one can build my house for me, I cannot build a house for anyone else, together we may succeed, but to assume, say, that I can know the needs of a stranger from the statistics of an 'objective' assessment of that persons' needs without that stranger even meeting or speaking with me, is the most presumptuous and arrogant of ideas. Returning to the illustrations of how the ideology of a society is expressed in philosophical and physical form, one can consider the spiel by Daniel Burnham, architect charged with co-ordinating the the design of Chicagos' World Fair in 1893 and subsequent author of plans for entire major American cities, of one of his plans, for - Manila in 1905, he wrote:- "Among building groups thefirst in import- ance, the Government or National Group which would include Capital Building and Department Buildings, is located on the present © Camp Wallace... Grouping itself closely about the Capital Building at the centre it forms a hollow square opening out westward toward the sea. The gain in dignity by grouping these buildings in a single formal mass has dictated this arrangement, the beauty and con- venience of which has been put to the test in notable examples from the days of Old Rome to the Louvre and Versailles of modern times. (Expletives Deleted) The eastern front of the capital group faces a semi-circular plaza from whose centre radiates a street system communicating with all sections of the city - an arrangemen entirely fitting for both practical and sentimental reasons; pracical because the centre of r government activity should be readily ace2ssible from all sides; sentimental because every seciion of the Capital City should look with deference toward the symbol of the Nations'power.(¢} «(Robert Goodmans' emphasis). This dominant western authoritarian ideology has been well expressed by some of its ablest perpetrators. The link between society and its architecture is seen as resolutely forgec. the importance of the power of symbols and the symbolic arrangement of things, the power of the aesthetic language is further evidenced in these following examples:- . In 1969, Daniel P., Moynihan was President Nixons! chief planner in.residence, earlier, in 1962, he had been given the job of affecting the design of federal government buildings and drafted the 'Guiding Principles on Federal Architecture’ announced by Kennedy in 1962: The Court House or Hall of Justice is given a separate location south of the main group and heading the vista down the avenue which passes the east front of the Capital... The Mall of Justice... represents the sentimentally and practic= ily highest function of of civilised society. Upon the authority of lsw depends the lives and property of all citizens; and the buildings vhich constitute the visible expression of law, its symbol of dignity «nd power, should be given the utmost beauty in their location, arrencement, architectural treatment and approaches....,‘' (9) "The policy shall be to provide requisite and adequate facilities in an architectural design and form which is destinguished and which will reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigour, and stability of the American National Government. "(10) : --Anexcellentexampleofacriticalmois intheprocessof transferring the expression of a ruling-c:2ss ideology into the physical fabric of society. All architectural expression is dedicated to the ideals of the state, against which the individual is insignificant, so the individuals! dwelling is rendered of secondary importance to the edifices of the State. It is an ideology with a long history;Hitler, 1943, in 'Mein Kampf,! "For what the ancient had before his eyes was less the humble houses of private owners than the magnificent edifices of the whole community. Compared to them, the dwelling house really sank to an insignificant object of secondary importance, "(!) More current exam ples of this type of ideological expression are not hard to find; from'An introduction to Modern Architecture, !,by J.M. Richards: "A town hall is partly a ceremonial building and needs to have a dignity that will form a fitting background for ceremonial. It must also express in some way the dignity of the State... eThe extreme pomp of monumental buildings is not perhaps a character a democratic age demands, but we shall come to appreciate in time the special form of dignity produced by orderliness and spacious planning. a S_) O The great housin scheme boasting these qualities, and incorporating as it does its own schools and community centres, can claim to (authors emphasis). The theme continues. As the state and capitalism are mutually supportive in our society and for practical purposes may be regarded as one thing, so the expression of the ruling ideology is prominent in the edifices of capitalism as much as of government. Banks;offices; stores, and consumable culture buildings (bookshops, theatres, cinemas, nightclubs, etc.) constitute the basic coarse fabric of our urban centres, The Centreplan complex proposed for Cardiffs! city centre, in which Cardiff Corporation and the Ravenseft property developers exhibited the clear partnership of the state and capitalism, was to have sacri- ficed residential areas to its existence. The life blood of its being were to have been roads whose construction would have obliterated communities of streets. The obliteration has not been complete, but the blight remains and the course is subliminally set for the future, The cities fabric has been invested with many meanings, myths abound, the city is a battleground - people, council and vested interests all struggle for power ina game where the winner is always making the rules, There are no perceivably rational responses to anything, there are no functional neccessities apparent as building and shelter are easy enough to come by, but the games of power and possession take place within great constructions of myths about property and people that is our culture. And thousands of people remain homeless while buildings stand empty. 457-5 fees fodaty.... Budi dings are Vf! i SIP OLT: all the same, everyones4 i expected to he the same... f uy rs chinA Kenic 1¥ i) g £ y %a SS Seaoe «ee Ge Pedestrian Or Consumer. On A Lighter ‘Note. apply to any habitable room (ACIPHER FOR ALL SEASONS) Evidence for this vested interest and Oppression is literally all around us, (in as. much as noone's interest can be held above another's, so the furtherance of any interest vested solely in oneself cannot fail to require the exploitation of others,and exploitation is only possiblbey the repression, .either overtly or subliminally, of the exploited). The streets that we walk down, the houses we inhabit, the buildings in which we work, shop, relax, pray in or visit, all are concrete mirrors to the purposeless patterns of our daily lives, the purposeless lives of pedestrians, members of the 'eeneral public', producers, consumers, holidaymakers, churchgoers and tourists. The majority of people in our society live in urban constructions that are not natural expressions of the lives of its people, fully lived, but are expressions of a society of human components, a machine of human parts relega ted to less than humanity. Bureaucracy is an inextricable, primary mechanism in our so- cial machine and accordingly manifests itself everywhere, particularly as all buildings are subject to some form of bureaucratic control. The rule of this law can be seen in the tower blocks, which have grown .in height and numbers ra- pidly in recent years all over the world, largely for commer- Cial reasons. ifter the main vertical dimensions have been fixed by econo mies of cost (the minimum possible), the depth of a plan is resolved on section according to regulations on light angles and permissable daylight factors - Appendix aH: ‘this regulation (Open Space, Ventilation and 'Todaye..buildings are all the same, everyone's expected to be the same...'- John A, Friend- 28-12-74, eS fe f Hei1ght °ofRcoms))shsahall a SOE Zeal — (except a room used for the lawful detention of persons other than mentally disor- dered persons) which has (ae rs rm Maivan po a Possi#LE Tr HEIGHT. MAX POSSIBLE — py DEPT SIIIL one or more windows! Building Regs. 1965- Pri- BLY 7 - maimed sons ae ae Sone El presumably, constitute alongSee habitablebuildings fg § (author's emphasis) ~p.62 FOR EXAMPLE. The depth of the floor, plan is thus. fixed, the length of this plan is then only dependant oh the Shape of the building site ‘indeterminacy!?, standard plan to be chopped off by the yard or mile SS A> ROOM V LET This plan form is generally repeated on each side of the access corridors and 'service cores! (lifts..etc..) which are often incorporated into a central supporting structure- CORRIDOR, The structural requirements of the floor slabs and the need to incorporate the ‘service runs! (pipes, wiring, Ducting...) determine the dimension between the floor and ceiling of vertically adjacent units, this distance is as small as pos- sible in order to cram as Many units as is structurally feasible in the smallest overall height- ri] i” CoO a \ The height of the tower is then limited by further planning conetraints, which vary from place to place but are often established during some form of dialogue bteween the develo pers and the authorities (Rarenseft and Cardiff...). It is a not unknown phenomenon for developers to try and'work a fast one' on the authorities by illicitly adding a couple of stones to a tower's height (very valuable stuff, ‘indeterminacy'), after all, who notices wether a block is 30 or34 storeys tall? Clad your tower in mass-produced concrete panels,'express! the top of the lift shaft where the lifting machinery is housed (functionalism) and,do and behold- a build- it- anywhere, super- architectural, bog standard, highly profitable office block (A design award is assured if youcréateawind-swdearpk,tg;ro*und floor 'concourse! by raising the building on stills, Ka arr YY tS TELL PLZ. Tg PIT The distance between tower blocks is controlled by further bureaucratic constraints wherein the endlessly varied kalie- doscope of natural light is once more conveniently transposed into a Cipher for all reasons 4 fine example of these laws of the concrete jungle in action is provided by the bureaucrats themselves, with the Department of the Environment headquaters in London, a building which eae oye been designed to incorporate every cliche in the ook NEW YORK evennesseks Leas nesberweseesl aoe ering: -96F Baeon BPscerenn ed ae es s piers Pea ®7ese Sterility for Everyone Ugly Heads & Evil To a large extent, the sterile dreams of the middle men (chapter 4) are responsible; the high-rise blocks and endlessly repetitive filing cabinet architecture which epitomise mass housing, are directly the result of the obs essive intellects, slitted consciousness and puerile emotional mechanisms of such men as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (a self-affected nick- name). Their original vapid imaginings unfortunately gained credence amongst fellow intellectuals and architects during and since the early part of this century and subsequently the mechanisms of capitalist economics ensured that their dictrines, and similarly derived doctrines held sway, MASS HOUSING (THE BUILDINGS RISE AS THE PEOPLE FALL) Nuts and Bolts. rganisation of the mass-production process, as it has been "evolved', demands the subjugation of people to machi i are therefore i panels of Centre Point to the che Council flat, Mass society with its 'mass'-orientated mentality and its capacity for mass-production, not surprisingly best exhibits its cultural sterility in 'mass' housing. In this instance, pictures probably speak louder than words (illustration -'mass housing"), but one does well to consider how much such an im posed solution constricts social forms to 23 children families and hence helps mould the social structure. Now let us consider how such monstrosities came about and why they still raise their ugly heads. Early practitioners of the art of eople-packing were often professed radicals, Le Corbusier believed Him self to be a communist, and Gropius set up the 'Bauhaus', a school of industrial art and design, which was to become a target for fascist reaction when and as Hitler rose to prominence in inter-war Germany. Despite this, the newly evolved consciousness of a mass society and uncritical adulation of the machine ensured a dearth of concern for the indiv- idual human being, Industrial society, with its concurrent is bound to exhibit Instances in which thi by our society are far too numerous to mention, mass-produced nuts and bolts of our culture. It is this essen- ole of mass-production in our culture which is Gropius in 1924: "The majority of citizens of a specific country have similar dwellings and living requirements it is therefore difficult to understand why the dwellings we build should not show a similar unification as Say, our clothes, shoes or automobiles... ." in 1931; --..the one-family house will remain reserved for a higher stratum of the population... . because the.... rented dwelling in an apartment house is better adapted to the needs