Planning Committees: Myopic Obscurantists

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Full unedited text of Piers Taylor’s AJ Planning Column here:

 

In The UK, we’ve devised a planning system that is over-complex, overly opaque and is all about passing the buck. Planning Officers, who are empowered with the responsibility to determine planning applications in a delegated fashion rarely use this power wisely, or indeed, are able to. Typically, officers fear the accountability of making potentially controversial decisions and refer applications to planning committees for determination.

This is a ridiculous kind of pass the parcel. We depend too heavily on discretionary interpretation of policy in the determination process, because our local plans are not specific enough. Very few other countries depend on – or tolerate – planning discretion to such a degree.

The significance of this discretion and the power it carries is immense and also part of the problem with our current system. It contributes to a fuliginous planning system that is overly bureaucratic, uncertain, time consuming and expensive and has given birth to yet another group of hangers on: planning consultants, who imbibe yet more fees from bewildered clients as they help navigate this foggy mire.

The other problem is the Planning Committee  – that grody invention that masquerades as a beacon of democracy but is instead a group of reactionary myopic obscurantists. When non specific local plans, risk averse case officers and a turgid committee work in conjunction, disastrous results ensue – as made manifest in much of the desperately mediocre built landscape we see today.

Most schemes with any degree of complexity or significance are referred by a case officer to one of these vainglorious committees, made up of elected members who have little interest in planning policy and one overriding concern – votes. Winning votes at a local level and gaining reelection depends on serving the short term needs of constituents and those that can shout the loudest – such as volume housebuilders. Volume housebuilders can shout very loudly indeed.

This planning system is a fitting tribute to David Cameron’s vacuous, discombobulated and capricious invention – Localism. Unless there is a robust adopted Outline Development Plan in place, local democracy (represented by the planning committee) can quickly become superficial and self-serving, and is often disastrous because of the lack of any wider or longer term view.

Planning is far too important to be delegated to nescient planning committees, and must have a broader view than they are able to offer. Devolving decision making to committees undermines any intelligence in our wider national policy documents, which are reasonably comprehensive. However, they should, and could be more specific.

Outline Development Plans contained within Local Plans should control – let’s call it design – growth and development. The main problem with Local Plans and ODPs is the lack of comprehensive drawings, which set out in outline terms how this growth and development takes place, meaning that the system depends on officer discretion to interpret policy, leading to the convoluted system that we have. If we had clear and categorical design drawings in ODPs which set out the principles and rules for development our planning process would be radically simplified, officer discretion would be largely eliminated, and planning committees abolished.

Critically then, with robust ODPs, a real type of localism could take place – one where local people could make their own decisions without interference from lackadaisical planning officers or inane councillors. These decisions are hugely significant and empowering for people, yet would be of little wider consequence. This system would also eliminate the need for parasitic planning consultants and costly delays during the approval process.

Planning cannot happen without a wide and long term view. What we need is a system that effectively marries the top down with the bottom up and marginilises the bit in the middle. More specific ODPs, less officer discretion and more individual freedom is the answer.

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We’re recruiting.

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We’re looking for an unusual architect to work with us or for us. This is the start of a two way conversation, so we have no preconceptions about the formal structure of our relationship.

It’s likely that we’ll need someone with a fair amount of constructional/detailing experience – we’re assuming that this isn’t a part 1 or 2 student, but we may be wrong.

You will need to be REALLY technically adept though. Well versed in current regulatory compliance. Someone efficient. Really self motivated. Someone who can develop their own role without someone standing over them.

Someone who is looking for something a little unusual, but with no expectations that we need not, at times, deal with the ordinary. We don’t want the presumption that this job will change your life, and we don’t want you to be too needy. But at times, there may be the opportunity to get involved with things that are really exceptional.

It will be a roller coaster. Practice is like that. Life is like that. If that’s a problem, steer clear, as you’re unlikely to find banal stability here. If there’s one thing we are, it’s creatively restless.

We get people having lives and responsibilities of their own. Kids, other interests, other priorities. That’s why we want you to define your terms, and the things you need in return. And we’d like you to bring some of that to us, some of your stuff.

