In the current economic climate, what is the most likely area that construction can deliver more for less?

I was asked this question by a journalist, and found it difficult to give a straight answer, but on reflection, came up with this:

Construction can indeed deliver more for less. The sector always has done. It has always been possible to cut corners and substitute good materials with low quality substitutes. Apart from substituting poor materials for good ones, we are also routinely de-skilling and de-professionaling the design and construction processes in every way possible to respond to clients who are not willing or able to pay for a good job. In the current economic downturn, it is inevitable that construction quality and social responsibility will be low on most agendas. But this does not provide more for less, in the long run. Perhaps what we need is a concerted attempt to persuade our clients of the medium to long-term benefits of good design and construction?

On the ephemeral nature of buildings

Obviously, the urban environment has a certain permanence to it. "Bricks and mortar", "as safe as houses", "concrete reality", are example of phrases that reassure us that the buildings are erected for decades, if not centuries. There are indications for designers and planners that buildings have life spans of upwards of 50 years. The land upon which we build is even more permanent, and the buildings that we add to land, if they are in the right location, make the land valuable (even permission to build will add this value to land). So it is clear that buildings have a certain degree of longevity and permanence, and that people engage with them for the long-term, right? Well, perhaps. I have not checked this for a while, but I recall that the average length of occupation of a dwelling in the UK was about seven years. In other words, on the average, people move house every seven years -- nothing permanent about that then.

I also heard a similar statistic for offices. There is a constant churn in the office market, not only in moving but also in refurbishing. In fact, fully half of the UK construction market is activity other than new building. One thing that really brought this home to me was the UK's Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in which public sector buildings were procured using private sector finance (largely from the banks). The basic idea is that a bank puts up the money for building a facility, then the private sector is paid a monthly or annual fee for operating the facility, from which they can repay the loan. This method of procuring public sector infrastructure has been very popular, and one unintended consequence is that the consortia who build such a facility, and operate it, sell it on to other operators. There is a healthy secondary market in completed PFI facilities, whereby an operator can buy the thing and run it. So, the idea of engaging the supply-side in long-term commitment has only resulted in yet another short-term engagement, as I am coming to expect with the construction sector.

So I have come to the conclusion that far from being permanent things, buildings are ephemeral. I don't mean the structure or the land. I mean our relationship with a building and the way that we define it and use it. Can we say that every part of the urban environment that we relate to is a constantly changing and ephemeral interpretation that is only temporarily ascribed to it? Does this help us to relate to the urban environment, or to interpret it?

Ephemeral buildings

My research and conversations into the nature of the impact of the built environment on the processes that are carried out in buildings is beginning to worry me. I knew for a long time that most buildings are gutted and refurbished every seven years. So the typical building is a somewhat temporary affair, even though the external shell sits on a piece of land for decades, seemingly semi-permanent. Not only are they refurbished regularly and frequently, but also they change hands. So no matter how appropriate they were for one occupier, the next occupier will inevitably find the facility inadequate or inappropriate in some way. When the Private Finance Initiative was introduced as a means of getting the private sector to fund the development of infrastructure, and then charge the public authority for its use under a 30-year contract, we all thought that finally there was a long-term view of infrastructure. But in the event, the deals were re-structured soon after the project was completed, once the development risk had gone, and the Private sector partner would often sell the facility to someone else for them to operate it. So, the engagement was still temporary. Now, I have discovered something else. There are some very good schools around, and they often have very poor quality buildings. Kendrick School, for example, a girls' grammar in Reading, which is one of the highest performing public sector schools in the UK, is situated in dreadful old, poorly maintained and unfit-for-purpose buildings on a crowded site. Failing schools are often provided with brand new buildings, because they need help, but are their results any better with the new building than with the old? If it is the same teachers and the same kids, dealing with the same syllabus, is anything changed? Finally, I learned that a field surgeon on a battlefield in a tent is more likely to succeed in terms of performance metrics thatn a surgeon in a well-equipped operating theatre. So all this leads me to question the permanence and even the significance of buildings in terms of what happens inside them. They now seem to me to be ephemeral things that have little impact on what happens inside them. Can this be true?