of the more mobile working class....who.... lack the time required to care for a house and garden if they are not to deteriorate, " (15) * EXPLOIT -utilize (person etc) for ones' own ends, esp. derog. of -ing colonial Possessions, the working class ets, =Concise Oxford Diahinnne Cracked government l upon ones! versal Demockeracy pte cantakeplace,soanin-crowdofexpertscangetthewhip- nd, one of the more famotisly evil events of our he way for much re-building, it provided Town movement. It also created a massive need for new housing and it provided an excuse for thousands of Suppressed megalomaniacs to impose their ideal of the ‘good life! on the weary and unsuspecting populations of war-torn Europe. Any substantial number of people contain individuals of so many different temperaments and attitudes that it is really quite hopeless to expect those people to wholly agree on anything 'en-masse!, However, small groups may be perfectly capable of achieving a co- hesion of purpose and direction whilst ensuring that the uniqueness of each individual within that group is respected, interaction between such self-regulating bodies of inner-directed individuals can be at least as successful to the mtitual benefit to all concerned, but never can one person or group of persons presume to tell others what to do without their active assent. This assent must be conscious, active, not a result of conditioning or cohersion, it must be an assent arising from the free agreement of equals , there must be no im posed authority. It is most certainly the most extreme form of arogance for a few people to presume to be able to successfully provide, for thousands of others, something as immensely important to them as the places in which they have to spend their entire lives. To force people to live in upgraded chicken coups, in those battery farms of the industrial work force, is an act of premiditated violence, a form of torture, it reaps its rewards even now as people become increasingly hostile towards such blatant acts of repressionTh.e awareness is dawning and cracks are appearing in the conditioning cells, ultimately the whole edifice must crumble, and A bugeoning population required expanded facilities and more homes. So the answer was to thump them all out on great production lines. The absurdity of forcing people to spend their lives doing repetitive, mindless, routine tasks in order to produce repetitive, characterless dwellings to which they go home to rest from producing those rep- etitive, souless artifacts never seemed to occur to sucha systems' theorists and propagandists. If it did, and they too believe that humanity is destined for greater and better things, can only be regarded as totally malicious, then their actions totally unpardonable evil, Cranks in the Meantime In the meantime the machine cranks heavily onwards, and most of its cogs seem to mesh well enough to ensure its continued function for the few more revolutions that the dwindling oil supply will fuel and lubricate. AL ‘) Ta Mik yor tenole we cars ~ bub cars Rul & moutim pestle. He Joa of oy Transient Suites ensures Kak much (moe POPE usere belle fey rote aecieds of. Morlicer Heard Man wtre.Aabled i.Me seme year tr theon-going cuntWu, Mare:peaple- eye _bdlek Ayroad Pie & he Gey “SA age HE.Aled n ARE Same gearunLhe Weta, unery chepotlen.ifaMAnufaTed one,irsIsqucisrefulable,AsalnuDupentbp. dhe frre piace f Ds ik is, She parblems exot: dad intend of hetpcag us de rd curselses of such pablans de, radically, rofhinkind Lhe need far such Thing o4 perenal Ttaanport Veclrotoyues usuch Withpeople and stead ét ra ig any atlept te de-mifistoane Toe 4édhaotsyes , planners & bureaucrats ptsdince dea shalisre: panded. )in Codified dos and dents, As Shak ub eseryone ull zur raw The dame proper ,£ cventone will prelend he sume realdicg , A ull won. pst fine. Eivenslhing A dhe qerden usth be lesrecl athe. The: experts truss done Enough (esetach F eshabhohed Te Selituur. eabenabie CorrPOMRLse-5 cadifued, “The- MECEVAN pallems of ehasrur and. nculcated UE desired. (Expenses . ~ Ie canashide, nest back efcayoy oC, Coste, & cansewrumnale aes a 5 jae BAe theSe) HE OFeerHME. (Gus, Meade hdr come LE ue tom PARA NovA ) The Gods Of Progress THE MOBILE SOCIETY Acceptance of the ability of imposed authority to shuffle around masses of people when it so chooses is another part of the ethic forced on a society whose people are only pawns ina game. The historical precedence for this are numerous, the mobilisation of entire pop- ulations in war time provide obvious exam ples, but there are others "The ambitious and proud country gentleman sets great store by his elegant house, his rolling parklands and the view from his windows. A squalid village spoiled the view, and the village fields interrupted the parkland; but when the landlord owned an entire village - as some landlords most certainly did - then the obstacles could be removed. Villages were depopulated so that parks could be made. "' (16) The man of wealth and pride Takes upa space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds. Oliver Goldsmith 1770 (17) So the lords of the marors used to mow down villages if they obstructed the view on their newly landscaped estates, the aesthetic predilection of the ruling class had thus obvious gécial consequences. Now however, the lords of the environment would mow down villages to build airports, those great manifestations of a society which moves its favoured few around the globe as fast as sound itself! The rest of us must be content to travel slightly slower, but travel we must, for our social system is dependant on physical mobility and people's homes and fertile food-producing farmlands are sacrificed to the god of progress that is the motor car. This need to continually transport people and goods all over the country has has produced a massive road network; 200, 000 acres of farmland disappeared between 1957 and 1972 to make room for roads - The Isle of Wight is only 94, 080 acres! Valid Jams and Defence There are more skills , energy and materials invested in a single car, designed to last about four years, than in the typical home, house or hut, that serves most of the worlds! peoples for a lifetime. Cars are invested with a similar emotional currency to that found in connecton with homes, and the highway system consumes land ona scale par with buildings whilst setting patterns on the landscape of at least as much force and importance as the buildings which they connect, generate and destroy. If the structures erected by a society respond to and reflect the structure of that society, then the structures of vehicles and the surfaces that carry them are equally as valid as manifestations of a society's ideology as are its buildings. The traffic jam is a built form. The infrastructure of a country provides physical and metaphysical maps of certain characteristic elements of that society. The dictionary definition of 'infrastructure' is "a system of airfields, telecommunications and public services forming a basis for defence, ' There is evidence (dark hints and rumours) that the motorway system has also been conceived as an integral part of the 'defence! transport networks. It is also an ins- tructive definition '"'for defence" in that it presupposes massive social and technological orientation to militaristic ends. in spneo useless IGM DE beenbuilt er compaparis develop intrinsically for tho seme aninunt of mons; Concorde, Gist: CAUGHT ON ENDLESS CARTWHEELS OF ANSANTTY «...then they bring them to the factory, machine is strapped across their sheviders and then the kerosene is brought down from the casiles by insurance men who go where the heart attack quality houses, or, in am sonic aircraft rather th: OTe Ws me banish poverty by effecting an exuitabl< @ Sure indicator as to the morality aud culture, Taking Stock A society with its entire structure founded on A capitalism is bound to produce toiems of its culi, Pi; 1s one purpose-built structure embodying very part cx Muchange peculiar to the economy which produced it, itis a eita; 1 of capit- alism, home of those forces which generate all social relationships > Functions in society. The Disease Takes Hold check to see that no-one is escaping to Desolution Row. - Bob Dylan - (18) War and Welath and Weapons The extent to which a society builds architecture rather than oh artifacts, or vice versa, can itself hecome a oui i and aspirations of that society. ‘Treo Crosby. the environment z2me," compares the coct of Vietnam or 6 hrs, j Pie ilesize of 4. Just as any individual is primarily limited by their economic means ( outside of any more sensible realities ), so ‘tthe. same proeccesses of the capitalist economy produce very strange social rala “Onships ( bourgeoisie, worker, capitalist etc). It is inevitable that the organ- isation of the productive forces in society, formed in response to capitalist ethic with its concomm itant machinery for the manufacture and exchange of goods and services, will embody these relationships. British capitalism enables individuals to hoard money, encourages the centralisation of resourse use and manpower, materiais and energy, ignores the social and environmental consequences of its activities requires massive systems of control to regulate the myriad activities of many people to the advantage of a few , falsely values all things and reduces all things to commodities, Hence a small area of land in Central Londen can be priced at £13 million because it is a prime site in the world's money capital, and a £5 million building can then be produced for that site with the employ of people who will never use or need that buiiding; the result being an lump of concrete which then proreeds, somehow » to gainin money value just by being there! Such buildings invariably faii to house people because that makes a building unprofitable... .and profit is the mainstay of the capitalist system. Nightmares Office blocks house some of the totally non-productive functions of the social machine, people are forced to do meaningless (as opposed to meaningful) tasks in order to control the flow of an imaginary commodity, money, in order to mainiain the existence of factories which then control the lives of people who actually produce something (though that 'something! may well be useless!). The factories may be producing pre-cast concrete panels, for instance. The ultimate, almost realized absurdity, would be for a company to construct an office block to house employees to administer factories which make panels to construct office blocks to house employees to administer money to finance companies which build office blocks....There are obviously innumerable ways in which human behaviour and inter-personal relationships will become distorted in such ‘endless cartwheels d insanity.' This social structure of ours contains a multitude of unnatural relation- ships between People, including those of consumer to producer, producer to controller (boss, executive), controller to financier, financier to government, government to consumer, it is no surprise that the cities of this society are such cancers on the land and its people. And the devaluation of the lives of these people to ciphers in the great consumer / consumed Spectacle is complete when their 'hames! roll off conveyor belts, tended by more beings regulated to lives where they are extensions of machines for half of their waking hours and dutiful consumers for the other half, with the sleeping hours f! ‘9d with dreams of possession and nightmares of work. To jibe about the quality of design of a machine, house or concrete panel in such circum stances, is to advertise one's candidancy for the post of chief ostrich and betrays sadly misplaced priorities, OTT —- Sa = eee (AEs|eelStehe zi ee ———} NENG “e -fTM \38acre ied junction- ee aoruar ay i)\= i| CODDD00000000000058 >“BOCSd6O) MIERARCH ITECTURE Ours! Short term gain at an incalculable long-term cost, where ‘someone else! will Pay ~ that is the ethic made concrete and cosmic In nuclear power stations, buildings essential to modern western industrial society in which the citadels of political power require citadels of energy. The Funeral Marches On Poison Power The central theme apparent in all analyses of social, and hence political, organisation is that of power, the power of pecple over - people. But thesocial structuring which centralizes its authority and political power is as requisite on power from energy as are all the other functions of a technologically advanced society. So huge i gies whose secrets can only be used by the few, and then only at the behest of the political power- wielders, come into being. These structures and their technologies P01son the ground for incon i some nuclear Laypeople Lose In an essay entitled "But', in May 1973, I used the pyramids of Egypt as examples of particularly strong expressions of a power structure of an unmistakeably authoritarian and hierarchical form. The structure of that society, with its Slaves, divine kings, and hierarchical distribution of power through priests and slave drivers, etc., — found its ultimate expression in the pyramid which was used, liter- ally, to entomb the values and aspirations of that society. The Pyramid is perhaps the most obvious expression of hierarchical form, with its implication for human society of an authoritarian System of distributing the control by 8 few of the many, and its validity asa symbol for such a power structure is as valid now as it ever was. Itis an excellent aesthetic expression of political purpose, In October 1973, the winning design for the proposed offices of the new Northampton County Council was a nine-storey, glass-sheathed Pyramid. The architects and councillors who comprised the bulk of the assessment panel thought the building was wonderful, their Support for the building was unconditional in that any criticism (Hee sthe planning of the two lower floor levels and entranes.... might be .... improved.... ") was virtually ignored in favour of the schemes "audacity, imagination, and.. +. comprehensive underlyin _logic!’ which they could not objectively fault.' Significantly, one nopes, this ‘lyrical structure' did not impress the only two lay &Ssessors on the panel who believed the design was "'an im posed solution" because, because, amongst other things, it was " an intellectual concept, ingeniously worked out and seductively presented;"inflexible; required unproven technologies; used too much energy; was ''reminiscent of a mausoleum and the dead pharoahs;" and was dominated by the council chamber in a manner foreign to the new conception (sic) of democracy and participation. is 'new concept? of democracy and participation had not either, reached the bunkers, for the building also had to include a 'Civil Defense Base- ment,' for which very few members of the public will have much use in any contingency, but then, the important people would survive. Making LightofitAll The Northampton pyramid succeeded in taking the ideal of an immortalized bureaucracy to a logical conclusion; at mid-day* on April 5th, at the start of the Financial Year, the sun's rays (assuming the sun shines!) were supposed to pur down ashaft in the structure so orientated that ihe beams would illumine the treasurer's desk? * assumed time. "WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY e IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Myth is Reality (21) TRIE ENEMY BUILDS WITHIN US "The Ministry of Truth - was Startingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air....Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size....They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government divided." (22) was Circumscribed Souls "The G.P.O's microwave system is a pretty paradign of the 20th. Century. Functional, sophisticated, technological, monumental, its towers stride across the land: publicly thay are described as the distributors of the garbage of television;in fact they link the instru- ments of sudden genocide, and implicit in their construction and siting is their use to repress revolt." (23) The woman or man on-top-of-the-street is not normally aware of the existence of the fortress because it is not visible outposts, but it circumscribes the entire existence of each and every soul on the globe. Internationally, it constitutes the rerve system of the biggest war-machine of all] time, in peace-time it also carries electronic opiate to the masses through the air waves, and internally in Britain it constitutes an immense net of power connecting key government hideouts so that order can be maintained in the event of social un- rest and civil-war, The enemy is within and it is the government, and as one wise woman has said, "It's hard to fight the enemy who has outposts in your head, " Electric Fortress (Cowardly OldWorld) Humanity's greatest constructions have always reached to the realm of the fantastic, the Pyramids maintain their marvel for us today, and the greatest cathedrals of the past extended humanity's capacities and technologies to produce a vehicle for reaching heaven. Currently, the most massive constructions of our culture are those built with the mighty resources of nations! defence budgets and those utilizing the most advanced of available technologies. When the two strands of achievement in mechanis «tion: of people, in the military machine, and of micro-technological electronic wizadry in the industrial machine, when those two strands inter weave in the military- industrial complex cloak of secrecy, the result is the most extreme manifestation of our society's insanity as is humanly practical. The result is the Electric Fortress. In such times as ours, to worry about the esthetics of architecture without setting it firmly in this social context is an insanity of the split consciousness which plays into the hands of those who want us to forget the ugly social realities which really give shape and substance to our daily lives. "I do not want art for e few any more than cducation for a fez,or freedom for a few. "Willian tiorris, 25 Those of us who are involved in the business of buildine, those of us who care about the enviromient because we care about people having to live in that environnent,those of us who enjoy designing,who despite the apparent ugliness of the world still wish to create better things and better places.How do we best use our energies and imaginations?Where do we go from here? Bankrupt The architects' role is so tightly defined by the imperatives of the economic system,that any pretensions to control over that system can only be pretensions.The architect can have no power without an econornic basc.At the same timc the arrogance of presuming to be able to design for clients who profess to express the "needs" of people they do not Imow is untenable and presumes a degree of control denied by the economic base.The architects! power base,such as it is,is given by control over a store of knowledge either actual or imaginary,that is providdd by the myths surrounding the architects! role.The architects! power is constructed on an ethical base,when in fact the architects! position is morally bankrupt. Corbliney! The power of an economic base and its concomitant form of social organisation precedes the power of an idcology.Idcas shape future material conditions only in so far as they are products of existing material conditions and only inso far as material possibilities actually exist which enable the rcalisation of those ideas, Le Corbusiers' visions cf a "new architecture"were based on his preference for a certain aesthctic derived from a fascination with the Machinc.He failed,however,to comprchend thc technologies the mechanisms and applications of machines,and designed buildings which looked like machine products but which did not have a technolegical integrity-stucco was rendered as smooth as streamlining only to suffer the weathcr and flake off,Corbusiers! visions did,however affect the future form of buildings,he held out for an ideological power,a pewer realised when the material conditions of capitalism enabled the application of high technologics in a manner of building which was consistent with a box-like machine aesthctic.The itself did not demand flat rocfs,for instance. Le Corbusier prefessed t be a socialist while at the same tine his"new architccture,his aesthetic visions were only realised with advanced capitalist technolcgy.He connections,to analyse the context o of his architectural werk anc he thus failed to ensure the compatability of his social ideas with his architectural ideas.Those of us who propose sccial change and "New Architectures"must cbvicusly thought must be, acutely aware of the comecticns between things. Connections Material conditions,the environient provides material for cerebration,imaginaticn.The imagination percieves possibilities . Those p_ssibilities are cnly realisable under certain material imperatives of technology failed te make essential avoid this fracture of Had Le Corbusier not writtcen"Towards a New Architccture"thc later architecture of the time when the technologies were extant to realise his visions would not hav e looked as it did.That is to say,his ideas shaped the application of the tools of future matcrial ccnditions,At the same time his visions cculd not have ecne abcut without the existence of certain material conditicns, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE °? conditions,in a particular social and cconomic environment.The possibilities seen by the imagination arc limitless as imaginings but limited in the material environment by that cnvironment.In propesing possible visicns,ic.as for the futur. abcut building ond so forth,it is necessary fcr those visions to- be intinatcly, t tally, connceted with certain cconcimic and sceial conditicns ana those conditions must be rcalisable and decucible from existing trends in present conditions.e can dream the impossible, but cannot achicve the inpessible,'c can fly in cur heads, just as people were doing leng befcre the first air ballcon,but we cannot achieve flight without an air craft,without cccnoi.ic enc social crpanisation capable of ccnstructing an air craft. Icshoulebasevisionsonrcalityvandutiacnreascn,pessibiliti&cs n focts,the petcential cn the realisable.We should keep our fect cn the ground,our heads in the clouds,and be very aware of what connects then] Lifestyle There is really no point in being dogmatic about"styles"and so forth,There is no way of providing a style,a new architectural aesthetic for democratic architects to rally around because democratic architecture has no'style".As architecture realised by the will of the pecple,even if those people utilise the services of individuals specialising in biulding design,cannot be a provided "style"by definition.Those who are concerned about the sorry state cf building design these days will nct find a sclution with a new brand of style-mongering of the ilk of Le Ccrbusicrs'"new architectureio"r other apestles cf "Demccratic architecture"such as Frank Licyd Wright.A new style cannct be provided by sone aesthetic gurrwithout being undemocratic.The ve ting in,by popular support cf any new stylc,though,perhaps an improvement on present conditions,would not be a truly cemocratic way cf building, The Urge to Create "I finc I'm satisfied by just living.The greatest creative experience of my life was building this house." So the only tenable architecture}the cnly way .f building compatible with a truc,direct democracy,is builcing users,If architccture is to belong to the people there can be nc architects.Intthe meantime those who hold in truth the skills of designing and constructing buildings those skills more readily availahle fighting the forces of mystification which set out to cestryy the stewardship of those sjlls in order the better to hoard knowledge and thus maintain the precarious power. The architoots'pawer being based on & monopoly of knowledge buildin uncertaken by should be working to make to lay people.Thcy should thus be position of privelege,prestige anc It is only when pecple are directky involved in the processes of Cesigning and building that the architecture can truly be said to come from the pecple,and in such a situation cf direct Cemocracy the word"architecture" would lose currency just as the word "acsthcitics"had no currency for the cottager whose craft and art were part of her life.If people were ever truly free to realise their creative potential their buildings would be the most henestly and beautifully useful that this world has ever known, because no-one would be suffering economic deprivation in créer to construct those buildings.Repressive societies may have produced Art for the few sweated from the brow anddbled from the veins cf the struggling"értist,but the art of builcings most admired as places to live in rather than as mseun pieces were produced, are produced by pecple making for themselves a place to be using tobest advantage materials and skills immeadiately available, and expcrtise, rathcr than cc n‘mie necessity, then the mre that mm oly is unt rmincc, the mere thet ver can be or “cd. This much can be “cne in cxisting circumstances, but t+ merely er vc the p-wer of architects with ut at the same time c nscicusly anc actively w rking t. provice means of returning the knowlecge to the pe*ple is t>» act c unter t the interests f£ the people. That "the urge t cestrey is 2 creative urge" is only truc insofar as Cestructi n of repressive “instituticns unleashes the creative petential repressed by those institutions. For architects t sect up an alternative "R.I.B.i..", fer instance, is counter-rev luticn- ary.e To sct us "Community Architecture! practises which only ffer cheap expertise an? which fail te invelve anc educate people in the activity of cesigning buildings, is c:unter=rcvcluti nary. Only the approach to building which frees people tc be erdative, to builc for themselves from cx:ericnce of their own ncecs, only the approach to building which frees the creative urge is revol- utionoary.Such a way of beilding ipossibi<e onlywith ragically different social, political and eccnomie crganisaticns to thse previcec by capitalism. Such a way of builcing is net easily achievec, for obvious reascns. It requires social