Good design matters: some thoughts about the future
Robin Nicholson
26 November 2007

* This paper was presented with power point images. These are highlighted in the text and are available on this website.

This evening I will discuss the value of a well-designed built environment as an essential ingredient in sustainable regeneration, as the physical context within which Matthew Taylor will give the 2007 Cornwall Lecture.

The title of his lecture is ‘to be realists we must be visionaries first’; and you cannot have excellent design without a vision, preferably a shared vision.

I will argue that sustainable and economic regeneration needs good design to help mitigate mitigation the effects of climate change and adapt our built environment. We need to move rapidly not only to a zero carbon condition but also towards a zero water and zero waste situation. Change has begun but we need to discuss what the future might look like.

First I will say a little about The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) (see www.cabe.org.uk)

CABE slide

CABE was set up in 1999 and is the Government’s advisor on architecture, urban design and public space in England.

Creating excellent buildings + masterplans + schools slide

As well as beginning to realise the importance of the built environment to our effectiveness and enjoyment, there is a growing understanding that good design assists in the dealing with climate change and obesity; the cost of both is rising rapidly. This Government has instigated a massive construction programme and we audit its progress.

We audited 52 schools built between 2001 and 2006 which showed that only 19% were good or excellent whereas a full 50% were poor or mediocre.

Schools good and bad sequence slide

We audited 300 private housing schemes (33 in each Region) for layout and external design and found that similarly only 18% were ‘good’ or ‘very good’.

Housing Audit example, Newark

However 29% were so poor that we believe they should not have got planning permission. The Building for Life tool, was used to assess the schemes and is now being used by both the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships as a funding gateway.

Cornwall rocks

The very particular nature of Cornwall’s topography, history and climate inevitably looks very different to a Cornish person to the way that Matthew, CABE or I might see it. You have the long-standing relationship with the sea and fishing, the geology, the agriculture and the warmer weather.

CABE explores the relationship between design aspiration and the social and economic conditions. In 2004 we appointed Mark Pearson as our first regional Design Action Manager to champion design quality across Devon and Cornwall. He is now Head of Design, South-West at Constructing Excellence, building on this work and spreading it to other parts of the Region. The Architecture Centre for Devon and Cornwall run by Tanya Griffiths is already doing a great job, raising aspirations and actively supporting local authorities such as Kerrier District Council, who have just been successful with a bid for Big Lottery funding for the Heartlands Project in Pool. I commend their website to you.(see www.acdandc.org.uk) which describes this and other examples of current work in Cornwall and Devon.

Cornwall word map (courtesy Tim Guy)

It is admirable that every local authority in Cornwall has a design champion, for there is much to be done. This is a distinctive illustration of Cornwall originally conceived by Tim Guy and Keith Hambly-Staite for the Great Atlantic Way Project created by Jonathan Ball, co-founder of the Eden project,

Bude Castle

I imagine we all enjoy the Cornish spirit of innovation illustrated by such people as Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, the inventor of the Bude light for his Castle in Bude which was later installed in the House of Commons. Never has this spirit of invention been more needed than now, as you seek to exploit Cornwall’s unique geographical opportunities for generating energy, be it from the sun, the wind, the earth or the sea and to nurture the fledgling knowledge-based economy.

Katrina &/or the Hub +

Katrina helped concentrate minds; the Hayle wave-hub is edging forward. A recent publication by the Centre for Alternative Technology, ‘Zero Carbon Britain’ explores what we would have to do for Britain to be carbon neutral by 2027.

Zero carbon Britain graph

- the dark grey shows fossil fuels and green nuclear, both diminishing and increasing renewables, albeit to a lower level. Clearly there is no time to prevaricate… or build more roads.

Cornish Hedge

It is said that despite the beautiful Cornish hedges some roads are getting better and the bicycle network is rapidly improving. Yet Cornwall has long felt threatened by periodic proposals for changes to the train network and the airports. So where you chose to develop and how these are connected to existing communities matters. Buses are 13 times more carbon efficient than trains and the use of new technologies such as broadband, with video conferencing and collaborative communication systems, might even finally change our dependence on physical transport.