The projects we’re working on are geographically far flung. You should know where we’re based, though, despite our invisibility.

Please email a brief CV to info@invisiblestudio.org  Tell us a little about what you’ve done, and how you’ve done it, but please don’t try too hard to impress us.

It may be a little while until we respond, so thanks, in the meantime, for bearing with us.

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What next Zaha? Where now?

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I’ve no doubt Zaha is a great architect, but we want more from our great architects than another cursory project that doesn’t develop their thinking in any way, and gives us what we already know.

Call me greedy, but I want to be surprised and delighted by great architects. I want them to always be several steps ahead of the rest of us, and bamboozle us with their clever thinking. Sure, we also need great artists to fail too – but the Sackler extension isn’t really failing; it just isn’t really trying.

The Sackler feels lazy in so many ways. It was a lazy commission by the Sackler, where Zaha is a trustee. The Sackler’s logic was presumably her commission would encourage lay visitors, rather than anything else. But they had greater obligations than just this, and a gallery should know better than to allow itself to be a passive recipient of genius. Any project – any interesting project – is the product of a conversation between architect and client, and it strikes me that this conversation wasn’t very inspired. Maybe Zaha isn’t used to being challenged – but being challenged is surely part of the delight of the best interactions with clients?

The point, of course, of a small project for a major architect is to act as a piece of research where either something – anything – is explored, or where it acts as a piece of polemic – but this is neither. With a small project from an enthusiastic client, you are so free from the conventional constraints – space, money, restrictions on experimentation – whatever – and given the relative freedom of brief from the Sackler in terms of what it had to do, the extension doesn’t work any idea hard enough. It’s not particularly clever.

Zaha’s oft praised greatness is more reason for not making allowances. One definition of a great artist (and part of the responsibility they have to retain this status) is someone who keeps pushing at the boundaries of what is possible and moving the game on. But the Sackler doesn’t move the game on. It’s a building that might have happened any time in the last 20 years of Zaha-dom. Formally, it is what we might expect – no more or no less. It is an instant Zaha by numbers. Once, Zaha’s relationship to the advanced geometry unit at Arup was her calling card, but now that has gone, what is there? I’m not a shape fascist, like many architects, but of all the things this extension could have been, why this?

The Sackler doesn’t even really work very well in terms of the lack of connection to the existing gallery (its main raison d’etre), or what it achieves for the occupants. It expects us to marvel at its formal genius, and indeed, if it allowed us to sit in landscape under a glorious folded handkerchief roof and achieved nothing else – great – but instead, we’re forced to be contained in a rather oppressive and mean sealed little box with a clunky soffit and no connection to the outside. Despite what Zaha may think, walls of glass are very much a physical barrier.

Materially I feel a little cheated, too – because it doesn’t really have materials – or at least doesn’t use materials interestingly. Materials were never really Zaha’s thing, granted, but here, the materials are little more than an inconvenience to her – particularly when they don’t go round corners very well.

The Sackler extension is the sort of project that a younger architect would have given their eye teeth for, used to demonstrate clever thinking, and show the world what they were capable of. It makes me wonder whether the old guard, of which Zaha is now part – have the equivalent burning hunger to excel.

Ultimately, it feels like a building from another time, one when we were all a little more naïve. But that was then – and this is now. What next Zaha? Where now? To keep your status you need to continue to be a game changer. Next time, Zaha, show us a glimpse of something we didn’t already know. Something new.

 

This review of Zaha Hadid Architect’s Sackler Gallery extension, for Architecture Today, by Piers Taylor, appears in the October issue of Architecture Today.

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Don’t Hit Me With Your Physics Stick…

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Don’t hit me with your physics stick, because I get the Physics of Passivhaus! I suspect my resistance to embracing Passivhaus wholeheartedly – or rather, my nagging unease somewhere around Passivhaus is also that I’m not convinced that reduced energy costs automatically leads to good architecture. I know most of you don’t either, but I’ve been sent many examples recently of fully certified Passivhaus buildings, and predominately, the key issue I’m told about is reduced running costs (generally at the expense of greater construction costs). Of course we aspire to reduced energy use and the resultant running costs, but much of the time it feels that for many Passivhaus builders, this is the overriding ambition for the building and of course, a building has greater responsibilities that this. Similarly, a symbiotic connection with context means more than being able to open the windows.

