Nothing wrong with the building industry

 Nothing wrong with the building industry

Yet another interview today: an earnest young researcher kept asking me what's wrong with the building industry. She seemed convinced of its ills and I don't blame her. We constantly talk about productivity issues, low building performance, housing scarcity, high costs, dangerous environmental impact and many other problems. And, naturally, we want to cure them all: remove the internal problems of the building industry and reduce its negative impact on the world. It appears to make sense but, seen from a different perspective, the building industry may actually work rather well as it is, perhaps not for itself as a discrete, isolated system but arguably for the wider economy and society. 

First of all, let's make clear that by "building industry" I refer to all economic activity concerning the built environment: design, construction, operation, maintenance, demolition, use, transport, networks, utilities and all related services - the lot. It's not synonymous to "construction industry", which covers only some parts of the above spectrum and, by the way, is not very industrialized. 

Secondly, let's examine what kind of improvements we aspire to. We establish goals like sustainability, which is self-evident and too broad or vague. Making it operational involves translation into simple constraints, such as the use of ethically sourced materials. These constraints tend to have a limited effect, especially when they do little to reduce overconsumption. The energy transition in the Netherlands is a good example: reducing the use of fossil fuel consumption and the need for fracking in Groningen are undeniably necessary but over-relying on an electricity grid already overburdened by agricultural, industrial, office and home demand is not wise. With renewable sources firmly in the area of 1-2%, who's going to object to nuclear power stations or energy supply (including fossil fuels) from abroad (including from unwanted bedfellows)? 

Other goals, such as circularity, seem more focused and feasible but suffer from a depressingly catholic interpretation and naïve indifference to the existing situation: everything has to be made circular and to the highest degree (i.e. reuse rather than recycling). That buildings prolong the in-use life of most materials and that old building components do not meet the requirements of today do not deter advocates of circularity, only side-track them from the huge existing building stock to the design and construction of new buildings. Even if we manage to stimulate a higher rate in the replacement of the existing stock, how can we guarantee circular flows for components that will exit the built environment in twenty, thirty or forty years from now? Or are we to promote faster cycles, as with electrical and electronic goods, clothes and furniture? This is already happening with kitchens and bathrooms; what is happening with the waste produced by these refurbishments? 

In addition to wider social and ethical goals, we also have goals pertaining to the current state of the construction industry. These are generally old and derive mostly from comparisons to other industries, as well as to industrialization in general. We can always learn from what the others claim to do well, so prefabrication, robotization, chain supply management, agility and various other solutions are been (re)introduced in the debate. The problems to be solved generally relate to cost and productivity. Admittedly, building construction is largely the same as one hundred years ago: slow, disorganized, inefficient, wasteful and too dependent on cheap labour, high demand, quick turnover and high mark-up for the end product. Production processes haven't changed but why should they, if people are satisfied with the same old results? The longevity and appeal of many old buildings also testifies to low consumer expectations. 

There's a lot to improve in the construction industry but how much does it matter to the whole building industry? From inside the construction industry improvement may be desirable but it can be argued that in fact the building industry works well, stimulating general growth and prosperity, thanks to a poorly performing construction industry. For example, it maters little if building prices go up and up, as it the current trend, or if they are delivered later and at a higher cost than promised. What matters is that they exist and enter use, so that consumption of resources and services can start. This also includes the constant adaptation of buildings to to changing requirements and fashions. In this context, it matters little if buildings have faults or underperform. If a builder makes a mess of a project, other builders will have work in the following decades. The shortcomings of the construction industry actually stimulate more economic activity, often connected to the goals mentioned above, such as energetic or circular retrofit. 

