Abstract
The astounding success of UK professionals in the three decades after the Second World War inevitably led to a backlash and political recrimination in the economic turmoil of the mid-1970s. The subsequent rise of free-market economics and the deskilling of the demand side in construction weakened building professionals and left them vulnerable to undermining their responsibility, and assimilation into the supply side. Yet the concept of public good embodied in professional principles of trust and mediation between demand and supply not only endures and remains socially valuable, but also is now urgently required to address the challenges of sustainability. It is argued that construction professionals need to place more emphasis on the public good by creating and sharing an open-ended, disinterested, interdisciplinary body of knowledge about buildings and their use. If the broader challenge for society is to reconnect markets and morals, for young building professionals it is to convert their intellectual capital into economic capital within a relentlessly neo-classical economic environment. Different approaches are suggested that are realistic yet that avoid suggesting a return to the mythical golden age of 1945–1970.
L'incroyable succès des professionnels britanniques dans les trois décennies suivant la Deuxième guerre mondiale a inévitablement entraîné une réaction en retour et des récriminations politiques lors des turbulences économiques du milieu des années 1970. L'essor subséquent de l'économie de marché et la déqualification de la demande dans le bâtiment ont affaibli les professionnels du bâtiment et les ont rendu vulnérables à une remise en cause de leurs responsabilités, et à leur assimilation par l'offre. Cependant, non seulement le concept de bien public qui s'incarne dans les principes professionnels de confiance et de médiation entre la demande et l'offre perdure et demeure socialement précieux, mais il est à présent d'une urgente nécessité pour faire face aux défis de la durabilité. Il est soutenu qu'il est nécessaire que les professionnels du bâtiment mettent davantage l'accent sur le bien public en créant et en partageant un corpus de connaissances interdisciplinaire, désintéressé et ouvert concernant les bâtiments et leur usage. Si le défi qui se pose plus largement à la société est de rétablir le lien entre marchés et morale, pour les jeunes professionnels du bâtiment il est de convertir leur capital intellectuel en capital économique dans le cadre d'un environnement économique implacablement néoclassique. Il est suggéré différentes approches qui sont réalistes, mais qui évitent néanmoins de proposer un retour à l'âge d'or mythique de 1945–1970.
Mots clés: architectes, éthique, connaissances professionnelles, professionnalisme, intérêt public, responsabilité, spécialisation
It's a time to rethink the role of markets in achieving the public good. There's now a widespread sense that markets have become detached from fundamental values … that we need to reconnect markets and values.
The rise in the fortunes of the professions in the first half of the 20th century was astonishing. What Harold Perkin in The Rise of Professional Society, England Since 1880 (1989) calls ‘class society’ transformed awkwardly into ‘corporate society’ wherein professional elites eclipsed and eventually smothered the industrial spirit according to declinist accounts, led by Martin Wiener in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (1981).
After the Second World War the Welfare State elevated constructional professionals to a plateau of power and influence that they enjoyed for 30 years, and that inevitably led to a backlash, triggered by violent shifts in economic circumstances that professionals failed to anticipate. The subsequent entrenchment of neo-classical free-market economics, particularly in Britain and America, presents professionals today with novel challenges that demand novel solutions.
The context
A special issue of Architectural Review from April 1943Footnote2 on an exhibition about post-war re-planning in the UK gives an insight into how the architectural profession then viewed its roles and responsibilities. Seventy years later, what strikes the reader is:
| • | the generosity of the production given wartime scarcities | ||||
| • | the boldness of the editors in addressing major national planning and infrastructure issues when the outcome of the Second World War was still uncertain | ||||
| • | the excellent graphic quality and confidence of advertising material from all parts of the construction industry | ||||
It is difficult to imagine today any such claims being made on such a scale and with great confidence, coherence and style – nor with such a mutually supportive relationship between architects and the construction industry.
From the late 1940s a growing proportion of the British architectural profession was directly employed by central and local government, rising to over 50% by the early 1970s.Footnote3 Today the profession retains little, if any, influence on any department of government. No longer do government ministers lunch routinely at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), nor would the RIBA chief executive brief new presidents to regard themselves as holding a rank equivalent to a minister and to behave accordingly.Footnote4
The disruption of global markets in the early 1970s, dramatic inflation and uncertainty about resources fuelled the revival of a free-market ideology that was deeply hostile to all monopolies. Since then, architects have had to come to terms with the reality that not just the architectural profession but also the whole concept of professionalism is under threat. All professions are now disparaged, and come to be seen as creators of problems and generators of negative consequences,Footnote5 even the ‘scientific community’ that was perceived as vital in the Second World War.
