F-B-F.org -

We can all name recent examples – the Millennium Dome, Picketts Lock, the new Scottish and Welsh Assemblies, the South Bank’s redevelopment; the list, sadly, goes on and on. Shamefully, for every failure highlighted in the national press there are yet more local examples of projects, such as doctor’s surgeries, schools and community resource centres, that should have made a vast difference to a community’s quality of life but have fallen wide of the mark.
There is thankfully a much more positive story to tell. Plenty of schemes show how it could and should be done, many of them lottery funded: the Eden Project, Tate Modern, the Magna Centre and the Lowry Centre, to name but a few high-profile examples. These are projects where everyone concerned has worked together to ensure quick planning decisions, community support and benefit, and completion on time and on budget. Crucially, they are also projects where good design has added both societal and environmental value while stimulating public debate.So why do we get it both right and wrong? Effective leadership from the client plays the key role in deciding a project’s success or failure.

It is the client, the users and the community who should decide what kind of building is needed and how it will work; and not the architects or contractors. It is the client who must set and control the brief, and it is at the brief-setting stage that a commitment to design quality must be made. It is also important, as the problems with the much-delayed new British Library demonstrated, that there is continuity in the management of the project. Every time you chop and change the client’s management, value is lost and it is a recipe for chaos. In Wembley’s case, exit stage left Ken Bates; enter stage right Rodney Walker.We must also remove the stifling fear of failure that knocks ambition and limits innovation on so many UK projects. Three years ago Lord Foster designed a great stadium for Wembley that could accommodate athletics, and was affordable. Then the accountants and civil servants mess around for three years, and finally we go back to Foster’s design.

It is impossible to compare the Wembley project with the successes of Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium or the Stade de France, because instead of sticking to a focused brief, the developers have added hotels, offices and a conference centre. As a result, costs have spiralled to £700m for a stadium that could have cost no more than £500m.The lesson is that the bean counters and all- knowing men in suits must not be allowed to prevent the development of projects on the basis of a crude investment analysis. The brave and seemingly doomed decision by Walsall Metropolitan Council to develop a world-class art gallery on the banks of a derelict canal, and the London Borough of Southwark’s idea of placing a state-of-the-art library on Peckham High Street both prove that widely held misgivings are often mistakenly held.Fear of the National Audit Office (NAO) can often cause public agencies to lose sight of the bigger picture and needlessly channel their energies into unsustainable cost-cutting exercises. I say needlessly because the NAO is, after all, interested not in pursuing the cheapest option but in achieving value for money, value that should be measured over a building’s lifetime.Finally, the architects do not escape my attention. Too many of them have been marooned in the world of luvviedom for far too long, designing for themselves, not for their clients or their users. Others have embraced a commercial ethos but have forgotten that they have a civic obligation to design for all the people that will use, visit or even just see our public building.