Abstract
Creativity was given great value in our family. As youngsters we used to literally scoff at those paintings done by friends who presented their colour-by-numbers efforts or join-the-dots drawings with great pride. Somehow, within the scraggly ill-formed lines that we had rendered there seemed to lurk some kind of truth, and in theirs, deceit, artifice and laziness.
In some ways the excellently researched Architectural Design and Regulation is about this tension between unfettered creativity and a more predictable world prescribed and circumscribed by a system of join-the-dots and colour-by-numbers regulation. You might notice the lack of an ‘s’ there at the end of the word ‘regulation’ (and in the book title), and indeed, my initial apprehension of the book was that it was focused on examining the interaction between architectural design and building regulations. But the book has a different ambition clearly articulated in the three parts of the book ‘The Context of Regulation’, ‘The Practices of Regulation’ and ‘The Scope of Regulation’. For all intents and purposes the first part engages with the idea of building regulations – their ideological underpinnings and their historical usefulness in urban environments. Imrie and Street provide a comprehensive and clear description of the role of regulation and codes in shaping the urban environment. More importantly here they also engage with what they term as the ‘rise of the (de)regulatory society’, particularly in the UK where there is a shift from ‘prescriptive to performance-based systems of control to facilitate greater freedoms’ (p. 71). Later parts of the book make use of extensive surveys, interviews and ethnographic work to chart the ambivalent engagement that architects have with this double bind of inflated managerialism, auditing and accounting needed to curtail the risks brought through (de)regulation and integrate the input from specialists who emerge out of expanding performance-based controls. Architects simply cannot cover the expertise demanded by what Imrie and Street call ‘risky objects’ (buildings) in an increasingly litigious but ‘freer’ society – the impact of specialist consultants and subcontractor experts on design work is marked. In a later chapter the book also provides fascinating (terrifying?) accounts of the rise of Design Code development in the UK where the ‘look and feel’ of a precinct or project is largely predetermined in a colour-by-numbers world where the architect chooses the colours. It is a return of Modernism’s orchestration of architecture as social engineering; beautiful environments will make beautiful people – in the right mould of regionalism and vernacular. Unfortunately, by sticking with the experience of architects in this shift in regulation from health and safety to that of aesthetic control, the authors miss a trick possibly linking this prescriptive regionalism to the re-emergence of an Englishness-fed nationalism.
As Jeremy Till notes on the jacket cover, Imrie and Street, as geographers, are ‘outsiders’ to the discipline of architecture. At times this outsider nature produces some inappropriate terms; ‘urban design’ is understood in the architectural world as the design of urban precincts by an urban designer, but here it reads as ‘the design of urban buildings’. More happily, Imrie and Street deploy the phrase ‘form and performance’ throughout the book which is a brilliant extension of the rather limited ‘form and function’ of architects’ parlance –‘form and performance’ seems to describe so much of the complexities of buildings and their design. More importantly, the book is cogent and compelling when it theorises the relationship of design and regulation of the urban environment to culture and power through the likes of Bourdieu and Foucault. Indeed, I expected more of the idea that ‘Regulation is, ultimately, part of a broader system of social and moral governance that seeks to (re)produce places consistent with normative considerations of what the good city is, or ought to be’ (p. 284), as I imagine they did until their research shifted (p. 17) to bring their extensive research on the perspectives of architects to bear on the topic.
It is this shift that has taken part of the book down an unproductive and unnecessary polemical tack. Imrie and Street have, in my opinion, been overly entranced by Habraken’s Children of Palladio. Their book seems, in essence, to set up architects as the straw man of heroic form giver, visionary and uncompromising egomaniac that is best found and laughed at (in my experience) when watching The Fountainhead. This characterisation of architects as artistic visionaries (Preface, pp. 8–16, p. 19, p. 228 and p. 278) seems wholly misplaced – indeed as much of their field work and interviews with architects confirms (‘While the representation of the architect as ‘heroic form giver’ persists in much analysis and writing, most of our respondents did not easily relate to it.’ p. 281) – architects are more than ready to work through complex and contradictory demands. They are quite right to state that the architectural profession has ‘never been “autonomous” or operated independently of project contexts, including the actions of a diversity of actors, and their values, that are part of the field of design and development activities’ (p. 228). Architects know that design is essentially the art of compromise; gravity has the habit of bringing lofty ideas down to earth. However, the process of design is in essence the articulation of an idea (by interpreting the brief and the context) and then the charting of a course that arrives at that idea, which, in all its complexity, is the building. To extend the sailing metaphor, winds and waves of regulations, risk aversion, budget cuts, specialist contractors and design build contracts buffet this craft which responds to these forces, anticipating them and taking them onboard, while the architect tries to hold steady in the turmoil by getting everyone to lean in the right direction – or, change tack and even change the destination. I realise that there is a certain drama, a certain heroism, in my description and Imrie and Street are right in saying ‘…“creativity” is not the preserve of any one individual, or reducible to singular acts of genius, but is part of co-constituted relationships …’ (p. 101) brought about through the consultative process of the realisation from architectural idea to building. But the key is that the architect is still the person (not singular, but the team of architects) who holds that idea together and can articulate and recognise when that idea has been compromised to the point of detriment.
In the chapter ‘Learning about Regulation’ Imrie and Street point to the pedagogy of the design studio as being the source of the ongoing problematic distinction between ‘architecture’ and ‘building’ and the perceived autonomy of the architect as artist. They make a good case for building regulation and other decentring of architectural vision entering students’ learning where the ‘messy realities of the field can be conveyed to future practitioners’. In my experience students are introduced to these aspects and grapple with them to varying degrees at different universities. Yet architectural design is such an arcane discipline that simply understanding and then being able to articulate and enact what a good design idea is seems to require extensive iteration, engagement and educational duration. The same can be said about understanding and articulating architectural ‘space’– arguably the real ambition of architects rather than ‘form’ or ‘beauty’ that the authors give an overdetermining power in architectural learning and practice (p. 247). In my mind it seems correct that ‘… architects’ education continues to be dominated by the studio culture, or a form of instruction premised on the understanding that architects are central to the design process’ (p. 20) because this is where design idea learning happens – even if students subsequently battle to make the transition into being part of a team that delivers buildings. Or, add another two years to the five year professional degree and graduates will be primed with disciplinary fundamentals and the abilities to meet the demands of the regulatory and regulating society.
One can’t help think that the ‘regulation’ part of the title of the book (the missing ‘s’) is really about the regulation of architects’ excesses, to curtail their role as ‘visionaries’, which the authors consider to be irrelevant and outdated. Imrie and Street’s own vision for the architect seems for them to become project managers (p. 281) which is an ironic turn when one realises that architects always were project managers until that role was replaced by, well, project managers. Within Imrie and Street’s vision, architects – as project managers without an overarching design idea – can only act as a middle-man in a shuttle diplomacy between a range of competing demands without any overarching idea to guide assigning relative value. The result: a colour-by-numbers without any shape or form, randomly cobbled together in a reactive process.