Celebrating Design

The British Council for School Environments has shortlisted two Scottish schools in its ‘Inspiring Design for Schools’ category for 2009: Hazelwood School, Glasgow and Dalry Primary School, North Ayrshire. The BCSE identifies these schools as ‘a gold standard reference point’.

What does this mean? It means that Scotland is designing some great schools – by anybody’s standards. It means that the bar has already been raised for all of us: that we have internationally important buildings on our own doorstep. It means we should not be embarrassed to celebrate great architecture . . even when it’s our own.

The BCSE are conducting a ‘Great Enquiry’ about what makes great schools. What we do and how we do it is always a matter for debate. What is already clear however is the answer to the question who makes great schools. The only possible answer for all of us engaged in school design must be . . . we do.

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Scarce Resources

One definition of Economics is the allocation of scarce resources.  This is where Design and Economics interact – how we make choices about how we use what we have to get what we want.

There will always be a lively debate about how much to spend on design rather than on other things.  Making those choices is what democracy is for.  What design is for is to make the best use of whatever resources we have for the best outcomes. Good design delivers exceptional solutions in the face of extraordinary constraints. Every single building you see around you had the potential to deliver this.  Every brief contains the seeds of extraordinary architecture.

And every building ever built is a result of passion engaging with compromise.  That’s democracy.  That’s life. That’s how great design happens in the real world.

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Clear as Mud

Wembley Stadium cost around £750m. The brief for a building this large and complex must have been formidable. However at its heart was a non-negotiable – provide a grass pitch suitable for playing football.

During the 1980s I ran a UK Government study on the use of school playing fields. The focus of the analysis was about the utilisation of pitches in terms of number of hours usage a week by numbers of pupils. In seeking best practice I discovered a school in the West of Scotland with the best utilisation rates in the UK. So I contacted the person responsible to arrange a fact finding visit. My first question was – how did he maintain the quality of the grass pitches given the high levels of use. Grass, he said, what grass – it’s just mud most of the year.

I suspect that somewhere in the Wembley stadium brief, as there was in my study, there are a whole lot of very focused SMART objectives – apart from . . .

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Measure for Measure

Why is it the most important criteria for a building always seem the hardest to measure? The apparent choice: specifying that which can be measured versus well meant prose hoping for poetic results.

Einstein said something along the lines of ‘things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler’. Perhaps some qualities are just not susceptible to being reduced to a number.

However, 20 years of writing design briefs has convinced me that everything can indeed be meaningfully described in one of three ways: by numbers, by ranking, or by similarity. The ‘generous’ space I want might actually mean 102.5 sqm, or just bigger than my current space, or a lot like some other space I can show you. The degrees of freedom offered to the designer is radically affected by which one we choose to best describe what we want.
A better brief is not one with more numbers, rather it is one with just the right numbers.

By taking a more measured approach to measurement we can choose not to be afraid to aspire to complex, poetic outcomes.

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Talking Iconic

It seems every new building these days is required to be ‘iconic’. We probably don’t mean sacred, or worthy of veneration. We probably mean architecture that is designed to be really good and very significant. Good as in reflecting the best we can do; and significant as in making places that people want to be – places that matter.

We should heed the proverbial warning be careful what you wish for when we use terms like iconic or ‘world class’. If we need to use inverted commas then we probably don’t mean it.

But sometimes we mean what we say. The Oratorio at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Kilmarnock is an example of a space that is both well designed and sacred. It is a significant new building with true civic presence and an authentic iconic feature at its heart.

History teaches us that design becomes iconic when it truly reflects both the values of its time and yet remains relevant today. Well designed schools that work well for the communities they nurture: now that seems like a worthwhile redefinition of iconic.

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