The idea of the architectural profession – and the reality
Where and when did the notion originate that professions deserve a special status? For architecture, the genesis is well documented. Sir John Soane, one of the founders of the modern profession in the UK, wrote in 1788 that the architect is:
to be the intermediate agent between the employer, whose honour and interest he is to study and the mechanic whose rights he is to defend.Footnote6
As the British architectural profession developed through the 19th and 20th centuries, it arguably failed to take proper advantage of Soane's idealistic strategic insight. Architects in general have:
| • | focused on the delivery of individual projects | ||||
| • | not amassed a body of shared knowledge based on the ever accumulating experience of designing many types of buildings | ||||
| • | failed to speak out strongly enough for the interests of clients and users of buildings | ||||
| • | not created an adequate body of professional knowledge based on researching, testing and articulating clients' requirements | ||||
| • | neglected to take advantage of what should have been (and still could be) the profession's principal source of power – the systematic, measurement of the performance of buildings and classes of buildings over time. | ||||
In the context of sustainability, the failure of government, the design professions and the construction industry to relate client aspirations to building performance over time is risking future vulnerability, not just of individual buildings, but of the wider building stock and the environment as a whole.
The strength and weakness of the professional ideal
Extrapolating Soane's crucial insight to today's world, the role of design professions should be to mediate between the forces of demand and supply, facilitating the exercise of fair judgement and trust by both sides and helping clients achieve desired outcomes in the context of a recognized body of knowledge about what buildings can and cannot be expected to deliver within a range of changing circumstances.
Professional structures are neither carved out of stone nor cast in bronze. One could claim that when Soane used the term ‘architect’ he was anticipating what is now called ‘the design team’, i.e. the inclusion of many specialized professions responsible for such matters as structural engineering, environmental design and cost estimating. By extrapolating his argument still further, this would now have also to incorporate the mastery of skills related to how buildings are best used over time, or what is now called facilities management.
Most societies' expectations surrounding the value and significance of the built environment are also malleable and changing. In the aftermath of war or other extreme events the construction industry is called upon to execute more than the provision of basic shelter and services. The act of building and rebuilding is closely bound to how society frames its own values and re-establishes itself. For example, in the post-war period, British architects were executing two parallel, and at the time essential, programmes: reconstituting a war-damaged urban fabric and constructing new schools, universities, hospitals and housing. It is no exaggeration to say that architects saw themselves as responsible for creating the built fabric of how society was reinventing itself, in this case as the Welfare State. And both government and civil society initially welcomed this new era and its manifestation in built form.
The centralized direction of research by government departments into the design of educational buildings, hospitals, health facilities and housing from the 1940s until the early 1970s was by no means unsuccessful, though constrained by the stringent economic conditions of the time. The best of the period provides precedents from which much may be learned, not least by providing evidence of operational and financial feedback linking supply and demand. In the 1950s and 1960s, the utility of feedback was taken for granted by at least some architects, government departments and local authorities in providing design guidance and case studies, especially given generally high standards of professional journalism, certainly in comparison with today's more news oriented publications. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that even in this period of ‘progressive’ improvement in the processes of design and construction, the result was a high proportion of dull outcomes; a general poverty of material expression, a lack of distinctive aesthetic and a tendency to rapid deterioration. These attributes were in fact as much the result of post-war material poverty as they were manifestations of architects' disregard for mere design, but they were noticed by astute critics, like Reyner Banham.Footnote7
Historian Andrew Saint calls this period ‘Social Architecture’Footnote8 in which both science and art were recruited into the service of the Public Estate, itself a manifestation of the aspirations towards social good of many gifted and genuinely idealistic planners, architects, engineers and quantity surveyors; as well as their predominantly governmental clients.
This secure setting made possible a great deal of painstakingFootnote9 and highly relevant design research. However, the same security may also have fostered complacency, inefficiency and over-manning, and left many building design professionals badly prepared for what in hindsight can be seen as an inevitable backlash as the UK as a whole began by the early 1970s to adopt more conventionally commercial and competitive criteria.
The professions' diminishing role in construction
Disruption of global markets, also in the early 1970s, caused by the rising cost of oil, resulted in disillusionment with a professionalized delivery system, seen as both costly and not given to self-criticism. By the late 1970s, inflation and uncertainty about resources had revived free market ideologies, strongly antagonistic to a professional ethos, which was seen as monopolistic and self-serving. Other professions (teachers, the scientific community and even health practitioners) also came under attack because traditional professional standards and processes were seen as barriers to so-called ‘efficient’ delivery. Only the legal profession, which had learned long ago how to stand above the fray, escaped such critical attention.
