Urban hits and myths

Our buildings, like our clothes, send out powerful messages to others about our values, our ambitions, our success, and our wealth or lack of it. It's no wonder image-conscious media companies have forsaken Fleet Street and flocked to Canary Wharf. Yet too few organisations seem to understand this.

The last 25 years have in many ways been a period of great achievement for housing associations - and several hundred thousand households now have a decent home and a roof over their head. But what legacy are we leaving in the built environment?

While there are some extremely good housing association refurbishment and new developments, there is also a great deal of unexciting and frankly rather indifferent development. I think too often an opportunity has been missed to make a major impact on improving the environment of our towns and cities through this massive investment in the urban fabric.

At Peabody, we've learnt that we can use our buildings to say positive things about us as an organisation but also about the people who live within them. Society today often seems to be embarrassed that while most of us are well off we still have a substantial impoverished minority, the socially excluded in current day parlance. Today we seek to eliminate this embarrassing visibility of the poor by advocating that their homes should be indistinguishable from those the volume housebuilders are putting up for owner occupation. Out of sight is out of mind. I for one am uneasy about this attitude, not least because volume housebuilders are not concerned with long-term fitness for purpose and economic cost in use. Kerb appeal is what matters in the war to keep shareholders happy.

However this is difficult territory. Libby Purvis quotes Lord Reith's working rule for the BBC as "to offer the public something better than it thinks it likes". I like that point of view and nowhere I believe is it more important than in creating new buildings in particular those for the poor and disenfranchised.

As a client for a new housing scheme one needs to distinguish between the interests of immediate occupants and future generations of occupants. The same goes for those who live and work in the streets around. As a housing charity, there is also the long-term interest in our asset base on which our very substantial borrowings are secured. I believe we need to think more about the long term and less about the short term. Cost in use, and the appreciation and delight of future generations is an important consideration, in contrast with the often fickle and fashion-led tastes of current society.

This is not easy and it is not necessarily popular. I have recently been congratulated, or perhaps that should be castigated, by the chief executive of a leading regeneration society for putting up the three most disliked modern buildings in Hackney, (Dalston Lane, Murray Grove and Newington Green). While I am inclined to take comfort in the original unpopularity of such well-known landmarks as St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Palace and Tower Bridge, if I mention this I am usually told I suffer from delusions of grandeur. However I do believe that clients have a responsibility to confront these issues and especially in areas which need regeneration. Regeneration implies a new beginning, looking forward not backwards, and therefore need adventurous, youthful, contemporary architecture, not repro building styles and an over-emphasis on reusing existing buildings.

Which brings me on to an underlying tension between the important proposals put forward by Rogers in his Urban Task Force Report and Egan in his report Rethinking Construction. Rogers sees urban regeneration achieved through design-led construction projects, large and small. The emphasis is on bespoke solutions to deliver an ambitious vision with utopian overtones. Egan suggests that better buildings are those which are built faster, more safely, with fewer defects and more cheaply. Some contractors have interpreted this latter agenda as endorsing their view that the design process - and the architect - should be subservient to their overall project management. However, it is hard to see how this model will deliver Rogers' vision.

I applaud Egan's emphasis on innovation instead of conventional and established ways of doing things and the stress on building quality and involving people. However, I am concerned that in this brave new world there seems to be more emphasis on the processes than the product. Perhaps this was inevitable as the organisations, particularly the Housing Forum set up to deliver his vision, are producer-, by which I mean contractor and housebuilder rather than designer-, by which I mean architect and engineer dominated. I for one find it difficult to conceptualise innovation in construction as being a design-free thing. For me design and innovation should be one and the same.

I am worried that designers seem to be loosing influence in the new partnering arrangements. I am also concerned that some people feel that implicit in partnering is a sense that all the parties are equal and sharing equally the risks. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I don't buy this concept. While I am emphatically positive about close and collaborative working, at the end of the day I am the client, I carry the can, and I am buying a service from consultants and contractors. The product is more important than the process. Over attention to the latter means that not enough thought is going into the legacy which we will leave behind us.

From our experience of volumetric prefabrication, I feel the most vulnerable player in the new world may be the main contractor. We have learnt that building indoors in a factory on a production line does reduce your on-site risks. Production lines impose their own discipline on supply chains and reduce dependency on traditional building trades. This could open the way for the emergence of dynamic new partnerships between architects and manufacturers with the designers acting as the interface between client/developer, and then external environment, while the manufacturer provides the project management. Architects would have to develop new skills such as public relations, media communications, political lobbying, public consultation, financial modelling, costing their own designs and design research. Only once all these have been mastered, and a share of the risk accepted, would the reward of designing the building be earned, and with it the right to exert the dominant influence over the form and aesthetics of the building.

To conclude, I believe that building is a development process and it should be design led; that design is about creating value; and that high value leads to a lasting legacy. When we identify a site which we want to buy and develop we reach for our architect to help us explore how we can maximise its potential and minimise any drawbacks it may have. We expect them to bring their knowledge of construction insofar as it is relevant at this stage, but we do not need to appoint a contractor to tell us how to build it before we have decided what we want to build. I know this sounds simplistic but it is about the difference between real property development and mere building. The design process at its best extracts the full potential out of a site and adds both real and intangible values as well.

This crucial dimension to development has been admirably highlighted by the Urban Task Force. It is worth reflecting that nobody has a bigger stake in the success of the urban renaissance than the poor. They are already over-represented in areas of lowest environmental quality and have the least choice in terms of moving to more attractive neighbourhoods. Creating new social or affordable housing is only part of the process. Just as important is creating neighbourhoods in which they would wish to live, and where they will find opportunities for employment and engagement with the good things of life. Improving our neighbourhoods is not a matter which I believe can easily be achieved by simply placing standard products there. They do need a bespoke, development led, approach, but using factory based construction technologies. Yes the pre-contract period may take longer, but it should cost no more if it exploits standardised construction processes. In the long run the recipe for success is to work on the basis that only the best will be the cheapest over time.