DEBATING LEADERSHIP AND INTEGRATION
Phil Gusack
1st March, 2008

The Reform Club debate is an annual treat for AfH members. It’s an opportunity to view Charles Barry’s 1841 Grade One listed building, a chance to imagine being one of the ‘great and good’ and an excuse to drink in West End nightlife.

The event, sponsored by HBG UK, a major design-build company, debated the motion that "This House believes that better architecture will result when architects reclaim their position as leaders of the Design Team, and lead the integration of engineering into the building design process."

If historians bookmark this week for its debates, it will be for Clinton versus Obama, not Cooper and Bishop versus Nedin and Shaw, despite the fact that the struggle for leadership of the design team has a far longer history than the American Presidency. Architects draw lessons from the past. Politicians do not but at least they address the future. Only Thomas Jefferson succeeded in both, building Monticello (and the world’s first swivel chair) before the United States won independence

Instead, John Cooper and Jaime Bishop proposed the motion with the Sherlock Holmes gambit: eliminate the impossible and you whatever remains is possible. In other words, the reason architects should lead the team is because engineers and quantity surveyors will do it worse!

Opposing the motion, Phil Nedin and Chris Shaw argued that hospitals are so complicated that architects may be too busy to manage the design team! As evidence, Mr Nedin cited the ever expanding Arup universe of specialist services. There is a touch of the macabre in all this: which client or, indeed, team leader can comfortably say no to all this expertise, especially as the soot is being scraped off the Royal Marsden and Lincolnshire awaits seismic aftershocks?

For the record, when it came to the vote, Mr Nedin and Mr Shaw were trounced. But let’s speculate on what was not said.

The issue of integration of engineering, that I take to mean finding smart ways to route ducts, pipes and wires through structures, and is a standard client requirement in everything from Broadgate to Bluewater, was conspicuous by its absence. 40 years ago this was one of the drivers of hospital design innovation and the multidisciplinary teamwork that was obviously needed to do it. Today, however, integration of hospital spatial, structural and electro-mechanical systems is as overshadowed by patient-focus just as the issue of racial integration has been overshadowed by Gordon Brown’s call for Britishness.


Greenwich District General Hospital 1968

Mr Brown has other things to account for too, especially to everyone in hospital design. Whatever you think about PFI, for example, it has been severely criticized by Parliamentary committees, many academics and even the RIBA in its so-called Smart PFI policy document. But the real issue is not that architects having to take orders from financiers, because that is precisely what architects do when they design spec buildings, even the gherkin. Nor is it about taking orders from contractors, because that is the way things are often done all around the world, even or especially in Japan.

The real design team leader of the ten-year £30 billion NHS rebuilding project is Gordon Brown himself. Knowing that Margaret Thatcher had disbanded DHSS and brought hospital building to a standstill, exactly how did he think a reformed NHS of first-time buyers would best be served? Did he consider re-constituting a leaner meaner version of Howard Goodman’s team? Did he consider splashing out on design research? Did he know that in order to protect their design skill base, the Dutch and the Swedes ensure hospital design is taught in their architecture schools?

Or did it ever occur to him, on his Cape Cod vacations, to see what we could learn from the Americans? No, they don’t have an NHS but they do know how to plan, finance, design and build hospitals with ease and speed. The answers to all these speculations is no.

What the team leader did instead was to sanction the world’s most complicated design and cost control system, in effect, fines designers should they try to improve on guidance that may be older than they are. Forget windfall PFI profits. That is a price most of us would willingly pay if, ten years and £30 billion later, we got short waiting lists, hygienic conditions, recognizable meals and single rooms in buildings that could be adapted without triple bypasses.

We all have favourite self-fulfilling definitions of teamwork. New Labour’s is partnership. But I suspect that Mr Brown, as well as many PFI quartermasters, would secretly agree with Hollywood director Billy Wilder. Asked if he believed in the auteur theory of film-making or in teamwork, he replied: ‘Teamwork. I believe in teamwork. That’s a lot of other people doing what I tell them to do!’




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