Architectural ambition and design by attrition

Many judge design quality on personal taste or whether it conforms to a favourite theory. I believe it is possible and important to judge quality more dispassionately.

So, if it doesn’t fit your theory, on what can you base your judgment?

First, you need to get past the brief. If it’s a tower block in a historic village or an abattoir in a housing estate, good architecture won’t change that.

After an acceptable brief, dealing with the site, answering the function, working within the budget, getting the details right, what’s left?

How well the architectural ambition or the designers’ vision has been achieved.

It’s what’s driven the design to be a piece of architecture, rather than just a building doing a job. To make the judgement, you have to find it out. Sometimes it’s clearly stated. Sometimes you need to ask.

You may agree or disagree with it, but it is possible to see if it’s been achieved successfully. And this is the key criterion beyond style, theory or taste.

All architecture and urbanism has to work within constraints, but this doesn’t stop the design team having a vision

Sometimes, you need to know a bit more about the nature of the ambition to judge its success. This may need some expertise.

It is, however, surprising how often designers can’t tell you what heights they were trying to scale.

Sometimes buildings seem to be designed on autopilot.

Function is knocked into some sort of order or shape. This is clad in a fashionable skin: London brick-vernacular, local-character vernacular, show-off-sustainable, glass-wall-modern, classical-with-columns.

This can be enough to be passable and is occasionally good, but most of the time will be short of the mark. It’s unlikely to make the grade on quality. There needs to be that something else: some kind of ambition or narrative.

Even where there is, our convoluted planning system doesn’t encourage it, and worse still, when you have one, makes it very hard to hold onto it.

Before anything is designed, lots of organisations have something to say and a lot of regulations apply. To get anything through the system, you must stick to the ever-growing list of regulations and you’d better go along with all the other organisations for an easy life.

The temptation is simply to fill in the gaps between these constraints. This is ‘design by constraint’. It’s very common in urban design. The constraints diagram is often the design. Fill in the spaces left with coloured blobs and arrows and then call it a ‘village’.

We need clarity up front in the planning system to encourage designers to reach a vision in the knowledge that their ambitions won’t be thwarted at every turn

All architecture and urbanism has to work within constraints, but this doesn’t stop the design team having a vision, ambition or narrative that will hold the design together through the thick and thin of the process.

And it will be very hard to hold onto it.

Designs have to be paraded in front of lots of people and organisations that all want their say: planning officers, conservation officers, design reviews. Then there’s the civic societies, the parish and town councils, statutory consultees, specialist interest groups and so on.

Everyone will have an opinion just because they’re asked. Committee members will be sure to have their say, some only to show they’ve been there. Some will disagree based on their chosen design theory. Some will think they could have done it better. Often, the power of the organisation is used to pursue personal agendas.

Responsible reviews can be helpful, but often the designer is just expected to change things regardless of how half-baked the comments might be – just to get it through. Any design vision suffers death by a thousand cuts.

This is depressingly common; it is ‘design by attrition’. Experience it too often and the temptation is to stick to ‘design by constraints’, go onto autopilot, let the critics chip away at it and claim consensus.

We need clarity up front in the planning system to encourage designers to reach a vision in the knowledge that their ambitions won’t be thwarted at every turn. We may not get it every time but, to achieve the design quality we all seek, regardless of style or type, we need designers to have ambition, vision and a narrative for their design and, above all, allow them to hold onto them.

> Also read: The new NPPF will help at the margins but does little to reform our planning system

> Also read: Planning more clearly is the way to delegate decision-making