revoluticn. ‘ ; : ; +47 . ¢eo f nee «af pee 12° fi Een a a~~ ,ns ry Ra4es Si cil ial Cae ate Neyee Open ert Ase yee i: Eriea = s oo —— ieee: _e — aoe i Naty : =—~ a“iWAallerofHE H iy yNecA ya 4 PNtCCCceicy cle 'ive { BH fi Option i LW RaatTh 2 ae th fi) as i,ee §- ayy neB:/ gz ro ProetSetbyiae”Ki (tor) IEwas our hope tocombine the efficient and ecologically sound principles of Communism withtheexcitingandunpredictablefoorfcreatsive. anarchy... We wantedit ways... Fierce individality within 9tyht: communistic, tribal-framewore.. Our experience, so-far has proven that thetwoidkdlogies arenotneccessarily exclusive... wv? 4 unifs connecting tunnel-Jinked towers embracing compactly a quarter of a million people housed, fed, transported, working and entertained in a controlled environment. (Cars are significantly absent, conveyor-belt seats taking care of movement between units. This vision of what could be is a machine for living linked with a supply of energy from a network of nuclear reactor islands for which plaas have already been developed by concerned experts neem > ae t “ wy, Ss Vz \ / Thesurvivingcify(below)xsacomplexofmoving Ae 2 : nt Ye LDSwwrmes a MART RRE THESE ANSTHILL (DEAS OF THIS MAN FOBLERI? GNE MAN CANNOT DESIGN FOR THE MASSES. |WANT AHOME, NOTA HOLE s AZeis, ELECTRICFORTRESS | t} dis a ara {}i | < BITE EPe 1S4 F¥ing4 ‘ vu Wwe WHADOTYouMEAN7—n “YOU WAUNA GO OUTSIBE! ———— SS NOVANOAH1~FLOATINGCITYFae40,000péopus! ne SOLERIS HUMAN ANTHEADS INA CONCRETE MONSTER..... WE WANT DECEAT-HOUSING” —ONEOFTHE‘BaitetcoRARMGeSAT'AHeese CONFERENCE0KLOSPYGELES,SERT:97Z. PUTUUe _ Mein GPO microwave system. The chain of concerts touters | PES8sabotagc:-preotlinkbetweenthemeprcitanidiesevside,ntly 4hy| Lj MONUMENTAL MANIFESTATION OF AN IAAPOSED IDEOLOGY tntended‘to governmentcommanicationsdaring atimeof civildisturbance.Therest thesystenservespienedeNariel of othereeItiseenshoesseveralnewlybuiltBB2CTV sd transmn iteame intentedSerdve,£necnssasamircryou,sve Hy APPENDIX CHAPTER 7=FOR EXAMPLE a)Architects ac»pted the statutory schocls'requirement of a 2% ‘aylight factcr tc office block design where it attained an effectively statutory status-a"rule of thumb"grounced not in practical experience but in the arbitrary impositions of rule=- makerSe Hout Tar BeBe ' 1Py AAS b)The large size of windows that the enforcement of the 2% Caylight factor procuced,meant that kics sitting near the wincows sufferec unculy from the glare of the sun,to such an extent that it caused permanent damage to their cyesight.This was made worse by opticiens(cpcrating within their own myopic specialism)giving the kics glasses to counteract their cye= sight problem,without realising that it was artificially incuce’,se thoir cyes never recovered. | «€.amstake ~ is should have Toah acae ae°heeinFOREXAMPLE Screws Let The Sunshine In Without Question The overall size of such buildings is determined by plot ratios which define the amount of floor space that can be provided ona site of a given area, for instance, 'Development Permits! are required for offices over 10,000 square feet. Colonel R. Seiffort has been an architect much in demand for office block designing, not because his clients think hig buildings are master-pieces of sculptural expressionism, but because Sieffort is famed for his knowledge of the various regulations controlling office block development (particularly in Central London). Sieffort is thus able to help screw the maximum return (profit) from a building by getting more Square footage of floor space on a site than anyone else. He epitom - ises the role of 'architect' in one of the most blatantly exploitive areas of operation in our exploitive society. Indeed, the infamous Centre Point development in Central London , a Sieffort creation, has become a totem » 4 symbol for that exploitive process of ! devel- opment for profit!: "on Friday January 18th at 5, 30pm., Centre Point, the 34 storey office block in Central London which had been empty since it was built 10 years ago, was taken over by 100 demonstrators in a protest against the scandal of property speculation.... 'We have occupied Centre Point,' said the squatters press statement, ‘because it has become the concrete symbol of everything that is , rotten in our unequal society. It insults the humanity and dignity of the homeless. It exposes the hypocracy of politicians who profess to care, but refuse to act." (14) The general form of school buildings that has evolved over the past few decades in the U.K. has been partly the result of educational theory with its expression in the ‘Open-Plan vs. Class Room! debate, and not least because of the need to comply with equally theoretically derived arbitrary regu.ations governing 'daylight factors' and hence window size and room depth as per the above office block examples. The windows in these buildings (offices and schools), in order to produce the deepest possible plan forms, have been huge floor to ceiling walls of glass which have aggravated the problem of heating and cooling the buildings, due to the well documented '! green house effect.' When the sun shines hot its very hot, and when its cold, its freezing, (see appendix). Only a society which accepted, unequivocally, the application of standard solutions to dituations with a multitude of possible responses (the school) , only a society which placed its faith in anonymous bureau cratic panaceas (arbitrary minimum'daylight factors! )for all events when the reality is an ever-changing sky and people of intelligence and feeling ( neither of which can be considered the preserve of bureaucrats!) well able to deal with each situation as a unique and worthwhile case, only such a society could mass produce such inadequate and unimaginative buildings as we are now well used to. The teachers, parents and pupils will know far better what is required of a school building than all the bureaucrats in Whitehall, or in the various ‘councils! of the land. REFERENCES ‘Credits Thank you, IGrady Clay Close-up Pith 2In conversaticn with a fricicjJchn A.Fricne(;. st-crac welcing techn logist)28.12.7h 3Alan Lipman qucte? by Martin Paulcy the ik trn M vuncnt ete.cssay P.F.D.P.7 4Minonu Yamasaki qucted by Robert Goodman After ‘the Planners P.132 5Jchn Carter Afantasy in seven actsAd 15.1675 P.li2(129) 6Swani Kriyananda Ananda Domebook 2 P.96 ?In conversation with a friend,Dave Becnyon("architect stucent")11.b75. 8Danicl Burnham quote? by R bert Gooeman After the Planners P.1)}1 Manicl Burnham quoted by Robert Goodman After the Planners P.1li1 10Danicl P.Moynihan quoted by Robbert Goodman iifter the Planners P,1hi€. 11icolf Hitler quoted by Robert Gaodman After the PlannersP.1)8: 12J,M Richards fin introcuction to Modern architecture P.98 13In conversation with a friend,John A,.Fricnd 28.12.71 ikirticle in frchitectural Design(periodical )February(?)197h 15Walter Gropius quoted by Martin Pawley The Mocern Movement etc.cssay P.F.D.P.5 16K..J 11ison Deserted Villages P.}j3 17Oliver Gclcsmith quoted by K.J.illinson Deserted: Villagus P.l3 18Bob Dylan"Desclation Row"from"Highway.61 Revisited!1965 197Theo Crosby How to play the environment came P.96-97 20Northampten Competition assesors A)31.10.73 P.1026 21George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-four P.7 ah peeeonee Orwell Ninetcen Eighty-four P.7 3Peter Laurie Beneath the City Strects quoted in Uncereurrents no.7 2kSally Kempton Resurgence VOLY., No.1 25William Morris Innate Socialism Sclectud Writings and Designs P.10 26Libra inhabitant gueted by Rbert. Huurict Getting Back Together 27In conversation with a friend,Dave R.Picklus("archit.stucent")20.1075~s Special thanks are due to typists Isabelle, Jenneth and Chérie, and to tireless helper and critic Dave Peace Pickles.- Special, special thanks to Chérie, super typist, printer, and worker against all odds. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paul F Downton Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived John Murray Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Nov-76 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/3fd5a982419ece9db9e84c952716eb3d.pdf cd009f1deaa07117f289570b38386c55 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Public Design Group Description An account of the resource <p><span style="font-weight:400;">Argued that it was only through the public sector that the majority of people could have access to the land and resources needed for housing, education and other essential services. The task was therefore to reform the practice of architecture in local councils to provide an accessible and accountable design service. The Public Design Group proposed reforms to the practice of architecture in local councils to provide a design service accessible and accountable to local people and service users. The following 6 Interim Proposals were developed which were later initiated and implemented in Haringey Council 1979-1985 by NAM members. </span></p> <ul><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Local area control over resources </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Design teams to be area based </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Area design teams to be multi-disciplinary </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Project architects to report directly to committee</span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Abolish posts between Team Leader and Chief Architect </span></li> <li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Joint working groups with Direct Labour Organisations</span></li> </ul> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY ARCHITECTURE Subject The topic of the resource RIBA CAWG Report setting out case for a Community Aid Fund. Report opposes local authority public architecture services Description An account of the resource THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY ARCHITECTURE: the case for a Community Aid Fund. Royal Institute of British Architects. fe , t yei Jy, ery >Do>s a) Baa ’2 : [ oh p20ae ob Ate eet23 Are sorte Beat AS Ah 7oN This paper sets out the case for a Community Aid Fund to be established within the framework of the Government's urban programme. The Fund would make professional services available directly to groups and individuals to satisfy needs at present unmet through existing channels. Introduction community groups. community. —— ape 1. The Community Architecture Working Group of the RIBA was formed in late 1976. It was established as a result of the increasing concern, within the profession, at the difficulties encountered in attempting to provide adequate professional services for certain community needs. The nature of those needs and the current attempts to provide services to meet them are indicated in the case studies which accompany this report. Whilst they vary widely in scope they all show a clear need for professional assistance and in certain respects share a common background in the These problems continue to raise fundamental questions both about the nature and organisation of professional assistance itself and more particularly 2. In carrying out this task, the Working Group has gathered evidence In response to these concerns the Community Architecture Working b) to explore the problems involved in providing such services. c) to identify areas of current and future need. d) to recommend appropriate action to enable professional skills and resources to match more adequately the needs of the wider from national bodies including the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Town and Country Planning Association, Shelter and the Civic Trust, and has examined over 60 case studies where community groups have received or are S ————— receiving, professional help. 33 of these studies are annexed to this report. problems of obtaining and financing that assistance. about the organisation and level of funding for the physical environment. Group was set up with the following broad terms of reference:- a) examine the kinds of professional services currently provided to Evidence From The Case Studies conclusions:- :2’ be met in the future unless radical changes are made. shown to exist. accessible. 