In the end, all's well with the building industry as a whole. Everybody profits from it, regardless of building state and performance. All that matters is that there is a large volume of activity - and if the low performance of the construction industry adds to that, then it's better for the economy. We can actually claim that, despite outdated production processes, the building industry conforms to wider current cultural and economic tendencies, including a superficial approach to quality: what matters in a bathroom refurbishment is that the visible objects, surfaces and interfaces agree with certain lifestyle choices, not how the underlying structures and networks operate. Is this any different to the choice of a smartphone or laptop? Only with respect to the lifespan of the whole building - but that's a fundamental misconception: a building isn't a thing but an assemblage of many, largely independent things, each subject to different conditions. The foundations of a building may not change over its lifetime but the roof may see a number of changes from maintenance and renovation (which may replace all original  components), extensions like loft conversions that change the shape and size of the roof, and the addition of new subsystems, such as solar panels. All those things coincide in the area of the roof and have some relation to each other but the overall picture is quite variable and opportunistic. Once we start seeing it like that, the building industry is not only very complex at both the physical and the economic level, but also doing quite well as a whole. 

Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker?

Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker? Does being an architect mean that you are a better designer of buildings? 

The position of authority many assume derives primarily from their educational and professional background: in matters historical we listen to historians, in matters of health to medical professionals. This seems only logical but the situation becomes more complicated when the subject under consideration involves a capacity we all should posses, such as reasoning. Does a philosopher perform better in reasoning than others? We should certainly expect that: a philosopher has learned what reasoning entails more explicitly and in more detail than others. A philosopher has studied the corpus of philosophical works, so has access to hundreds of relevant views and approaches that inform and structure their own reasoning. So far so good; we can learn a lot from a philosopher. 

The problems start when philosophy becomes self-referential: when it addresses issues and debates within that corpus, with little regard for what a wider audience might understand. It's one thing to explain that what one is saying draws from other sources for reasons of credit, justification, transparency etc., another to try to impress by endless name-dropping that can feel mind-numbing for an audience and yet another to withdraw to the fundamental issues or technicalities of one's own discipline with little regard for what takes place outside of it. Philosophical debates are fine in philosophical circles but out of place in analyses of non-philosophical subjects that could profit from the rigour of philosophical reasoning. 

Similarly, architects have been trained in how to design buildings and have studied what other architects have done in the history of architecture up to the present day. Therefore, they should be able to design much better than untrained people. This is quite frequently the case: architects have a better understanding of matters spatial, functional and structural, as well as a wide repertory of tried solutions at their disposal, so they tend to avoid common mistakes non-architects make. At the same time, however, many of their solutions merely follow established patterns and architectural vogues. A design often merely copies what other architects, especially prominent ones, have made, resulting into a mass production of the same instances, which are automatically elevated to the status of prototypes. 

Learning from each other is a common and valuable practice in many areas, professional or not. The problem is again that it may reflect a self-referential architectural culture: that the choice of the particular solution is made not to offer good performance to clients and users but to engage in architectural debates, illustrate adherence to a particular school or otherwise favourably impress peers. The results are even worse than with philosophy because the tenets of architectural debates are often promoted as the solution to wider problems, e.g. societal or environmental. Architecture may adopt goals like sustainability, circularity or inclusiveness but superficially so, insisting on belief in the architects' capacity to change the world and confusing belief and intention with evaluation and performance. The world may be overheating, making summers often unbearable, but clever solutions in passive cooling, many known for decades are seldom applied to new construction or to the existing building stock, while sales of air-conditioning devices (actually a source of overheating themselves) are soaring. It seems that architecture has learned little from the failures caused in the second half of the twentieth century by its combination of blindness and arrogance. 

Human resources

 Human resources 

Yet another student of mine came to the same conclusion after studying a couple of cases at a construction enterprise: the main problem is the human resources, that the people working on a project have to perform well if projects are to be successful. To be fair, it wasn't purely her own conclusion, it was what she was told in the interviews she conducted with the middle managers - and she took it over, as many others before her had done when researching different aspects of design and construction projects. 

Putting the blame on your workers is always the easy way out. Yes, one should expect every professional to perform at least adequately but if it doesn't happen, what does this mean? Is it just a matter of personal failure or do the organization of the project and the enterprise play a role? People may perform well individually and still fail as a project team - something rather frequent in sport. There, it is usually followed by changes not only in personnel but also in approach, e.g. recruitment structure and game tactics. But even if failure is personal, how does it come? Poor education and poor training are often blamed, as are inadequate tools. Especially with computerization, it's increasingly evident that outdated, irrelevant or cumbersome tools can lower performance by adding an irrelevant burden to users. 

