What does your building say about the place it’s in?

Walk through any UK city centre and you’ll notice something is missing. Not offices, homes or retail – there are plenty of those. What’s missing is distinction. Flat, featureless facades now characterise so much new development, telling us little about the places they occupy – or about the ambition of the people who commissioned them.

This isn’t an architectural failure; most specifiers working today have strong views on what they want buildings to look like. The problem is around process, and what happens between drawing board and completion.

The cities that get it right

It doesn’t have to be this way. For example, if you walk through Rotterdam or Copenhagen, you will see something different. Both cities made a decision, consciously and consistently, that their built environment would reflect civic ambition, not minimum procurement standards.

Rotterdam’s post-war rebuilding programme set a precedent for design boldness still visible in today’s skyline. Across the city, commercial blocks, mixed-use developments and cultural buildings carry genuine character. Texture, material choice and considered form are the norm, not exceptions to celebrate. Copenhagen has pursued a similar philosophy – even utilitarian office developments carry intention. The idea that performance and appearance operate as competing priorities hasn’t taken hold there the way it has here.

What these cities share is a working understanding of the fact that buildings don’t just house businesses and people, they shape how the people who work and move through them feel about those places. As I see it, architecture has a public responsibility: we can’t all enter every building, but we can all see every building. The built environment is a collective statement, visible to everyone, regardless of whether they set foot inside.

In the UK, we have been slower to make that connection – and it is showing.

Three pressures, one outcome

The visual sameness – even “blandification” – of today’s commercial and mixed-use developments didn’t happen by accident. I believe, three systemic pressures have gradually narrowed design ambition out of the specification process.

The first is procurement. Competitive tendering on tight budgets pushes specifiers toward products that clear performance thresholds but rarely go beyond them. There is no credit given for civic quality. The brief gets written around minimum requirements, and the building meets those specifications, but little more.

The second is a persistent misunderstanding of value engineering. Done properly, value engineering means delivering the best possible outcome for the budget available, not identifying the cheapest option and calling it a decision. Dame Judith Hackitt made this point clearly in her post-Grenfell review: minimum standards in Approved Documents should never be treated as a ceiling to negotiate down. Sometimes spending more on a facade is the right call, particularly when that building will define a streetscape for 50 years. The cost looks markedly different when framed that way.

The third pressure is risk aversion. The Building Safety Act introduced necessary and important new responsibilities for principal designers and specifiers. But, in some organisations, it has produced institutional paralysis: a retreat to whatever material was used on the last project, regardless of whether it is appropriate for this one.

Each of these pressures, applied in isolation, narrows a brief. When combined, they tend to produce the same style of building.

The timing problem

Here is what rarely gets acknowledged: facades don’t have to look the same just because they perform to the same standard. The aesthetic-versus-performance debate is, in most cases, a timing problem.

When late changes are made to a facade specification, design vision is eroded. Typically, this occurs following contractor appointment, under procurement pressure, and with adjustments at that stage seeming to be prohibitively expensive. Up to 30% of panel material can be wasted through late-stage changes in the facade design in a bid to save money. That is a huge amount from the budget. But the specifier hasn’t changed their view of what they wanted; they simply ran out of road.

In the UK, Urban Splash’s award-winning regeneration project in central Birmingham’s Port Loop district shows what’s possible when design intent is protected from the outset. The design-led, commercially grounded, uncompromising approach produced a development that genuinely distinguishes the space it occupies. That isn’t an accident of budget; it is an outcome of process.

The solution is earlier engagement, not a wholly different approach

The answer isn’t a different material or a larger budget, it is a different conversation – at a different point in the process.

Engaging a facade material manufacturer at concept stage allows design intent to be protected: technical constraints get resolved when they are still straightforward to figure out and before designs get fixed in ways that make change feel expensive. Panel sizes, formats and layouts can vary considerably within a single rainscreen system, generating real visual variety without adding cost or complexity.

Specification isn’t only about risk management; it is a design decision. It just needs to happen at the right moment – when there is still room to make the right choice.