The ‘rolling back of the state’ that gathered pace in the UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s included divestment of a huge body of publicly owned and delivered intellectual and professional capital related to design, construction and management of buildings. Responsibilities were transferred, diluted or lost as quickly as physical properties were sold to the private sector. The procurement skills of clients were dismantled as previously responsible government departments enthusiastically deskilled themselves. Private design and consultancy practices were invited to compete for public work on the basis of price rather than experience or qualifications. Such ‘rationalization’ of procurement processes became politically popular in the freewheeling and relatively prosperous 1980s and 1990s. The promise was that free market procurement processes would be tested against robust, empirically based criteria. Unfortunately, the criteria actually deployed in this process became increasingly biased towards supply-side considerations, e.g. easy delivery at low cost, unaccompanied by any attempt to measure the longer-term value to taxpayers, clients and end users. In addition, decision-makers preferred to ignore the emerging findings from the limited amount of feedback that was being done.Footnote10
Conditions for successful professionalization
Trust, as the philosopher Onora O'Neill has pointed out,Footnote11 has become usurped in contemporary society by the overriding notion of accountability – the very word implies a loss of trust. In the so-called ‘construction industry’, this has led to prescribed behaviours, sanctions, a culture of suspicion, of complaints procedures, of audits of non-financial as well as financial activities, all of which can distort and even displace professional judgement.
The independence and structuring power that characterize the services of all professions were originally intended to protect the offerings of each professional body – protection of function in the practice of medicine and law and protection of title in the case of architecture in the UK. This is the fundamental reason why the right to control access to training is still guarded so carefully by all professional bodies.
More importantly, independence and structuring power are also intended to ensure that each professional body continues to produce and develop new professional strategies. From this perspective, each such body must be responsible for the cognitive development of its own particular field of activity, with the responsibility to expand, test and develop members’ collective knowledge base as circumstances change and data accumulate.
As the state has been rolled back, architects and related professions bear a heavy responsibility for not having maintained and developed adequate knowledge bases that systematically connect client objectives to built outcomes, based on an open-ended and developing body of knowledge about buildings and their use. Instead, in the world of construction there has been a strong tendency to hand over to suppliers far too much responsibility for exploring and understanding how building design should accommodate clients' developing requirements.
To put this criticism into a wider perspective, building design professions are in danger of failing to meet the three criteria articulated by Ulrich Beck in his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (2007), to define successful, or even acceptable, standards of professional behaviour:
| • | a professional group must access research institutionally, keeping itself open to sources of innovation | ||||
| • | it must determine standards and content of training, thus assuring the transmission of professional norms and standards to the next generation | ||||
| • | most importantly, and least often achieved, it must see that the practical application of the knowledge and trained abilities occurs within professionally controlled organizations | ||||
Redesigning professional structures
Soane's initial proposition was for the professional architect to be an honest broker between rich, potentially rapacious clients and weak, divided and easily bullied craftsmen. Today the situation is reversed. Now it is clients, even that mega-client, the state (now, in some countries, fully deskilled in design and constructional matters) that need protection from the huge, powerful and rapidly globalizing delivery machines that parts of the construction industry have become. These enterprises have even stronger tendencies than the professions to deliver what they like delivering. Typically they demonstrate little spontaneous curiosity about changing client requirements, either now or in a future that spreads out far beyond a constructor's short-term returns.
Over the past 30 years, Beck's three conditions for professionalism have been eroded to a point at which attempts to develop new professional strategies (such as sustainable development) stand little chance of success. The free-market thinking that dominates political discourse in the UK today is surely incompatible with sustainability, a concept that assumes notions of commonweal, public interest and planning for the long-term. It will be an uphill battle for professionals to promote these values in the face of:
| • | commoditization of professional processes, from building information modelling to sustainability assessment systems | ||||
| • | appropriation of intellectual capital by supply-side corporations, be they builders, contractors, consultants, materials producers, information technology providers, or facilities management companies | ||||
| • | concentration of power and expertise in great global corporations: contractors, suppliers and now increasingly consultants | ||||
Over two centuries of existence, architects and other building professions, despite their glorious histories, distinguished presidents and councils, fine libraries, lecture programmes and grand institutional premises have not succeeded in bridging what appears to be an ever-widening gap between developments in society's requirements and the capabilities of standardized building designs. Is it likely that global delivery machines, embracing many skills within predefined packages of services, will be any more capable of anticipating and addressing open-ended and ever-changing client and user requirements? What ‘organisational roof’, to use Beck's term, could possibly be sufficiently wide and robust to comprehend and shelter so many potentially conflicting interests?