3. The evidence from the case studies suggests the following a) (that there is a strong demand for professional help to community groups which is not being met adequately, either by public service or by private practice, and that it is unlikely to that at present the types of demand vary widely, ranging from the improvement of older properties to environmental education. The eight types shown in the attached list of case Studies highlight the gaps between the main areas of finance for the physical environment and specific community needs. Even if the legislative and professional framework changes in the future to meet these needs it seems likely that others will be that these needs are not a temporary phenomenon and demand is likely to continue and grow particularly if professional services are better advertised and made more readily that there are considerable social, environmental and economic benefits to be derived from meeting this demand quickly. Where residents, whether tenants or owners, have added their own efforts to over-stressed local services these have manifested themselves in a better maintained physical environment and greater public spirit. Community projects represent good value for money by ensuring appropriate solutions and reducing maintenance and vandalism costs. Also where local people have been prepared to do work for themselves there have been considerable savings in capital costs, provided that the necessary professional support is available to carry out proper co-ordination and ensure adequate quality. Moreover, particularly in housing, the arrest of further deterioration now is helping to avoid the cost and disruption of subsequent demolition and replacement. e) _that the existence of professional help can enable communities jto derive maximum benefit from existing legislation, for instance by helping to speed up the take up of improvement grants for older housing and by ensuring the quality of the work carried out. The existence of such expertise can therefore make a positive contribution to the success and cost effectiveness of Government programmes. Current Problems In Meeting The Demand and thirdly the lack of resources for fees. providing professional services. 4, From the available evidence it emerges that the main reasons why the demand for professional services is not being adequately met are firstly the present structure of local authorities, secondly lack of legislative provision 5. In the public sector, some of the problems of local authority professional services have already been identified by the New Architecture Movement's report on Community Architecture. They include lack of resources both financial and staff, in some cases lack of commitment to the idea of community architecture, both among staff and elected members, and an organisational inability to respond quickly and sensitively to local community needs. Furthermore, an additional fundamental point, not adequately dealt with by N.A.M., is that there can be inherent conflicts of interest between, for example, particular community groups and the policies of their local authority. This can arise,for instance, in the case of local groups objecting to specific Compulsory Purchase Order proceedings or lobbying for alterations to Structure Plans. If public service professionals, as currently employed, were to aid community groups in such cases they would be acting against the corporate policies of their employing authorities. This is sometimes done but it cannot be judged to be a satisfactory means of 6. The form of legislation can create problems which effectively restrict access to adequate professional advice, as in the case of Urban Aid schemes where costed sketch schemes are often required before a grant is made but no support is available for the preparation of the inception work. A similar Situation arises in the cases of work on Manpower Services Commission projects and Improvement Grants, where the use of adequate professional advice is inhibited by the lack of specific financing provisions within the legislation. - for aid. or carry the financial risks involved. 7. In the private sector, the profession is unable to provide an adequate service for projects when no provision is made for fees or when payment of fees is inadequate or seriously delayed. From an analysis of the case studies it is clear that where it has been possible to ascertain costs, architects have received no more on average than 1/6 of the fees to which they are entitled. In almost all cases, they have pointed out that the inception of a project up to feasibility stage is more difficult in working for a community client than for any other. The client as an identifiable organisation may not yet exist, or if it does, it may be unclear about what is required or what is achievable. Considerable time and effort have therefore to be devoted to the project to bring it to a stage at which a local authority, or other sponsoring body, can approve it and determine grant, if indeed the project is accepted as qualifying 8. The uncertainty experienced by private practice over payment, particularly for feasibility studies, means that few practices, especially small ones of the kind best suited to this work, can afford to offer a full time service. Accordingly, professional input is either reduced to a point at which ‘it is barely effective, or is carried out on a part time basis, which in the end benefits neither the community nor the profession. The recent state of the building industry means that very few practices are in a position to subsidise 9. It has been suggested that financial help for professional services is available through Legal Aid, but this is seldom the case. Legal Aid is only available to those with very nominal disposable assets. Householders who wish to improve their homes for instance, who in most cases have to find their share of the cost of doing so, will obviously have some disposable assets, so although they may have no other resources with which to pay for professional advice, the very fact that they are in a position to require aid usually renders them ineligible for Legal Aid. Suggested Action 10. There is already an awareness within the Department of the Environment, the professions and informed public opinion, of the social necessity for communities to be more closely involved in determining their physical environment. There are many overlapping developments ranging from changes in tenure and control, as shown by the ‘tenants’ charter' and the co-operative movement, to changes in participation and access as shown in recent planning and housing legislation. The RIBA itself is involved in studies concerning the matching of professional skills to needs, including the study of the Role of the Architectural Profession in the Work of Public Authorities, and investigations into alternative forms of practice which will indicate medium and long term lines of development. The specific recommendation of this report however is for immediate action in the short term to provide a source of funds for communities to pay for their own professional advice on environmental matters. us To some extent, some of the cases examined could, and arguably shoud, have fallen within the responsibility of the local authorities concerned. However, if local authorities are to meet the demand for professional services sensitive to the needs of local communities then both professional and political attitudes and structures will have to undergo radical changes. However desirable such changes may be, they are long term solutions. Even if such changes were made there will still be situations where residents are at variance with the established authority or where the authority has no particular involvement or no resources are available. For these reasons it is Suggested that there will always be a need for independent professional advice and services both to assist community groups and to act as conciliators when conflicts arise. Furthermore this service should be seen as a valid and important extension of public service in the broadest sense. CommunAidtFuynd 13. The RIBA therefore proposes that a national Community Aid Fund be set up, sponsored by the Department of the Environment. Such a system would involve problems of accountability and clearly it will be necessary to establish some machinery whereby the authenticity of projects and the bona fides of community groups can be ascertained as there is no precedent in this country for channelling public funds direct to community groups. The following alternatives may be worth considering: by analogy with the Law Society and Legal Aid, money could be channelled through a joint professional committee or it could be channelled through a joint professional committee or it could be channelled through the National Council for Social Services or system could be organised here. programme. 12. The need for these services is pressing now but is likely to increase in { the near future as the new initiatives to encourage the involvement and | concern of communities in the development of their physical environment, take effect. The services, as shown in the case studies, include community environmental education, for residents to learn about their opportunities and rights as well as professional assistance for specific problems. The former, although very important, is largely outside the scope of this report: it is to " In the United States, the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is currently considering a programme of grants direct to neighbourhood organisations which could, in part, be used to provide the professional advice they need, and the National Endowment for the Arts {an approximate equivalent to the British Arts Council) is empowered as an independent agency to make funds available to private individuals and the latter that the recommendation is addressed. through an independent agency siinilar to the Housing Corporation. 14. Examples from overseas also serve as a useful pointer to how such a community groups through its Architectural and Environmental Arts In Holland a scheme has been introduced whereby private practice architects can be paid out of public funds to work with local community groups. The scheme operates in a number of towns including Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and early results indicate that the Dutch Government expect it to be expanded. Recommendation 15. The RIBA recommends that joint discussions be arranged through the Department of the Environment with all interested parties to develop the practical shape of a Community Aid Fund to meet the needs described in this report. These discussions might examine the extent, scope, management and | accountability of such a fund. The RIBA believes that these aspects are capable of solution and that a Community Aid Fund would be a valuable contribution towards satisfying certain basic environmental and social needs. a) South Field Square, Bradford Archite-cJothn Brunton & Partners. Cli-eSnheltter Housing and Renewal Experiment. Project: The improvement of the properties and subsequent preparation of evidence for a public inquiry against clearance. 75 properties. Briefed May 1974, first fees received November 1975 from a housing association. Actual cost of fees £887, including voluntary help, total cost including voluntary help estimated at £2,000: money received - £500. The local authority has refused to remove South Field Square from its clearance programme, which means there is no public source of funds to finance this sort of work for the local residents. The Square is a listed building. Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales Architect -Chris Whittaker of Stephen George & Partners, Client - South Wales Anti-Poverty Action Centre, followed by Merthyr Housing Group, followed by Merthyr Tydfil Housing Association. Over a hundred small old houses have been looked at and schemes prepared for two infill sites since 1976. So far the cost to the practice has exceeded £10,000. No money has yet been transferred to the Houstng Association. In this long development stage there has been a lot of wastage while the association the council, the Housing Corporation, and the District Valuer open up that narrow band of houses that are too poor to find private buyers but which can still be rehabilitated. The practice now has an office in the town, but should it have had to Carry the costs so far on its own? Confidential Community Case Studies Category 1: Poor Housing Areas b) The following case studies illustrate the variety of community projects for which professional services have been required; they are typical of the activities which would benefit from the establishment of a Community Aid Fund. They are listed under 8 main subject areas. The DOE's 1976 Housing Condition and Social Surveys indicated that nearly 20% of the country's housing was in need of attention, mostly of repair, and that the need was greater where there was a concentration of elderly people and poorer families. Although the surveys show a decline in the number of unfit houses, particularly in whole areas, there are still a number of existing situations where residents, either singly or in communities, are threatened by demolition and clearance. It is in this category that the Fund would have an immediate benefit, in providing residents with professional help both to defend their homes against clearance and to prepare alternative proposals, and also to improve them. St Andrews Street, Development Co-operative, Beverley A project involving 30 new-build and 30 rehabilitated houses for a housing co-operative; involving bringing the residents together, establishing the co-operative, carrying out the professional work, and establishing credibility for the co-operative, without which the street would have been demolished and the community dispersed. The professional skills provided came free from three members of the Hull School of Architecture. No fees were paid, but the assessed cost of the professional service was approximately £3,000. The benefits of their efforts is demonstrated by the fact that the houses are now being rehabilitated. d) e) c) f) g) Qucens Road, Kingston-upon-Hull Representing 168 house owners against demolition proposals at a public inquiry. Preparation of scheme up to public inquiry took 15 months, estimated cost of professional help £2,000. Help came from members of the Hull School of Architecture, free of charge. Professional work included detailed house survey, a comprehensive social survey, structural report, plans for rehabilitation, preparation of specification, costings, preparation of an alternative plan for the area, a phasing programme, organising a case for a public enquiry. RedevelopmenotfpriorityareasintheAngel, Islington,London Staff and students of the Polytechnic of North London were first approached in September 1973, and work was carried out over the following year. The purpose of the project was to translate the planning proposal for the area into architectural design for the benefit of local community and for council members. The principal contribution the project made was to demonstrate to members of the council and their architects’ department that considerably more rehabilitation of so-called ‘poor building’ was possible than that proposed by their planning study. As a result of the demonstration, the council had adopted a policy of fewer 'clean sweeps’. The cost of professional services has not been assessed. 