Low energy use and low running costs are the starting point, not the end point. I know there are some great examples of the Passivhaus principles being used wisely by really good architects – Bere, Architype, Mole, and many of the people I’ve been having this conversation with, but these guys know that there’s more to a building than the chasing of efficiency. I worry that it is a system that can be used by mediocre designers to justifying a well performing and well intentioned but poor piece of architecture.

Yet, dare question it, and you’re labelled a ignorant Luddite who misunderstands the system. I know the system, but that’s no excuse for thinking it infallible, or a tool that magically transforms mediocre work into exceptional. And no excuse wither for thinking that if the physics is infallible, then the system is infallible.

And maybe that’s the point – you exceptional and intelligent designers will always be fine. But for the rest, it seems often as a mechanism of justifying a poor building. Maybe again, that’s a fringe issue. As there’s so many poor buildings anyway, and at least with Passivhaus they’ll better in one regard.

I’m loving the debate, and thank you. We’re on the same side, and we want the same thing. And I know most of you know it is just a design tool – I get that, along with everything else. I’ve stated above, and I’ll state it again, Passivhaus is good physics, I’m sold for the main part, and, read it here: Passivhaus is THE standard that we should as a construction industry adopt. Just let’s not think that because something can be measured, that makes it always appropriate.

Maybe the great Robert Hughes should have the last word: ‘A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.’

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I Think You’re Right

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Thanks for all the Passivhaus comments, and apologies for the group response. I Think my comments have been misleading and, perhaps, deliberately provocative. I think too, that you’re right – Passivhaus works and is perhaps THE appropriate standard for UK new build – certainly while there’s not a real alternative. I do believe my piece raised a key point though, though, but I think it is the margin of the conversation, not the main part and perhaps a distraction.

One off new builds in rural locations are not the main part of the conversation – the main conversation, of course, is what we aspire to do with housebuilding generally – and certainly I do believe Passivhaus approach is a good one here – particularly when the alternative is greater heating demand or primary energy use. The Code for Sustainable Homes has proved to be hollow – focussing on the wrong issue of theoretical carbon emissions, not actual energy use. So, categorically, I agree wholeheartedly with Passivhaus that the standard must be about energy demand.

So – I’m with you here, and I’ve only really had one key point (it’s a a fringe point, really) which concerns more particular buildings which have a more complex relationship with a site or use (the houses I’ve talked about). Yes, these buildings need to focus on actual energy use too, but I’m not convinced that heat recovery whole house ventilation systems would have been appropriate. That was my rather clumsy ‘one size fits all’ comment. But even so, all of those houses used core Passivhaus principles of orientation, insulation and efficient envelope, so I’ve never been a non-believer. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter too much if these houses aren’t certified.

There’s another point of not being convinced of using the Passivhaus standard in warmer climates – I’m a big believer in natural ventilation and thermal mass, still. But again I’m happy to be proven wrong.

Finally, I think it is this point – of wondering if natural ventilation (with thermal mass, of course) can still have a place in the UK – for some of the year (and the whole symbiosis with site thing) that has made me waver whether full Passivhaus certification is always appropriate. Maybe it is, and the answer, of course, is that the occupier has free reign to operate a building accordingly when he or she sees fit, and not when they don’t…

I suspect too, that my previous post was also provoked by the seemingly hallowed-and-beyond-reproach nature of Passivhaus, and I’m a big believer in prodding, poking, and turning inside out.

The big focus, though, has to be on raising the standard of the 95% of housing from the volume house builders that has zero design aspiration – Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Barratt, David Wilson – you know who they are – and, with this, if a first step was convincing them to begin adopting Passivhaus, it would be a great start, irrespective of ultimately whether Passivhaus is flawed in dealing with the particular or not.

Keep up the debate.

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