Existing communities - St Austell and Fowey

It is relatively easy to design buildings that need no heat, that can recycle much of their water and even generate some power. However we only replace 1% of our housing each year and our existing buildings are responsible for 40% of our energy consumption. And in the future cooling new buildings will certainly be more of a problem than heating them.

First we must reduce our waste of energy by insulating our buildings inside or out. Then we need to distribute any waste heat from combined heat and power plants into the existing housing stock and other buildings; so we might share obligations and benefits, be they for energy or water or waste, moving from an individual culture to a collective one. A silver lining may exist in climate change as adaptation might well sponsor some community cohesion, something that Matthew Taylor will look at later on.

Cornish cob and gridshell

Inevitably there are disagreements as the design and manufacturing industries speed up their work on matters sustainable. Should buildings be heavy concrete and masonry to provide free passive cooling or can they be light timber frame using less embodied energy and speed up the construction process? Are traditional building techniques such as cob or rammed earth useful today? Traditional lime techniques are developing fast by combining it with hemp to make carbon negative building materials.

Our (ECA) Downland gridshell uses local materials with care, including the structure which is made from 1½ x 2 inch green oak.

Cornish Trinity + Cornish Targets

Should we use the abundant wind at a micro-generation scale or is it more sensible in larger units. I find turbines quietly beautiful while I struggle with electricity grid pylons. It should be no surprise that the Renewable Energy Office for Cornwall’s 2002 report showed wind in such a dominant position.

We have few choices but we are not necessarily making the right ones. Recently the Treasury made available £100m to help schools provide 60% of their energy from on-site renewables. However it has been estimated that, while it would cost in the order of £3.5m to provide 60% for a new secondary school from on-site renewables, it would cost only £500k to provide 100% from renewables by investing in a remote wind farm!

Battersea Power Station

We waste so much energy, water and materials that there is little need to invent new technologies in order to have a significant impact. We waste building materials – each year 19m tonnes are delivered to site and then sent straight to landfill without being used! We waste electricity, through idleness and through ignorance; up to 10% of our domestic electricity is wasted by stand-by devices. Few businesses would survive if they wasted resources like that.

The mighty but redundant Battersea power station used to send its waste heat to the 1800 flats on the celebrated 1950’s Churchill Gardens Estate; we have precedents but to-day it needs a change of attitude.

We know that inspiring design brings huge benefits and creates confidence; place-making is more important than object-making. There are many green shoots appearing all over the country. I shall look forward to your new Quality Design Initiative creating great places for new public art, which must of course be of the highest order. I look forward to the creative development of the public space in the Heartlands Project with interest.

ECA Consultation at Bristol, Wembley, Penarth and Warwick University

Good architecture and urban design need both an informed and determined client and an excellent design team. However the engagement of the users and the local community can be hugely beneficial since we all experience buildings in different ways. The following pictures show my colleagues engaged in different forms of consultation in Bristol, Wembley, Penarth and the University of Warwick and I always like to take new client teams to look at other schemes with the design team, not for copying but for inspiration.

Emscher group in Dortmund

CABE recently helped take a group of Thames Gateway leaders and Government officials to the former steel and coal heartlands of Germany, now re-branded as the Emscher Landschaftspark. You will notice the ‘-park’, because when they began, twenty years ago, to anticipate the winding down of their traditional heavy industry they realised the future lay in creating new knowledge-based industries, locating many of them in the landscape between the seven existing communities; it is a series of collective endeavours. Centres for innovation and research have been an essential part of re-skilling these communities, just as planned in the Cornwall Convergence programme.

Mont-Cenis in Sodingen – the library and a wider view

In Sodingen they built a new town centre on the site of the Mont-Cenis coal mine; this consists of a civil service training college with teaching spaces and a hotel for visiting students as well as the local library (the Cone), the Town Hall, a community hall, with a bar and restaurant. They all sit within a low energy climate-controlled glasshouse, heated and cooled from the ground and powered, in part, by a massive photo-voltaic ‘power station’ on the roof.

Zollverein School

In the coal and steelworks at Zollverein they have built a new graduate school (the white cube at the bottom right) where business people, architects and designers teach one another; a brilliant idea for increasing capacity and re-focussing it. The building is heated and cooled from the water from the coal mines far below.

Reinelbe incubator units.