The precedents are not encouraging. Formal inter-professional bodies, such as the UK's Construction Industry Council (CIC), were intended to bring professional disciplines, contractors and trades together. Unfortunately, such interdisciplinary bodies tend to be centripetal, rather than outgoing, defensive rather than collaborative. Lacking the voices of external clients and unaware of the silent majority of the mass of building users, discussion quickly becomes introverted. Demarcation disputes, inter-professional rivalries, institutional inertia, geographical isolation and sheer lack of time and opportunity for continuing informal contact make creative collaboration between building professions almost impossible. More importantly, collective attention to the demand side of the big economic equation is minimal.
New approaches
Putting aside the intra-professional differences and institutional inertia that hinder the ability of the supply side in its current form to respond to the demand side, how can the so-called construction industry regain the respect of users and clients? How can it reconnect ‘markets and morals’, to use Michael Sandel's striking expression from his 2009 BBC Reith Lecture quoted above. Two practical initiatives are suggested as positive examples.
The Harvard Business School case study method is a powerful precedent for building up and making accessible for teaching purposes a complex and ever-expanding body of knowledge related to professional decision-making. This provides carefully structured and strictly monitored accounts of real situations, which are used in teaching and learning. In a building context, the cases would be about the briefing and design process and its effect on outcomes. Such case studies would take into account client aspirations and resources, social and economic contexts, the parties involved, the management of the decision-making process, project delivery, user feedback, and an accurate account of the consequences, financial and otherwise.Footnote12 Open-ended interdisciplinary discussion would allow alternative courses of action to be explored.
What makes the case study approach potentially so powerful is not just that well-documented cases are the essence of the teaching method, but that the accumulated library of cases can provide examples of successful (and instructively problematic) initiatives and experiences that could accelerate learning in many contexts. The exercises and results could inform undergraduate and postgraduate education, continuing professional development, inter-professional debates and, most importantly, practices and project teams addressing real design challenges.
Curiously antique British precedents in the domain of design and building exist in H. B. Cresswell's books from 1929 and 1930: The Honeywood File and The Honeywood Settlement.
Another on-going, and entirely non-fictional, precedent for the accumulation of professional knowledge in the context of practice is ‘The Edge’ – an informal, interdisciplinary group of architects, planners, engineers, surveyors and others established nearly 20 years ago to facilitate inter-professional discussion.Footnote13 The initiative was a direct reaction to the realization, stimulated by exposure to inter-professional politics in the construction and property industries, of the many practical difficulties that stand in the way of establishing continuing, collective, working relationships between professional bodies at the official level.
The official interdisciplinary problems are very different to the actual experience of working on real projects where, especially at the early, conceptual, design stages, effective leadership of an interdisciplinary design team shifts around the meeting room table depending on which discipline happens to be most relevant to the particular matter being discussed – structure, environment, costs, construction, planning, architecture. In practice, no single dominant or controlling voice is necessary: in fact, very much the opposite. Such flexibility and willingness to listen and collaborate within a range of disciplines contrasts very strongly with the fractious nature of inter-professional politics at the grand scale.
What has sharpened the desire of Edge members to collaborate, both at an intellectual level and within the context of projects, has been the urgent need, felt by all members, to address the complex and inherently interdisciplinary issues raised by the challenge of sustainability in the face of climate change. These discussions may be regarded as a prototype for collaborative, open-ended, knowledge-based professionalism. Perhaps inevitably they have been exploring the potential for a radical redefinition of professional structures within the wider construction industry as well as practical ways to promote discussion, collaboration and added value.
Choices for architects
In the face of radical challenges in both politics and economics, architects have been remarkably unforthcoming about the roles they might profitably play. To win work, success for architects depends on the value placed on their intellectual capital by various kinds of client, i.e. those who wish to build. Two principal approaches can be seen to give clients confidence: Imagination and Mastery. Imagination is the ability to simulate new kinds of reality through mental images whist promising an effective outcome based on a legacy of previous work. Mastery tends to be related to a particular building type – e.g. offices or schools – and depends on a study of precedents and anticipation of emerging client requirements, both of which can help to reduce uncertainty.
The modern world deserves new kinds of professionalism to broker effectively between clients, industry and the wider world and that can respond to increasingly diverse demands. A monolithic vision based on the glory days from 1945 to 1970 is no longer relevant. Nevertheless there are lessons to be learnt.
