Clients will love less doing more

At last year’s World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, our thematic exhibition was called ‘ Less Does More’. Curated by Jeremy Melvin, it featured case studies from around the globe, looking at everything from Masdar to the London Olympic stadium, and from the financing of  housing in East Africa to a university project in the Congo. Nanotechnology and Sauerbruch Hutton’s work on energy transfer added to a rich mix. In all cases the aim of the designer was not simply to reduce cost to a particular client, but to approach a problem with a new attitude, that being a reflection of our current thinking about resources, finance and delivery.
This is not the same thing as minimalism, which from observation can be extraordinarily costly because it is an aesthetic proposition rather than an attitude to resources. For the ordinary run of buildings it is unlikely to be much use because to be successful. it needs to be brilliantly specified and detailed, and that is rarely cheap. This is not to say that minimalist architects cannot cope with the idea of lots of stuff; for example John Pawson’s arrangement of the Venice Biennale main exhibition as curated by Deyan Sudjic in 2002, was masterly. Exhibition design during good times is not the same thing as housing, schools and healthcare buildings in a recession, however, and the drive is now on to get greater value for money at a time , at least in the British context, of significant cutbacks in capital espenditure.
We can no longer rely on PFI programmes to take care of the capital spending because  revenue programmes are going to be hit as well. A PFI school on completion triggers revenue spending, so we can only hope that one of the government’s recent success stories will not come to a grinding halt, whoever wins the next election. The argument that you should spend money on teachers, not premises, fails to address the question of whether good teachers will be attracted to terrible environments, will be motivated to work there, and won’ t move somewhere better given half a chance. It is a very inappropriate argument from people who went to well funded schools with decent buildings. (And let’s remember that one third of local authorities in England have yet to see any benefit from Building Schools for the Future because they are still in the queue. Are their children to be denied decent school buildings for the nest generation?)
Whatever happens to funding, the imperatives in respect of what we continue to build will be the same: make money count. This requires a root-and-branch reappraisal as to why we habitually spend too much money on building elements which make little difference to the successful performance of the building. Why not make savings in some areas, and use some of the saving to give the client something extra elsewhere?
What we are talking about is what the construction tsar Paul Morrell describes as the difference between ‘good’ and ‘good enough’, which forces one to think about the purpose of the building in the first place, the outcomes which one wishes the building to help achieve, and the way in which one might assess success.
The role of design in this is, as Morrell says, critical. Smart design can save fortunes and produce what you need (or never realised you needed). But the obverse is also true: less smart design can fritter money away on details which won’t have any beneficial effect.
Perhaps it is time to starting looking at benchmarked costs for certain building types, and reward all concerned for bringing in well designed jobs at below those levels. This has nothing to do with reducing architects’ fees, but everything to do with producing better outcomes for less espenditure at a time of need.