13_150-year old cottages, the Meadows, Kidsgrove Rod Hackney Associates were bricfed to represent the owners at a public enquiry. The time involved in the preparation of material, and the assessed cost of professional feces are not stated. No fees or expenses were paid. Parton, West Cumbria Representation by Rod Hackney Associates on behalf of local residents at a public enquiry to save Bank Yard Row and White Row. A housing association was prepared to acquire the houses and rehabilitate them. Bank Yard Row was saved, but White Row was not. No professional fees or expenses were recovered for White Row. They are likely to be recovered for Bank Yard Row as part of the rehabilitation costs. ' -10- Moor End, Northenden, Manchester Rod Hackney Associates represented all the local residents at a public enquiry at which Manchester City Council withdrew its case , so allowing residents to carry on with improvement proposals. The architect had to finance his professional work over five years from first being asked to help the residents until such time as they received their grants for improvement. 1 - 23 Nealden St, Lambeth, London The study and investigation of an alternative form of renewal in Nealden St, as against the comprehensive redevelopment proposed by the Borough. The study was carried out by the Housing Renewal Unit on behalf of the Solon Housing Association and a residents association. Actual cost of fees- £7,000; money received £2,500 in instalments during the project. The money came from Solon, which does not normally have the money to finance studies of this nature. Despite that, however, the HRU's proposals turned out to be substantially cheaper in terms of capital investment requirement and more cost effective in social terms than the development proposals by Lambeth. Leedsbatcobkacks A survey by the Housing Renewal Unit of a cellular renewal approach was applied to Leeds, with the Leeds Civic Trusts and the Leeds Community Housing Working Party as clients. Cost of the study in professional fees £1,000 but only fares were paid. The purpose was to explore the opportunities of a gradual approach to renewal for the remaining 30,000 back-to-backs in Leeds. There is no official source of funds to pay for such theoretical and general studies which would be done on behalf of local authorities. ASSIST, Govan, Glasgow The project started within the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, with a grant of £10,000 each from the Wates Foundation and the Scottish Development Department. The sced money has borne fruit in a changed attitude to rehabilitation of tenements in Glasgow. This is manifested by some 12,000 houses now in housing action areas all over the city which might otherwise have been destroyed. As is customary in such projects, the money received was from special sources. It was hard enough to raise the money in 1971, and might now be impossible. Carlisle and Cumberland, Portsmouth The Housing Renewal Unit prepared detailed evidence and alternative proposals for 85 houses - phase 1 of a clearance area of approximately 350 houses. Project included survey of house conditions, household attitudes and decisions on the range of rehabilitation options. The professional work involved is likely to cost up to £5,000, and a fee of £50 is to be paid. The money will come from Shelter, the client being a combination of the residents association and Shelter. The Consultants are now carrying out Phases Two and Three of this job for no further fee. -ll- m) -ampaign Nottingham a) Camlachie School, Gallowgate, Glasgow A project to defend 77 old properties apainst a Compulsory Purchase Order, and make representations at a Public Inquiry. Work included educating the inhabitants on procedure, social and house surveys, preparing alternative plans, and making the case for the enquiry. -The architects, D Nicholson-Cole and M Chiuini will receive no fee unless the residents win their case, although the solicitor involved will receive his costs through Legal Aid. Much of the architects’ time was spent on giving quasi-legal advice, planning matters, housing legislation, and doing surveys. Category 2: Community Buildings Community groups May wish to use a building, usually an existing one, for their own community purpose. They require professional assistance to prepare a technical argument in order to secure finance. Conversion work partly carried out by Community Industry with specialist contractors, initiated by the teachers running the community school. ASSIST provided advice on feasibility, on conversion, negotiations with Education Authorities, Fire Master, Building Control, Planning etc. designed the conversion, negotiated with the electrical] and plumbing contractors, supervised their work and co-ordinated the Construction process. Problems included the high level of vandalism and theft from the site, and the unreliable nature of the community workforce. Architectural input in such projects must have continuity given the inexperience of the client. To expect such projects to be Squeezed into any office as unpaid work handed from architect to architect is to invite disaster. Assessed cost of fees £1,500: fees received —nil. Dixon Hall Day Centre, Govan Hill, Glasgow Conversion of a public hall for use as a day centre for pensioners. ASSIST were asked to produce ideas for the conversion, and to produce a scheme sufficiently detailed to form the basis for an Urban Aid Grant. This necessitated taking the project to production drawing Stape, as the local authority had to be assured that all necessary building regulations were complied with. If work does not proceed, assessed fees would come to £2,500 of which ASSIST may receive £1,000. Note: Much of ASSIST's work is at stages A and B (inception and feasibility). Most grant giving bodies do not pay for this stage of the work. c) Govanhill Community Rooms, Govanhill, Glasgow This is the conversion and alteration of two temporary school class- rooms for the Govanhill Youth and Community Youth Association. Problems included those arising from the use of job creation labour, and the fact that JCP programmes allow only 10% over salary costs for overheads which is wholly inadequate to cover the real costs of housing, supporting and supervising young and fairly inexperienced architect. There is uncertainty about the liability for professional negligence of a practice sponsoring a JCP architect. ASSIST receive no payment for supervision, nor for providing accommodation, phones, nor secretarial services used by the JCP architect. The architect was financed under the JCP programme but the JCP Grants are insufficient to cover adequately the professional services. Bridstow Village Hall, Ross on Wye, Herefordshire The repair or renewal of the village hall for which grants would be available as long as work began before April 1979. In rural areas, the village hall or community centre is more often than not the focal point for social and recreational activities. Yet most organisations using them are generally short of funds. They are reluctant to spend part of their very limited resources in engaging professional consultants. The result is that they either attempt to do it themselves in which case they may fail to meet the criteria for funds, or are led into a package deal without adequate safepuards on their side. When the committee sought grant aid from the County Council, they had not sought any professional advice and had wasitd valuable time. The result was the village hall committee failed to seek professional advice early enough in the year to ensure the most economic solution to the problem was found, and the application was not submitted in time for planning permission. Brilley Village Hall, Brilley, Herefordshire The extension and improvement to the village hall, a converted redundant village school. The committee did not seek professional advice and submitted a grant application which did not make the best use of the money or space. The estimate of costs first submitted by the committee for their own scheme turned out to be based on the use of voluntary labour. Now the scope of the work is fully appreciated it is apparent that the work will be beyond their capabilities. The project will now have to be carried out in two phases spread over two years due to insufficient thought at the initial stage regarding the way the building was to be improved and the cost of this work. Although redundant village schools can make extremely good village halls with careful consideration at the design stage, committees, usually short of funds, attempt to design the conversion themselves without professional advice. The result is unnecessary delay, additional costs and in some cases the aborting of the project. =a ai d) e) Lenton Community Centre, Nottingham Nottingham Community Arts and Crafts Centre The conversion of the Old Dispensary at Gregory Boulevard, into an Arts and Crafts Centre. David Nicholson-Cole prepared proposals ior a group of local people, and did the typing and graphics for the report. He thereafter worked on the preparation of a Manpower Services Commission application. All professional services were donated although the architect had a university salary on which to live. The project had dual objectives in aiming to provide working space for craftsmen to earn their living and also to teach their craft, both of which would alleviate inner city problems. Architectural advice was necessary but there was no moncy to pay for it. Merseyside Carribean Centre, Liverpool8 Since the project is funded under the Urban Programme, the Merseyside Carribean Council had to apply initially to Liverpool City Council. In order to make a proper application, a substantial amount of architectural services was required in advance: - agreement of the brief, finding them a site, negotiations with various local authority departments, site appraisal and investigation, sketch plans, outline of a realistic cost estimate. These services were provided by James Hunter Associates, Liverpool planning approval, and the production architects. If the application Programme applications in Liverpool have a success rate of 1 in 10) the Council would have been unable services. A community aid fund would make it easier for voluntary organisations to take a positive attitude towards environmental change. The reason is that the absence of expert knowledge can cause organisations to come unstuck when regulations and legislation surrounding architectural and environmental issues. The value of preliminary work prior to grant aid application being made was approximately £2,500. Nottingham City offered the Tenants Association a portion of a baths building built in the thirties, £2,000 conversion. Architect David Nicholson-Cole produced a feasibility study for the cheapest possible plan which cost £9,000. After that the City Council architect did the necessary working drawings and provided other professional services, and David Nicholson-Cole's task was to monitor the building work and help the residents. Services were donated free by the architect. The Tenants’ Association, being composed of council tenants, had no finance to pay for professional fees, yet the architect's help multiplied the money available to tenants by four and a half, simply by finding out what they needed and working out the best plan. The action of the City Council doing the architectural drawings based on the architects drawings, negotiating with the builders and supervising the work was the ideal compromise. had been unsuccessful (Urban to pay for these architectural confronted with a host of was offered to pay for the Day Work andCentrefor Radford Community Care Group,Nottingham David Nicholson-Cole was asked by the Action Resource