In the centre of Reinelbe, the mine has been replaced by an ambitious business incubator project which focuses on renewable energies; the quality speaks for itself.

It will be clear that the design of these buildings, public spaces and landscapes was placed at the highest level from the very beginning and has been key to building confidence in these deeply traditional, largely working class communities.

Sodingen lunch

There is a general buy-in to the programme and the unfamiliar architecture. The social and economic alternative to this kind of vision would have been progressive economic and social collapse as the mines and mills closed.

Surely your Convergence Programme starting in 2008 must aim as high?

Warwick Digital Lab

But there is vision in the UK too. At the University of Warwick, Edward Cullinan Architects is building a unique Digital Laboratory, which is funded through the Regional Development Agency. It will house state of the art digital research and provide support for the whole university, the local business community and the NHS in a smart contemporary,a BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) excellent building - that is to the highest measured performance for carbon, water and bio-diversity. (see www.BREEAM.org)

I have mentioned the importance of the spaces between buildings and the need to collaborate; this requires the Local Authorities and the planning profession to change from (preventative) development control and aesthetic dumbing down to positive spatial planning and support for a sense of place that is shared and local.

New pseudo-Cornish

‘Local distinctiveness’ is often used as an excuse for combining bits of design from various ages in the belief that something Cornish (or Welsh or…) will emerge, when you are actually debasing the local vernacular. The blind windows on the bottom left are for the garage behind! Whereas local distinctiveness should be about the essence of the locality, the nature of the space, inside and out, the climate, the location, the landscape and a developing attitude to energy, water, waste and bio-diversity.

The New Herbarium at Kew

We all value our Heritage but for some it can become an inviolate comfort blanket instead of being a spur towards a connected future. The creative management of our built and landscape heritage in general and our World Heritage sites in particular is crucial. We have worked in four World Heritage sites and are building state of the art modern lower energy buildings that respect and build on the character of the particular place. The New Herbarium at Kew was topped out in 2007.

Eden, Tate, Falmouth and Life-boat station

There are those who believe that iconic buildings are the answer and the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was not averse to lauding what he called ‘the wow-factor’. Of course we need special buildings and special places as symbols of our community, be they the schools or health buildings or even museums, just as we used to focus on the local church and village green; indeed we need the new schools and colleges to deliver their full potential and function, spatially, as the heart of the community and that is a matter of design and management.

Cornwall already has its new major statements at Eden, the Tate and the Maritime Museum at Falmouth. And you have an essential but extreme building type in the life-boat stations, some old, some new, some good, some not so. But don’t we struggle to find a critical language to discuss architecture beyond mere abuse or adulation?

And I am sure there are a number of good new urban spaces, but this evening, while clearly an improvement, I wondered whether Lemon Quay here in Truro was really good enough?

Hayle Foundry, Brunel Business park, Falmouth HERS and Gun Wharf

It feels that things are beginning to move; I have not visited these but:

Jubilee Wharf in Penryn

The new architecture of Cornwall may seem unfamiliar but its values are likely to be fairly eternal and the spaces between the buildings enjoyable. It may not be as different as the exuberant Jubilee Wharf in Penryn which I visited to-day or the new galleries in Newlyn and Penzance but they all have a vision and a real quality of design.

Newlyn and Penzance galleries

There is no shortage of design talent wanting to work in Cornwall but the recent past has too often seen individual compromise outwith any vision and with little encouragement from the planning system.

Blown tree

I want to leave you with a sense of optimism that allows us to get going now and not put it off for another day. It is now my great pleasure to introduce Matthew Taylor, the Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts (see www.rsa.org.uk) and until recently principal policy advisor at No. 10; before that he had led the think-tank most closely associated with New Labour thinking, the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) (see www.ippr.org)

I met Matthew 5 years ago when I was helping ippr organise a competition called Designs on Democracy, which looked at how to design or transform the design of three town halls so they might encourage a greater engagement of their citizens.

Matthew will be setting you some challenges towards a social and economic transformation that is particular and local. I believe that transforming the quality of your built environment is an integral part of this process; not on its own but in an integrated way and this is a challenge.

I know we are in for a real treat, a high-speed insight into a possible future.

So without further ado I give you Matthew Taylor