Owen Hatherley’s critique of GCHQ (Opinion September 13) was as superficially vacuous as the apparently empty centre of the doughnut he chose to relieve his thinly veiled political prejudices on.
Except the hole in that doughnut covers the biggest concentration of artificial intelligence this side of the Atlantic.
The hole in Hatherley’s critique is the serious lack of application of enquiry to get under the skin of what it takes to create such a highly successful project in the face of the dysfunctional PFI process.
I have no association with GCHQ other than I lead the design of a similar but smaller strategic headquarters, procured and knobbled from the start by the politicised PFI process. In contrast, the project directors of the GCHQ programme only let the PFI contractors get involved once it was a highly defined project. They gave them little leeway to damage functionality by tinkering or value engineering. They changed the whole security modus operandi of GCHQ so that its mission to achieve maximum flexibility for perpetually changing team groupings could be achieved with intractably rigid IT systems.
It’s an inspired integrated solution, achieved because of the project’s equally inspired leadership.
Knowing all that reduces Hatherley’s critique to little more than political prejudice. It’s a sad example of the shallowness of much journalism by non-practising architects today. So rarely does the critique of a contemporary building give us either an enlightening insight that the likes of, say, Vincent Scully once did, or even a decent technical appraisal.
Back to school, Owen, to learn some fundamentals of good journalistic enquiry, rather than the ill-considered ranting we’d more likely expect of a cyberspace troll.
David Lees
via email
Postscript
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