Centre to prepare plans for a site selected by the Radford Care Group to provide a day centre in which old people could spend the day. Architect prepared plans for the site, obtained costings from a builder, and fresh drawings for local authority approvals and tenders. No fees received for feasibility work; fees payable after an Urban Aid grant is received on a time basis. Without the professional work, the old people of Radford would have been unable to accept the donation of a redundant prefab nor make an application for an Urban Aid grant for the new building. A Community Aid Fund would have enabled the Radford Care Group to feel that the success of the project did not depend entirely on the continuing generosity of one person. Category 3: Conversions Similarly in kind to Category 2, this category includes the conversion of buildings for a variety of uses, including the provision of small scale workshops. a) Margaret Street Baths, Everton, Liverpool 5 100 years old building closed in 1974. Local voluntary organisations assisted by the Liverpool Council for Social Service, produced a scheme for the conversion of the baths to a sports centre for use by un-clubbable teenagers who were causing havoc on the streets. This required detailed negotiations with various councillors and officers of the local authority. Initial design work, costings and organisation of the funding was worked out by architects Jim Hunter and Nigel Worth. Without expert knowledge it is certain that this scheme would have floundered in early stages. Architectural services for inception and feasibility were donated free to the project. The value of these services was approximately £2,000. In addition to this, assistance had been provided by the staff at LCVS. b) Rotherhithe Workshops, Hope Sufferance Wharf, Southwark, London SE16 The renovation of warchouses and conversion to craft workshops and a dance studio on behalf of the Industrial Buildings Preservation Trust. This was a particularly difficult task in converting historic warehouses into low cost workshops, using paid direct labour teams, and inexperienced site management. The professional fees involyed came to at least £7,000, which were paid in full. However they were paid out of a number of grants, which took a very long time to assemble. In addition to that, initial feasibility studies were provided free of charge -although without those feasibility studies the project would never have been started. The immense amount of inception work which this project required was provided on a voluntary basis. The lack of funds for the planning stage undoubtedly led to higher costs later on. Sis c) Brunel Exhibition Project, London Si:16 d) Working out schemes _that Category 4: _Anti-vandalism a) ‘ Angela Street, Liverpool The project consisted of landscaping a former junkyard, followed by the restoration of Brunel's Engine House for the Thames Tunnel. The scheme was funded by a variety of charities, an appeal, local authority and DOE funds. There have been many difficulties causing substantial delay including obtaining the use of the site, the release of funds, the necessary approvals, agreement on specification, and raising more finance. Once again, the body of the work was done by Nicholas Falk on a voluntary basis. Some £3,242 worth of professional fees have been incurred to date by the architects Duffy, Eley, Giffone Worthington in addition to £1,938 worth of abortive work. Total amount of money received so far - £500. This case study reveals yet again the difficulty of getting schemes started -particularly where they involve older buildings which require very much more negotiation than the construction of new ones, and hence more professional fees. t mest fall within approved government prograanmdmbuedgsetse.g.inrelationtotheD.O.E.'sIndustrial Improvement Areas or the M.S.C.'s Special Opportunities Programme. Often 'third force' agencies are needed, particularly where there are multiple objectives and several sources of finance to be tapped. A good example of this problem is the difficulty that the Job Building Action Group (JAG) has had in setting up a training workshop and related flatted factories in Lambeth. Thougn Wicholas Falk helped the group devise a scheme involving a number of different voluntary groups, JAG lacked the capacity properly to evaluate the various possible sites and press the case’ for one of them. The Industrial Buildings Preservation Trust has spent around £500 on working up schemes for converting buildings owned by the GLC into workshops, and it is easy for a voluntary body's resources to be exhausted if nothing goes ahead. Local residents' or tenants' groups require professional help to combat vandalism, often in post-war developments, where the built environment has contributed to the problem. Hunter Associates of Liverpool were commissioned under the Inner Area Studies to carry out a scheme of Defensible Space in blocks of four storey walk-up flats in inner demonstrated the extent to which living conditions in those flats were virtually untenable, and it tested out some methods of improving them. The point of the inclusion of this in these case studies is that the money came from a special research fund. There is no normal source of finance to pay for this sort of work, although it is essential if improved living conditions for tenants are to be achieved. Liverpool. This experiment b) Tower Hill Estate, Kirkby, Knowsley c) Withens Centre, Cantril Farm, Liverpool Category 5: Use of derelict land The Lively Arts Centre, Dock St. London On behalf of the Half Moon Community Theatre, the Community end Resource Planning Group prepared a report looking at the revival of the surrounding area near Wiltons Music Hall. The report recommended refurbishing empty and derelict warchousing, out of doors activities on derelict land, the provision of low cost housing, #nd associated industrial units, whereas the centre of the square will be used by the local community for various activities. Joint clients were the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and the professional fees were assessed at £5,500. No fees have been received, and none are likely to be unless the scheme proceeds. =n lie a) This is a virtually uninhabited scheme of deck access, multi-storey maisonettes with low income families. In addition to the unsuitability of accommodation for low income families, the construction of the buildings is technically poor. Pre-cast concrete cladding panels leak at the joints, access decks leak water into the flats below, and condensation is rife. The tenants commissioned Hunter Associates to prepare technical reports in some cases required to back up legal action undertaken under Section 99 of the Public Health Act. Although some of the services can be obtained under the Legal Aid scheme, in practice the time scale relating to such payments is too long to work. A community aid fund would allow harrassed tenants groups to participate in the improvement of their own living conditions. The value of the consulting work was approximately £1,000. No payment received. This is a multi-level district shopping centre in the centre of an overspill estate. Residents are harrassed by delinquent teenagers who use the centre and the communal deck access as an unofficial adventure playground. Cars parked in the underground carpark are prone to break-ins and vandalism. Hunter Associates were asked by the residents to report on ways to make this centre safer. This report involved a considerable amount of study, and produced 8 proposals. There is no finance available to pay for the preparation of this report or the recommendation. The availability of a community aid fund would allow similar groups of residents to purchase technical expertise and to contribute to the decision making. Value of consultancy work approx. £1,000. No payment received. Community groups can often find a short term use for waste land and need help in securing it and in providing a technical solution for its community use. The services provided by Inter-Action's NUBS in helping the establishment of Urban Farms fall into this category. =aia b) Use ofland bencath motorways The study of land beneath an elevated motorway showed that it could provide facilities for the local community including a self-build theatre, low cost community facilities, a shop, landscape improvements, and a community hall. These projects were completed by a group of local architects acting individually or as a member of the community design group over three years (1971-74). The funding was organised through a charitable trust, and fee paying projects subsidised unpaid or voluntary work. Not all the proposals have been taken up, and there is a large amount of derelict land still unused, Category 6: Area Studies c) Other references There are a number of publications on this subject giving details of projects carried out. They include the Civic Trust's Urban Wasteland” report and Norwich City Council's "Heritage over the Wensum". Local people not only require explanations of the planning authority's proposals, but also need to commission independent studies, and obtain advice in formulating alternative proposals. a) A continuous programme in Canterbury Involving students, local groups and professionals refining and developing plans to mect the needs for people living in the area. For example, a recurring problem was what to do with cars in the city centre. The local authority proposed a multi-storey car park. One result of the studies demonstrated that almost as many Cars as could be accommodated in the multi-storey, could be parked in the existing surface car parks simply by laying them out properly. Potential saving of £2 million. Secondly, alternative proposals were made for a site for a large office development in a residential area. The public enquiry came out in favour of those alternatives. Thirdly, the design and negotiation of a community garden on land that had been blighted by road proposals in the middle of a conservation area. This garden is now proceeding. None of these projects would have been carried out without the area studies produced free of charge. b) An investigation into the effects of industrial development upon rural communities for the Easter Ross residents group in Scotland. Community and Resource Planning Group (CRPG) were asked to report on the likely effect of major industrial decisions upon existing rural areas. The report was made available to residents of Easter Ross, was summarised on television and radio, and was discussed in the House of Commons. Publication of 2,000 copies of the report was funded by the residents group. Assessed cost of professional fees £15,000; fees received £5,000. c) Category 7: Adult Education and Environmental Education a) Environmental Education for Adults and Schools Involvement of the public in planning matters is now central to Government policy. Some planning decisions-on _ rehousing, relocation, transport etc - have a direct bearing on individuals and on companies. Yet there are few methods by which the non-professional can acquire the know-how to survive and prosper. One of the root causes of urban troubles could be the lack of such education, and the subsequent apathy or antipathy toward environmental matters. Work done in Urban Studies Centres and the Newcastle Architectural Workshop demonstrate the need for special educational units or centres. Best linked closely with a School of Architecture and within the area of a sympathetic local authority the unit should draw together different design professions and teachers. Sao Opinion survey of industrial development around the Moray Firth in Easter Ross. CPRG was asked to undertake an opinion survey of 5% of the families living in Easter Ross with a view to discovering the extent of movement of people into and out of the area, the adequacy of employment and local amenities, the views of local people concerning existing industry, and the attitude of local people towards communication of official information. The document demonstrated a clear picture of life in Easter Ross with rapid acceleration of people moving into the area during the last five years; the desperate need for more jobs and a general desire for industrial development to be more closely related to the size and scale of existing communities. Assessed cost of professional fees: £5,000; fees recieved £900. There is a pressing need for people to be more aware of their urban environment, its quality, need and potential. Innovation in the community architecture/education field is becoraing increasingly important if we are to satisfy the needs of society. Finance is urgently required to set up an experimental unit(s) in an inner city/partnership area for a minimum period of five years. Pilot work would be geared to the needs of the community and would be monitored over the trial period. - This work would relate to programmes already evolving through institutions such as the Urban Studies Centres and the Newcastle Architectural Workshop. The capital cost of setting up such a unit is expected to be in the region of £30,000 and running costs