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GBE Opinion (About) G#41171

By 16 November 2023Encyclopaedia, Opinion

GBE Opinion About

GBE > Encyclopaedia > Opinion > State of the Industry > G#41171

GBE Opinion About

Scope/Extract:

  • These Opinion Posts have the potential to contribute to filling part of the ‘knowledge-gap’ and I am planning to ring every bit of 50 years of experience in violet construction, 40 years of specification consultancy and 24 years of green construction into its content.
  • GBE Continuing Professional Development (CPD) seminars will also be created and published to support this paper and its promotion.

Definitions: Green and Violet

  • Throughout these opinion posts I may refer to ‘Green’ which is widely adopted and well understood as being ‘environmental or sustainable’.
  • I also refer to ‘Violet’ which I coined in 1999 at ‘Green is the Colour’ conference by BD newspaper, to mean the opposite to ‘Green’; it occurs at the opposite side of a colour spectrum circle;
  • Not purple, Violent and Violate give the right flavour.
  • It applies to deleterious materials, badly performing buildings, incompetent material choices, bad cost planning that is bankrupting the industry.
  • It also applies to all actors, actions and choices in construction, the industry and the professionals and trades.
  • It applies also to anybody who does not act on behalf of the environment, biodiversity and future comfortable human occupation of our only planet.

GBE Opinion About

Challenging the readers and status quo:

  • Problems:
    • College Knowledge may be 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years old and may not have been good enough, probably is not good enough in the context of a rapidly changing climate and the ‘sustainability revolution’.
    • We are all familiar with the steep learning curve of learning new subjects, but the forgetting curve comes with not using knowledge or know-how at all nor frequently enough to reinforce it in the memory banks unless you are lucky enough to have an eidetic and/or photographic memory.
    • Post-Grenfell changes in the regulation landscape is going to be radical to ensure we do not repeat Grenfell, Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) or equivalent mistakes.
    • Our buildings have been performing badly but our mild climate has let us all fool ourselves that they were okay.
    • The regulation tsunami is just beyond the horizon, heading this way and our design professions are not ready for it; competency not awareness is to be expected.
    • If competency remains missing from Architectural Education, the Health and Safety Executive in the form of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) can challenge the Professional Institutes to do better, but that will take a decade or two to drive that change through to graduates.
    • The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) & Architects Registration Board (ARB) response so far had been inept:
      • Awareness at the expense of competency.
      • Initially they decided architects should know about fire, then they added carbon, next will be RAAC.
      • The RIBA had assigned blame to ARB.
      • RIBA Chair of the board still refers to Building Safety (Fire & Structure) and low-carbon design (Environment) and Inclusion (Access and Diversity) as essential issues for education.
      • Whoops they have not yet added Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC).
      • Many universities do a good job on inclusion, its UK employers who fail.
        • “Young, Gifted and Blocked”.
      • Finally, the ARB have woken up and 28th September 2023 published their new agenda:
      • “Competency Outcomes for architects and Standards for learning providers”
      • A move towards 40 ‘outcomes’; recognising ‘what they know’, ‘what they can do’ and ‘how they must behave’.
      • A new accreditation approach let’s hope they get it right.
      • Let’s hope the Universities realise they need new staff to be able to meet the new expectations and not more same-old, same-old.
    • My reaction:
      • Philosophical awareness without practical know-how is useless.
      • All performance know-how must improve significantly during education.
      • If Architects want to become or remain design team leaders, education needs to up its game.
    • There is increasing excitement about the prospects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) making all technical design decisions for you, my fear is it will be decided that Architects no longer need to know it and need not be taught it.
    • Facilities Management was seen by Government as a major contributor to sustainability, quite rightly.
    • Government Soft Landings and Post Occupancy Evaluation were introduced to try to correct those shortcomings.
    • In past decades RIBA discouraged supervision, or architects might risk finding out how badly their buildings work and risk getting sued for the shortcomings.
    • Especially in small retrofit works some architects seem to let go of their role and responsibilities once in the hands of a contractor, who may substitute materials because:
      • They are unfamiliar with them.
      • They claim they cannot get them.
      • Their supply and install chain will not use them.
      • They will cost the client more. (In the short term, but save much more in the long term)
    • The ‘Performance-Gap’ grows ever wider as materials are being substituted with wrong properties.
  • Solutions:
    • “All communications ports open, Captain” (Lieutenant Uhura RIP)
    • The future of humanity requires new, better joined-up-thinking with awareness of the bigger picture.
    • The future of humanity requires greater environmental, societal and moral responsibility by all players.
    • Profits before people before planet will not allow the majority of us to survive into the future.
    • Policing the specification to avoid the ‘Performance-Gap’ is critical for comfortable human survival.
    • Technology has moved on and none more so than in the last decade, efficiency and effectiveness in kit is improving, smart monitoring, metering and controls.
    • Big open data is growing, evidence-based design is increasingly possible and expected, intelligent software is arriving.
    • Like all ‘Expert systems’ AI needs to be briefed by intelligent people ‘Gurus’; and must include regulations, physics of building, science of materials, crunching of numbers and other design parameters; Algorithms need to be written with or by those same Gurus.
    • Competency not Awareness is the new post-Grenfell currency.
    • Architectural Philosophy and private jargon may have a tough time finding their way in post-Grenfell, carbon rationed world.

© GBE GBC GRC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ****
16th November 2023

Images:

Architects Don't Need LCA CPD

Architects Don’t Need LCA CPD

 

© GBE GBC GRC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ****
21st September 2018 – 16th November 2023

About:

GBE Opinion

GBE State of the Industry

Sectors

GBE Greenwash

GBE CPD

GBE Jargon Buster

  • Violet (Jargon Buster) G#1583 N#1516

© GBE GBC GRC GBL NGS ASWS Brian Murphy aka BrianSpecMan ****
16th November 2023

GBE Opinion (About) G#41171 End.

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