From an architectural perspective, and particularly for new entrants to the profession, there appear to be three main ways of responding to the present situation:
| • | Approach A: Architects should embrace the role of glamorous shape-makers. The objective should be to astonish clients with audacious aesthetics. Their work should be unique, precious and exclusive – but visible enough to win awards. They must challenge the supply side to achieve technical marvels. They must be fashion leaders and trend setters. | ||||
| • | Approach B: Architects surrender to the domination of the field by free-market forces, becoming servants to commercial entities. The mission will be to promote supply-side solutions, by being model users of products and materials. Their highest achievement will be to contribute to the ‘look’ of new products by major producers – cladding, finishes, colour ranges, textures – and, if possible, the latest styles for schools, housing and offices. | ||||
| • | Approach C: Collaborating together with other professionals, architects could learn from the precedent of the best, most idealistic and most practical aspects of the 1945–1970 model of professional action for the public good. They would use science to improve the quality of designs through the measurement of results, including those that are less than successful. They could win work from the inherently monopolistic, all-in model of services of Approach B by demonstrably producing better buildings. They would create a more transparent market through better arguments, by rigorous testing and by demonstrating the competitive quality of their processes and their output. A superior knowledge base would be derived from never being afraid of admitting ‘We got it wrong.’ | ||||
Conclusions
For young professionals now embarking on a career, there are formidable obstacles to increasing the value to society of their gifts and their intellectual capital.Footnote14 Professionalism has been the main way of institutionalizing expertise in industrial societies. Such societies have generally positioned expertise in people rather than in things or rules.Footnote15 Professionalism survives today for three reasons:
| • | market-based occupational structure favours employment based on personally held resources, whether of knowledge or wealth | ||||
| • | all kinds of knowledge can be organized as common resources for a body of individuals – design for architects, building for engineers, etc. | ||||
| • | professionalism has not yet been completely overwhelmed by competing forms of institutionalization, mainly commodification and organization | ||||
For an individual professional person to escape absorption by the ‘organizational machine’, and to succeed in making original contributions that affect the nature of demand, are already difficult and becoming harder. At a minimum, practical approaches to making a professional mark and to solving the problems addressed in this paper must:
| • | cross the boundary between supply and demand | ||||
| • | be accessible across interdisciplinary barriers | ||||
| • | be expressed in a language that all parties can understand | ||||
| • | be based on real, well-researched case studies | ||||
| • | address ethical as well as commercial issues | ||||
| • | bring short-term as well as cumulative long-term benefits to all involved | ||||
| • | provide case study solutions in a cumulative and open-ended way | ||||
| • | provide the foundations for a new body of professional knowledge | ||||
Notes
The Reith Lectures are a series of annual lectures commissioned and broadcast by the BBC. Michael Sandel delivered the 2009 series entitled ‘A New Citizenship’. Lecture 4, ‘Markets and Morals’, is quoted here (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kt7rg).
One of a series of wartime special issues of the Architectural Review edited by Cronin de Hastings, John Betjeman, Nikolaus Pevsner, Osbert Lancaster and J. M. Richards.
Specialist architectural divisions were embedded within ministries including Health and Education. The UK Ministry of Public Building and Works was a globally recognized centre of research and development employing hundreds of architects and engineers.
The personal experience of the author (F. D.) as a Past President of RIBA, and also Past President of the Architects Council of Europe.
Attacks on professions and professionals were led by iconoclasts such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs and later by Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher who initially inspired politicians to legislate against professional privilege. Later waves attacked government welfare and spending in general leading to the ‘rolling back of the State’; Harold Perkin (1989) The Rise of Professional Society, England Since 1880, Routledge, London, esp. ch. 10, ‘The Backlash Against Professional Society’.
Soane's preface to his 1788–89 Plans, Elevations and Sections of Buildings sets out the responsibilities of the architect. Quoted in Gillian Darley (1999) John Soane; An Accidental Romantic, Yale, London, p. 89.
For example, Reyner Banham (1962) Ill-met by clip-joint. Architectural Review, May, 349–352.
Andrew Saint (1987) Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School Building in Post-War England, Yale, London.
Perkin (1989), ch. 10.
For example, see the special issue (2001) on ‘Post-occupancy Evaluation’ in Building Research & Information, 29(2), 79–174.
The 2002 Reith Lecture series delivered by O'Neill was entitled ‘A Question of Trust’. Lecture 3, ‘Called to Account’, is particularly relevant here (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ghvd8).
Bent Flyvbjerg examines the insights that case studies can offer to the creation of a body of knowledge and why a discipline needs such exemplars; Bent Flyvbjerg (2006) Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
The challenges for professionals are well articulated in the important book by Dominique Foray (2006) The Economics of Knowledge, MIT, London.
See Andrew Abbott (1988) The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, University of Chicago, London, particularly the conclusion about the forces threatening professionalism.
Related Research Data
