Contact Fellowship

RSA Fellowship Team

+44 (0)20 7451 6826

fellowship@rsa.org.uk

With architects catering either to the super-rich or the mass market, a rift is emerging between vibrant city centres and their neglected outskirts. Irena Bauman calls for an architectural approach that puts the needs of the community first

Thirty-seven years ago, on a rainy July afternoon, I drove into Leeds for the first time. After travelling through what seemed like endless brick-terraced suburbs, we eventually reached the city centre, which was black with soot, empty and shabby. As I explored the city, it became apparent that it was always empty in the evenings; few foreign accents could be heard; and there were many derelict sites that had been empty since the post-war slum clearance. It was essentially a pre-Thatcher, class-based, industrial British city, entirely representative of its time.

How things have changed. Over the past 15 years, an economic boom has transformed English city centres beyond all recognition, and undoubtedly for the better. Economic prosperity, the 1999 Urban Renaissance white paper, the expansion of the higher education sector and globalisation itself have created the right conditions for transformation. Multicultural city centres now offer a host of cultural, retail and job opportunities.

However, such has been our belief in endless growth, prosperity and credit that we have not taken the time to think in the long term. We have built a lot, and mostly badly. The public sector has yielded to the profit-focused private sector, forgetting that one of its roles is to moderate such excess. The private sector, exhilarated by the lack of resistance, has grown grotesquely greedy.

Highs and lows

In the retail world, profit can be made either by marketing haute couture to the richest few or by selling high street fashion to the masses. In the architectural world, this principle translates into two distinct approaches: ‘haute couture iconic’ and ‘discount iconic’, distinguished from each other only by their aesthetic impact on the city and by the scale of the ambition of those who commissioned and designed them.

Many talented architects are engaged to design haute couture iconic buildings that are but a cloak to tedious, deep plan office blocks, with ever more inventive skins designed to compete for the wealthiest of buyers. It does not matter whether the proposed building fulfils a demand or whether it contributes coherently to the design of the city.

What does matter is whether or not the concept for the building can be translated into a marketable brand. ‘The Shard’, ‘The Pinnacle’, ‘Bright Start Tower’ and ‘Enchantment of the Seas’ are all single architectural statements designed to celebrate three egos: the iconic client, his iconic architect and the iconic user, all of them united by their compatible ambitions. Dubai is the embodiment of haute couture iconic architecture, full of developments that aspire to be the tallest, the biggest, the longest and the most spectacular.

Beneath their glossy surfaces, haute couture iconic buildings tend to lack genuine innovation and aesthetic excitement. They provide the perfect material for a new breed of lifestyle magazines that flog consumerist dreams. They are ideally suited to our retail-therapy generation, which has embraced notions such as the wow factor, novelty value and unique selling points, and which has a habit of discarding anything that does not fit into those categories. In short, the phenomenon of iconic architectural expression is an accurate reflection of the zeitgeist – as architecture always is.

Discounted iconic architecture shares all the undesirable qualities of haute couture iconic architecture, including its visual impact on the city. Design gestures such as banded brickwork or rainbow-coloured render are provided in response to insistence from planners on breaking up the mass and making buildings appear something other than they are.

New beginnings The Margins Within the City study is being undertaken by Leeds Love It Share It, a Community Interest Company (CIC) involving Bauman Lyons Architects, academics, cultural practitioners, designers, geographers and researchers. Bauman Lyons set up the CIC in 2008, with the aim of finding and inspiring ways of creating a sustainable future for Leeds, with the active involvement of all its citizens, as it faces challenges such as climate change, energy use and land use. The study began in January 2009 and is due for completion in December. Architects at Bauman Lyons have created the brief (an attempt to ask the right questions) and have raised funding using the skills of other CIC members, from Yorkshire Forward and the Leeds Local Enterprise Growth Initiative. They will use their drafting skills to map three interrelated areas in the disadvantaged community of Richmond Hill, located in the rim and ripe in underused skills, social networks and physical assets. Architects will identify specific constraints to regeneration within the three spatial dimensions, such as the recent appearance of gated communities or intolerance towards Traveller communities, and will consider these alongside broader constraints: the potential impact of climate change on the future of these communities; the implications of the dependency culture created by long-term unemployment; the total demise of the high street; low property values; a history of short-term policies; and the devastating impact of the housing policy on asylum seekers. It is hoped that this study will alert city leaders to the potential of neglected communities and point to a regeneration approach that builds on existing assets through long-term facilitation and empowerment. This will contrast with the highly controlled, short-term policies and initiatives we have seen up until now.

 

Deceptively named buildings (‘The Plaza’, ‘Velocity’ or ‘City Island’) are essentially overdeveloped ‘blocks on plots’ unconnected to the historic fabric of the city, built with cheap materials and to the lowest possible standards – including standards of environmental performance. Although such buildings have attracted less criticism than their sexier counterparts, they are now ubiquitous and are likely to shape cities across the UK for years to come.

Now that economic disaster has struck the construction industry, extreme gratuitous growth of the kind found in Dubai has come to a standstill and other, more sinister, side-effects of the boom period are already beginning to emerge. An increase in the poverty gap has meant that, in most major cities, a ‘rim’ consisting of the most disadvantaged communities can be found on the outskirts of the newly revitalised city centre, restricting its eager expansion. The rim and the centre are often separated by little more than a single street.