for a staff of 6-8 approximately £60,000. The Unit would be a major innovation in the fields of higher and professional education. y 8: Arbitration This category covers cases where professional help is required to produce technical evidence in rent tribunals or to settle disputes between agprieved residents. a) Rod Hackney Associates appeared on behalf of Pensioners who could not afford an increase in rent. 45 professional hours were spent in this case, with no indication from the client on how they could repay professional charges. The bill remains outstanding. Solicitors acting for the tenants obtained fees through the Legal Aid funding system, but the architect did not. The architects’ involvement was necessary because structural and condition surveys had to be drawn up. In addition, the clients were trying to persuade the landlord to improve the property. A schedule of work, of drawings and specifications were required as information for the arbitration. Without free professional advice in the building field, a successful case could not have been entertained. -20- Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource RIBA Community Architecture Working Group Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived John Murray Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Decenber 1978 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/fb2f19d9cf982d109c050338ef6e827b.pdf d5d8664db0610a6de6f4663cb61f465f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Professional Issues Description An account of the resource A cohort of NAM members became engaged with the professional registration body, standing as elected councillors on the Architects Registration Council and its various committees. Hitherto entirely dominated by the RIBA bloc, the Council began to yield to a new dynamic through NAM's involvement, enabling fresh perspectives on such issues as mandatory fee scales, greater lay representation on the body, ethically-based standards of professional conduct, etc. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The President "Eric's Whistle-stop Tours" Subject The topic of the resource The President "Eric's Whistle-stop Tours" Description An account of the resource itects, who are anti the RIBA, who think the RIBA isn't doing things for them. I myself am a life-long critic of the RIBA. But the RIBA is not a separate entity. It exists as a body of architects; and its quality depends upon the quality of the architects who play their part in it. There are people who are concerned about architecture and some who are prepared to work with the Institute. No one gets paid for working in the RIBA. I don't. People don't realise this. Neither is it a glorious club. It is the worst damn club I've come across. There are some members who are content to pay their subscriptions and believe that the Institute represents them adequately. There are a few others who don't contribute in any way, they merely snipe. I feel they ought to leave the RIBA to get on with its work, and its members to get on with their beliefs and develop their confidence. The Institute is better off without them. The RIBA represents a very large percentage of architects in this country. It is a club in the sense that it constructs rules, such as the Code of Conduct. But above all it is a big institution and institutions are the life-blood and force of change and growth of ideas. You have only to read the original Charter of the RIBA, dated 1837, about its purpose for the benefit of the community, the embellishment and improvement of towns and cities. If members don't believe in that, they shouldn't join. The right place for debating diverging views is the RIBA which is, after all, a democratic body. The way to change its shortcomings is by asserting or reasserting new objectives. People have elected me — they must know my views, therefore I assume this represents a view of Council. This indicates change. That is why democracy is important because it allows change to happen in an organic and effective way. If you want to make change go faster, then you have got to get more involved. Perhaps right now is the time for change. There is the ecological challenge and there is the environmental challenge which is con- 16.00 Meeting with Architects in City Architect's Department GLOUCESTERSHIRE ARCHITECTURAL 18.00 Dolphin Hotel, Portsmouth for ASSOCIATION, THURSDAY, 20th meeting with local and Isle of NOVEMBER 1975 Wight members 19.00 Informal meeting with members 20.30 Return home. at Hotel de la Bere, Southam 20.30 Dinner BERKSHIRE, THURSDAY, 30th OCTOBER 1975 SCOTLAND, 25th-27th NOVEMBER 1975 10.00 Arrive at office of Berkshire TUESDAY, 26th Nov. Branch Chairman 10.10 Fly to Glasgow cerned with the quality of our built environment, a growing worry that we have to share. Speaking about the present being a time for change, the President said that this leads to a re-examination of what architecture really is. It was pointed out that in America architects are involved in about 80% of industrial buildings, and a much lower percentage in housing, and that the figures are almost exactly the reverse here. The RIBA work very hard to dent the commercial and industrial market because it is of enormous importance to everybody. It is only comparatively recently in Britain that architects and Council have taken any interest even in housing. Industry has been resistant to architects with notable exceptions. Industrialists are beginning to realise that architecture can have advertising prestige value and so on. But few of them have seen it in terms of actual, intrinsic, social benefit in terms of their working environment — the effectiveness of what they do — as well as the symbolic, monumental aspect. Computerised technology — not talking about design — means industrial production ; you can work effectively in small units. The distribution of power means an end to the need to concentrate in certain areas ; resources can be moved, industry can be located with communities. But this concept has made very little impact on real planning theory. Even when you bring industry into new towns, it is considered a nasty thing in a block, creating huge traffic problems in the smallest of towns. This could be eliminated and the thing entirely integrated. Re-examination is needed. Schumacher's idea of smallness is not just a sentimental thing — it is a practical thing. The factor of size is of enormous social importance. I was talking to a group of doctors about the mammoth hospitals that were being put up. They don't work. Psychologically, organisationally, economically, socially, they are bad places. Buildings must relate and identify with the community. All the good ideas relating to change come from architects. The fact that we have allowed our operational freedom to be constrained beyond the point where we cease to be effective, is deplorable. (This is not to say we are a law unto ourselves and that we have no controls). Ask any good architect whether he was hindered or helped to produce his last good building. We have to go through the labyrinth of a planning department. I believe it is necessary to find a level where we can share the overall concern. By creating objectives which have some kind of nobility, we will all be uplifted. It is like the business of a company with a good PR department. Even if what the company is selling is not particularly good, the PR man can create a marvellous impression, the public will believe it and the company will begin to believe it and act upon it. Architects need some very positive PR help to relate to ordinary people. We tend to play down the more mundane and serious background to our work. We must correct the balance. We must make people realise that we are concerned. If the RIBA and its members start revaluing and revalidating themselves, they will start to feel better. The public will begin to respect them — it is a cumulative thing — and we will get back the nerve to do things on our own. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource RIBA Journal Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived JA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Feb-76 https://nam.maydayrooms.org/files/original/aca4bb15f585fdf14fcf24d09049bc0d.pdf a1d74cb0c78f6b4bd64d1d62b313a929 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Professional Issues Description An account of the resource A cohort of NAM members became engaged with the professional registration body, standing as elected councillors on the Architects Registration Council and its various committees. Hitherto entirely dominated by the RIBA bloc, the Council began to yield to a new dynamic through NAM's involvement, enabling fresh perspectives on such issues as mandatory fee scales, greater lay representation on the body, ethically-based standards of professional conduct, etc. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Those shillings and pounds Subject The topic of the resource Article " Those shillings and pounds" Description An account of the resource 14 BUILDING DESIGN, February 6, 1981 THOSE SHILLINGS AND POUNDS It is high time the mandatory fee scaie was replaced with something more flexible and of more benefit income is the level of principals' hourly rates for time charge work. In 1962 it was two guineas per hour. by three-and-a-half uineas. In 1971 it was raise to LS per hour. where it stuck until 19". Two guineas to five pounds from 1962 to 1977 tells its own story. 'Ibe argument that mandatory fee scales would save the profession from a fate worse than death has not helped, The inflexibility of the scale prevents The introduction to the present scale is a good point to start. The scale is for the mutual benefit of clients and architects — so it is said. Because that contention is likely to be more closely scrutimscd in the future, we had better make sure more notice is taken of clients' interest and requirements, These clients. almost without exception, supported the general concept of percenta e scales in their evidence to t e Monopolies Commission but salanes not compare creative design and the need well with the equivalent earn- indemnity insurance in 1965. forced to use all labour saving to provide buildings which ings of other professions. And and this is now three percent — methods available to reduce keep out wind and rain, while the RIBA over recent where has the extra two per overheads. architects have tomaketheir years has been preoccupied cent come from? It is unlikely The RIBA in 1970 to living from their art. with other issues, Architecturalthe situation salaries that overheads have decreasedor techmcal introduce above tapering 000. Now. fees for in jobsreal The days of the dilettante has worsened. indeed most offices have strug- terms. allowing for inflation, the man of private means using ractice in less than a decade hard to keep those under equivalent size contract suffer. architecture to fill his idle hours as changed from a relatively gled have gone. While the practice low risk. reasonable risk. returnlow control. profit. Profits It hascome have gone outofgrossdown, reduction ing that quarter is little per more cent thanfee of architecture must always be occupation to a high far more than merely a way of return one. risks up. 1200 largcon today's making a living. few architects A number of factors have costs. tion of A the cons'derable profession's •aork propor-has can ignore the need for adquatc contributed to this- The Taxes suffered an automatic financial return for their abili• enormous extension of profesty, time and effort. sional liability since law started the firstto the Similarly. total fee allocated the proportion to techni•of reduction RIBA argued in fees about while retainingthe Government and the public changes in case fees. at healtky lat e should wish to ensure a appearin 1963. leading toa rap- cal sa laries has increased as suc- mandatory where lack of financial climate for idly increasing exposure to cessive governments have pilcdthe effective Another official area action has lost architects. "If you pay peanuts, clatrns. has resulted in vastly in- charges and taxes on required far greater flexibility in application. A new scalc needs to be flexible. with the various alternative methods of charging clearly set out so that the most appropnate and suitable for architect and client can be selected and applied, The suggestion that the scale is in any way a minimum charge should be dropped. It should bc used as a basts to be negotiated upwards as well as downwards. Some parts of a contract may warrant a higher fee —a situation that already applies to the supervision element. Here. architects are poorly compensated for the work. responstbi. lity and open-ended nature of the commitment. The difficulty for all but the most experienced clients will be to establish with any prectsion what they will get in return for to be use the and dis- and in go or be a a in reader inquiry number 13 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Building Design Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived JA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6.2.1981