We should keep in mind that people are fallible, that even with the best of preparation and organization they may still fail. So, in addition to them, they should be given the right tools for the job: tools that prevent or correct their mistakes, that nudge them towards the right procedures and steps, that add to their capacities and increase their understanding and appreciation of what they are doing. We shouldn't blame them for struggling to perform with tools that don't meet these standards, just understand what their problems are and solve them at source. Yes, we still need to change the world: we've been saying for a long time but have yet to start doing it in earnest. 

Confusion and obfuscation

Confusion and obfuscation 

Back in March (https://alexanderkoutamanis.blogspot.com/2020/03/social-distancing-and-design.html) I was wandering what will come out of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of both spatial design and human behaviour. The conclusion so far is that we've learned little and solved even less. To the disinterested observer our ongoing confusion must be quite amusing and educational. Every day in every medium some expert or inexpert has something to say. On the one hand, the media are to blame. They need to fill their time and space, so they invite opinions and discussions that have little point. Politicians join in, too, in vain attempts to seem in control. On the other hand, many people are unsurprisingly behaving as if the pandemic is over or trivial. It's very difficult to change our ways. 

However, what worries me most is the behaviour of scientists. I'm not talking about all those rushing to produce vaccines or other medicines but about the rest, who deal with subjects from the design and operation of the physical environment to the collection and analysis of data about human interaction. Regrettably most of them seem to be interested in easy successes, things that will support their careers and funding with little real impact. All they need is clients willing to listen to their claims. 

My hope is that the few who try to approach the problems in a comprehensive way will be able to describe and explain what's happening in a clear way that takes into account the complexity of both the infection patterns and the human-environment interactions within which they take place. Otherwise, we'll dwell in confusion and half measures. We'll insist on social distancing but when this affects major interests, we'll wear face protection. Politicians appear to be unwilling to put some pressure on airline or other public transport operators (after all, they're often effectively still state-owned) to improve their facilities. Ventilation in workplaces has often been deemed inadequate, e.g. in schools, so what can be done now that it is promoted from irritation to health hazard? Our lives and environments are confused and confusing, a mixture of unchallenged assumptions and fixated structures from a number of centuries. It's admittedly not easy to untangle them, even under pressure from a new threat. We've been negligent for a long time, preferring to focus on just a few issues, such as the availability and value of housing, at the cost of  overall performance. It's not just Covid-19, it's also the soaring temperatures of each summer that show how inadequate the energetic design of most Dutch buildings is. And I'm not referring to building stock from previous centuries; even recent housing can be grossly inadequate. 

Yes, we can wear face protection and fill every room or vehicle with transparent screens or fit air conditioning units to every building but that wouldn't resolve our fundamental problems; it would just displace attention and add to the complexity of real solutions. First and foremost we need to try to fully describe and understand what is happening, including every aspect and relation, however irritatingly complex. Instead, however, we are constantly in search of easy, piecemeal magic fixes and to sell them we obfuscate: we fail to mention things we already know because they undermine our assertions. We avoid explaining that the design of most environments we happily use today is inadequate - that it has been inadequate for some time now. Officials, either naively or stubbornly insist that adhering to existing building codes suffices. But as anyone with some experience of classrooms (which includes millions of pupils) knows that they easily get unbearably stuffy and warm. Moreover, anyone with some experience with the application of building codes knows how many exceptions and loopholes there are, even in apparently rigorous specifications. And, of course, if building codes sufficed for the problems we are facing, we wouldn't be erecting screens and placing arrows everywhere. 

So, we fail to acknowledge the inadequacy of what we have been making and the ways we have been making it. At the end, someone we'll claim it's too expensive to change everything so drastically and people will happily go on pushing short-term and partial fixes, which will cost our societies much more than a fresh start. As usually, most of us will buy it - and not always reluctantly. Even under these exceptional circumstances we desperately try to pretend that life can go on as usually, without taking the time and trouble to look around and try make sense of how changeable life actually is. It's therefore inevitable that we trivialize even the biggest problems and reduce them and infantilize them into individual nonsense, as a recent exchange between survivors of the Second World War and today's youth reveals. That's why the disinterested observer would find us an amusing example of what one shouldn't do.