Rod Macdonald, chairman, Buro Happold
Products throughout our buildings still cling to the designs and technology of the past. Isn’t it time we pushed for greater innovation and commoditisation?
Have you ever tried to change a tap at home? For many people, the end result is a broken basin. Taps were designed in Victorian times and are still manufactured in the same way, so that we need a special tool to remove the nuts. But with a garden hose, one part just clips into another. Why can’t it be as simple to change a tap?
Or suppose you want to hang a door the other way round. It takes a long time to move the hinges and reposition the locks. But when you buy a fridge, you take out two pins, remove a screw and move the handle. We produce many more doors in the construction industry than we do domestic fridges. So why hasn’t someone thought of a similar system to simplify the manufacture and installation of doors?
Or why do we still wire light switches? There’s enough energy in a touch to send a signal to turn the light switch on. We don’t need batteries or wires. Yet the work that goes into cutting, chasing, wiring and putting switches in is enormous.
Buildings are filled with trivial-sounding examples that nevertheless demonstrate a wider point: the lack of innovation and development in construction components.
Today, buildings are put together approximately and corrected later. But we need to work towards delivering buildings that can be put together “clickety-click” — from parts compatible with other parts and standardised fixing systems, assembled by multi-skilled operatives, and straightforward to maintain.
Design in that capability and you create a whole new industry. For example, we could have colour-coded construction parts that could be swapped to suit changing requirements over the building’s lifetime. With good design and greater innovation at the manufacturing stage, the things we put into our buildings would look good, be easily fitted and maintained, and be the right price.
These are the issues our cross-industry steering group hopes to highlight in a proposed parliamentary inquiry, supported by the Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group (APDIG).
We want to see every firm producing parts for the building industry consistently developing and improving quality. Construction is a long way behind the curve when it comes to manufacturing innovation. If you’ve taken a flight recently, it’s likely that nothing in that aeroplane was manufactured in the same way that it was 10 years ago. But construction is still stuck in the past.
We’re not arguing for standardised products, just better-designed products. Nor is this a criticism of architects, who are not being supplied with the components they need to make buildings more efficient. Nor is 21st century modularisation a synonym for standardisation, as it was in the 1960s — with many regrettable results.
The big difference since the 1960s is that we’ve made important advances in IT. By linking IT directly into manufacturing — foregoing the working drawings, the specification of incompatible products and the inevitable making-good on site — we can drive up technical design quality without sacrificing unique design. With IT and CAD/CAM techniques, we can produce components that have almost limitless aesthetic and dimensional variation.
The boom time was a chance to rethink construction components. With BSF, for example, we could have used highly-developed products to improve quality and reduce costs. Instead, everything was driven by cost, be it through design and construct or traditional tendering.
Innovation is necessary if we are to meet our ambitious sustainability targets and thrive in a competitive world. We urgently need to start encouraging the commoditisation of construction products. People have been scared of it in the past, but we can do it, and do it well.
We have the designers, the technology and the manufacturing capability. Yes, we will need clients who can take a lead, and government to take an interest. There needs to be a change of attitude among manufacturers, and a readiness to invest in new concepts. But above all, we need to work out a better way of doing things.
Rod Macdonald is chairman of Buro Happold and leading the call for a parliamentary inquiry into the poor design and quality of construction products, along with APDIG and Constructing Excellence.