The legacy of 10 years of urban renaissance presents a paradoxical situation for cities. On the one hand, they have vibrant centres and residential communities inhabited by young, transient professionals, divorcees and empty nesters, who are short of social networks and of the ancillary facilities that constitute a residential neighborhood. City centres tend to be lacking in schools, family housing, community centres, surgeries, corner shops, diverse places of worship, parks and playgrounds. In the rim, on the other hand, there are schools with available capacity, places of worship, family accommodation, underused open space and plenty of existing social capital.

Looking at the city centre and the rim, each seems to have what the other is missing. It follows that if the centre could embrace the rim to create a single spatial identity, we would have the beginnings of a sustainable city core. But the obstacles are severe. The rim is separated from the centre by physical barriers such as rivers or highways and by socio-economic barriers such as housing in poor condition, fear of ‘the other’, fear of deprivation and lack of meaningful exchange. Recently, the creation of gated communities – residential communities with strictly controlled entrances – has resulted in the erection of a literal barrier between worlds, preventing the possibility of any integration. This, coupled with the imperative of addressing climate change, is one of the biggest challenges facing architects today.

A new way of working

Architects have the capacity to think on a variety of scales and to handle complex data. We are problem-solvers with a regard for aesthetics and, as such, we have a vital contribution to make in the struggle to stitch up the huge disconnections within our cities. But to tackle issues such as the rim, we need to lose some bad habits and acquire some new skills. The most urgent burden is to shed our ‘starchitect’ culture, which repeatedly obscures the more intelligent work of many practitioners.
 
The architectural press is currently dominated by publicity for the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona this autumn. The literature for the festival speaks of the ‘leading-edge architects’ and ‘architectural visionaries’ who are ‘competing to win’ and hoping to gain ‘unprecedented media exposure’ in order to become ‘part of architectural history’. This is the language of a handful of self-absorbed journalists and starchitects who prevent the profession from hearing what society most needs from us.

Instead of pursuing vanity projects, architects need to learn to ask the right questions before settling upon the solutions. If we are to have an active role in creating briefs and overseeing procurement processes, we require new skills such as an understanding of governance and policy, a grasp of economics and community dynamics, and an ability to recognise and design drivers of change. We need to learn the language of business planning, engage in political life and nurture our listening skills. Inspiration and guidance will not come from makeover property programmes or glossy magazines but from those thinkers who have dared to voice possibilities other than the continuous growth model. Think, for example, of E F Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful, Nabeel Hamdi in Small Change or Susan George in Another World Is Possible, If…. We can also draw inspiration from innovative architects such as Jaime Lerner, mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, who transformed the city through a series of ingenious processes, such as offering a fresh food basket to every family that brought out its garbage to the edge of squatter towns, thereby helping to clean out the slums. Or think about architectural firms such as Elemental, which worked with a local community of 100 households in the Quinta Monroy settlement in Chile to develop affordable housing solutions that allowed for gradual modifications as the family grew in size and means.

At Bauman Lyons, we are changing our practice to embrace the many different dimensions of architecture. We have developed research capacity within the firm and have carried out research projects such as ‘The Future of Market Towns’ to give us a better understanding of the context in which we are designing. We have developed snowballing research techniques in the attempt to engage hard-to-reach communities and we spend a lot of time, most of it outside office hours, interviewing members of the communities in which we work. We are developing new communication techniques such as storytelling and animation to ensure an ongoing dialogue with the public, and we have set up the Community Interest Company to facilitate multidisciplinary research, as we have found architectural education to be too narrow for the holistic approach we want to take.

We have also made some unconventional pledges to enhance our new way of working. We have made a commitment only to accept projects that require no more than two hours of travel from the office, the aim being to facilitate long-term engagement and to build a bank of knowledge about the places in which we work. We have also stopped entering our projects for awards and are currently working with Yorkshire Forward to develop new work placements for architecture students, involving both practice and research students. Our aim is to start growing a new generation of architects capable of genuine interaction with society.

The resourceful architect Because the construction market is one of the sectors hardest hit by the credit crunch, thousands of architecture students are expected to graduate with limited employment prospects. Design Directions, the RSA’s national student awards competition, includes a brief called ‘The resourceful architect’ that goes to the heart of this challenge. Training in architecture demands great single-mindedness and has been likened to training for the priesthood. Graduates who may be struggling to find jobs need to be encouraged to turn their knowledge, intellectual discipline and visual skills to good use. What advantages might flow from architecture professionals working outside their usual field? In the absence of a large, commercial construction market, can architecture graduates use their talent to help the smaller, local community? Perhaps we should see the lapse in the construction market as a welcome opportunity to reflect on the future of architecture – thinking, for example, about how new design approaches can deliver greater sustainability and environmental benefit. The brief asks entrants to design a service, business or project that uses and extends their architectural education but is not based on being paid to design buildings. Entrants are required to make explicit what aspects of their architectural training come into play and how they meet the needs of society today. The project is open to students, new and recent graduates and those already working as designers. Entry forms/fees must be submitted by Thursday 19 November and entries by Friday 11 December. Entrants may also wish to consult the RSA Design & Society pamphlet You know more than you think you do: design as resourcefulness and self-reliance.

Irena Bauman is a co-founder of Bauman Lyons Architects Ltd

Find out more

How to be a Happy Architect, by Bauman Lyons Architects, is published by Black Dog Publishing. Matthew Taylor's blog describes similar work by RSA Fellows in Chelmsford and you can also view a recent RSA event on Cities and Citizenship.