A brave new world (of concrete)
Dear All,
It’s been far too long since i’ve posted here, in the UK we’ve been emerging from the pandemic back to a sort of normal over the summer, which has led to it’s own busyness. My friends and I are also entirely convinced that a ‘social hangover’ is a thing- far too much stimulation after over a year at home!
I was surprised to see that the national shortage of craftsmen and the dwindling building crafts skills of the nation were picked up this week in the Times, I would like to think Laura Freeman had been interested in my ongoing columns linked to this subject in BD, however I think that is just wishful thinking!
However, as this is clearly(!) a matter of national interest I will pick up where I left off- at the two world wars where the inherited construction knowledge of the country was being decimated in the trenches. Between the wars and after World War Two there begins to be a rise in the commercialisation and commodification of building products. Advances in technology begin to change the way we build, moving away from bespoke individually crafted buildings towards buildings assembled from manufactured building products. There was even a showroom on Oxford Street in London where architects could take their clients to browse for the latest fashions in bricks, roofing boards, paint, tiles and so forth.
This changes the way buildings are specified with architects beginning to name particular products, relying on the stated performance of those products- and less on the knowledge of the builder. It begins to be seen as old fashioned to use a master craftsperson who knows the material and can craft it to suit the particular constraints of the project. We begin to celebrate the builder who assembles building products to typical details at greater speed (this is of course a vast over simplification but you get the idea).
Buildings continue to get more complex, projects get bigger, regulations, by-laws and planning constraints grow almost exponentially. The re-building efforts after WWII called for ‘new’ techniques and styles, after two world wars the modern, the new, the anything-but-what-we-have-just-been-through, began to be sought, we started to build a brave new world of concrete skyscrapers pushing modern construction methods to the limits of their development and technological capacity… not only had we lost a lot of the knowledge of traditional building techniques, we were losing the appetite for them. Energy was cheap, we didn’t need to design for climate- we could overcome it with air conditioning. Buildings didn’t need to move or breathe we could wrestle them into our control with steel reinforced concrete. Why build a building in the way our grandparents did? We didn’t want the life and the thinking that had led to two world wars. We wanted something new, the hope of peace, of something better than the hell we had just faced. It was understandable but we’re all now living with the long term cost of those decisions.
The increasing complexity of these projects and the speed of construction led to further changes- notably to the way buildings were procured in the UK. In the past traditional or management procurement routes were most common- whereby there was a close contractual relationship between the client, the architect and the builder. These routes give less cost and time certainty but give the client greater control over the construction process to oversee quality.
With the increasing scale of construction projects clients were less likely to be private individuals or committees of interested or invested individuals from the local community and more likely to be local authorities or real estate investment companies.
In and of themselves governmental or commercial authorities do not contribute to declines in craftsmanship but these more professional clients are less invested emotionally in projects, and often do not have a long term or personal interest in them. For these commercial clients time and cost become increasingly important factors when working within expected return margins or government funding cycles.
However, design and build contracting is a saga for another day so I will leave you at this point.
Until next time!
Eleanor