“Yes”

Harriet Harriss
Senior lecturer, Oxford Brookes

It was once explained to me by a practice director that architects are the only professionals who allow the spectre of “design by committee” to subjugate their expertise. “No one would insist a surgeon should involve the public when performing heart surgery,” he said.

Intoxicating as this argument seemed, there is a delicate balance between engaging professionals and the public in shaping a city. Many architects are becoming interested in participatory design methods. This was given impetus by two government reports in the 1990s — Latham and Egan — which criticised architects for their poor teamworking and public consultation skills.

One of the problems is that so many architecture schools turn out ego-maniacs rather than encouraging students to work as teams and to engage with communities. Many newly qualified architects arrive at their first practice having never listened to an end-user’s experience of a building.

But the schools are simply responding to a profession that is still focused on architecture as product rather than process. It is the “process” part of our expertise that we most under-use: our ability to demonstrate “design thinking” through leading collaborative processes that empower clients and communities to shape their own environments.

Therefore, rather than blaming what Will Alsop dubiously titles “non-architects” for their influence on our cities (which sounds like someone took our marbles away in the playground), we should focus on showing our expertise as process designers and not just product designers.

We must untether ourselves — rather than waiting to be given permission — from our self-imposed limitations on the true value of architectural expertise.ć

“No”

Colin Haylock
RTPI past president and principal at Haylock Planning & Design

Will Alsop’s call of “Trust me, I’m architect” is thought-provoking and, I suspect, deliberately provocative. As an architect, a planner and as it happens a Cabe Built Environment Expert, you know to trust me when I say that the best design exists in a wider social, environmental and democratic context that architects can ill afford to ignore.

Of course, architec-tural practice would be so much easier if we could let our creative juices flow without having to deal with the public expressing their views, planners urging us to take a wider view, surveyors talking about viability and conservation experts advising us about what is in sympathy with the surroundings. And that’s not even mentioning clients and their requirements.

As always, the best answers do not lie at either one or the other extreme. The range of non-architectural players in the shaping of environments may protect us from the most ill-conceived buildings, but they cannot themselves shape great places.

Very occasionally an individual building treated as a carefully crafted piece of sculpture can make a wondrous contribution to its surroundings. Chipperfield’s America’s Cup Building in Valencia harbour acts as a rare example of this type of interplay. The core of this, though, is our need to consistently unlock the richness of architectural imagination in the conception and design of buildings, to join the richness and complexity of their urban and rural settings.

This is something that requires architects and non-architects to understand. They need to work openly with each other and have those “yes and…” conversations which can make working on shaping and refining complex places so exciting and rewarding.