As love affairs go, it is not the most obvious of unions: architects, with
their polo-neck jumpers and overt aestheticism, being matched to developers
- people with dogged cost-cutting and practicality in the forefront of their
minds, plus a rather dowdy dress sense. Yet fall in love they must, for what
is a building project if the developer - who has found the land and
organised most of the scheme - does not get along with the architect, who
must design the edifice of wonderment that will sit on it? Rubble, that’s
what.
So no wonder the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the
Royal Institute of British Architects felt the need for a speed-dating night
in central London recently that aimed to have architects and developers
snuggling up to one another.
At first sight, it seemed as if the architects would hold all the cards. They
were far better turned out: the women wore weird bits of entwined silver
jewellery and elegant black dresses; the men had tie-less black shirts,
fabulous specs and complex arrangements of facial hair. They exuded the kind
of confidence normally shown by contestants on reality-television shows. The
developers, in shiny ties and sober suits, looked much less interesting.
It’s also clearly a rather macho business: there wasn’t a woman among them.
For those readers unfamiliar with speed-dating events, the structure is
simple: one group sits at tables, and the other moves around. So every five
minutes, a bell rang and the architects had to move on and chat up another
developer. They were meant to discuss things such as “Is our relationship
lost in translation?” and “How better can we bridge the divide?”
What happened, however, was a fascinating revelation of power play, during
which the architects tarted themselves around ruthlessly to get work - or
the vague promise of it - from the money men.
“We have solved the UK housing problem,” declared one of the creatives, Bill
Dunster, a masculine type who looked like he was unused to being turned down
by a date. He produced a variety of books, cards and pictures of work by his
eponymous practice, and fanned them out in front of Nick Davies, the
planning and design director at Crest Nicholson. “Is this a level6 house?”
asked Davies, inexplicably impervious to Dunster’s fashionable suit and
manly charm. “Yep. Three bed,” cried Dunster, the man behind BedZed, a
famous eco-community in Beddington, Surrey. “Everything is in place. Yours
for £150,000.” I think he then suggested the level6 house could be made
available in flat-pack for just £115,000.
Level 6 means a house is zero-carbon, with solar-power this and low-energy
that. Dunster showed Davies a picture of 50 of his level6 houses sitting on
a hectare of land. The bell rang. “If you don’t use us, your competitors
will,” was his parting shot.
Over on the Berkeley Homes table, architects Georgina Hock and Gareth Wilkins,
an associate and associate director, respectively, of Proctor and Matthews
(designs include the second phase of the Greenwich Millennium Village), were
bewailing the state of affairs in British housing over a glass of dry white
and some spring rolls. Hock appeared happy to let Wilkins do the talking,
while she batted her eyelashes at Charles Calverley, the chairman of
Berkeley Homes Northeast London.
“Nobody takes on board the monumental housing requirements we have to work
with,” said Wilkins. “The problem we all have is planning. Do you know how
many committees you would have to approach in order to get a building done
on a brownfield site in east London?” I confessed I didn’t. “About 20. It’s
no wonder we have a housing crisis.” Calverley looked vaguely sympathetic,
but overall seemed more interested in a bowl of jellybeans than in Wilkins
and Hock’s overtures. But that’s the speed-dating scene for you. “The thing
is, we have to keep an eye on the commercial aspect,” he murmured.
This appeared to be the fundamental flaw in any putative romance between the
two professions. No sooner did architects start waxing lyrical about levels
and aesthetics than developers started shifting nervously in their chairs.
Neither party is a charity, but both use remarkably different routes in order
to make their money. And profit is, of course, one of the important goals of
any development. As Niel Pratt, an architect from Architecture plb, put it:
“There always has to be value. But while we call it ‘value engineering’,
developers might call it ‘cost-cutting’.” It seemed a hopeless impasse.
Could a meaningful liaison be found?
People began to fill in “interfacing ideas” on red paper hearts. One came from
Geoff Winter, from Miller Homes. “We can work fine with you guys,” he said,
looking at two architects whose sartorial style was so high-end that they
almost seemed to have bounced out of the pages of Elle. “It’s the local
authority that is the problem.”
At last, people started relaxing a bit, and suggesting other reasons why
house-building seems so bogged down in Britain. “It’s the media,” some said,
particularly when they saw my Sunday Times badge. “It’s the general public,”
said Chris Roche, principal design architect with 11.04 Architects, one of
several award-winning London-based practices represented. “How they are with
us now is just how they were with contemporary art way back before Damien
Hirst made it all sexy. We need to have that kind of effect on the public.”
So forget about the love affair between architects and developers. What both
professions seem to need – badly – is love and understanding from the rest
of us. We need to understand how all these regulations and committees are
grinding them down, and we need to appreciate that something terrifyingly
new is just a Georgian house with cladding. Probably.
