Architect and Educator | Director of 1828 🌎 Diversity + Inclusion Leadership 🏠 Housing Association Board Member💡 Design Thinking Researcher
📐 Architects and our responsibilities to Grenfell 💚 A rather sobering read regarding the role architects play in the disaster. Key takeaways and recommendations: "mistakes and oversights which were symptomatic of a ‘widespread failure’ within the profession – and found that they had worked under a ‘fundamental misunderstanding’ about the nature of the job, its obligations and responsibilities." "‘widespread failure among the profession to investigate properly or understand the nature of the materials being chosen for that purpose" "failure to ‘engage’ with expertise in cladding high-rise residential buildings, given the lack of in-house expertise." ✍️ Recommendations: Setting up of a single independent body, that would bring together fire safety responsibilities currently spread between different government departments into ‘one department under a single secretary of state’. Review of the ‘arbitrary’ definition of a ‘higher risk’ building in the Building Safety Act, an urgent review of building guidelines in Approved Document B, and building control to be done by a ‘national authority’. Review changes to architectural education and training. ⏰ This has to be a wake up call for our profession to better educate and train future architects to focus on the human, wellbeing and safety needs of our users and communities. #grenfell #firesafety #architect #architecture #education
Grenfell Inquiry report: Studio E Architects bears ‘very significant’ responsibility for disaster
So sad. British social housing in London was so much better before the GLC (Greater London Council) was dismantled during the Thatcher era in the 1980s. Selling off council housing was another mistake. A friend who is not an architect but lived in a beautiful Victorian council flat compared it to a library book on long term loan. You enjoy it when you need it and then pass it on to a new user once you’ve made it through the difficult period of bringing up your children. And the next user can enjoy it while they need it. The library book isn’t going to improve if only owned by one person. It’ll sit on the shelf and get dusty. Making the book as cheap as possible is only going to dilute its quality, isn’t it? Anyway, some of the best mid century housing projects were designed by the housing departments of local councils. Privatisation was the problem in my view. As with the NHS, and the railways - all privatised, assuming that a structure driven by profit (a contractor) is better. Why?! Why would a private limited company care about anything but it’s bottom line? Why oh why Did anyone really believe that the market knows best? Thatchers sell off needs to shoulder some of the blame, surely?
Giuseppe Di Leo
5mo
You clearly think that there is ‘widespread failure’. Could you point to research confirming that please. I don’t think that the Inquiry had it, but I could be wrong. Perhaps you’ve seen it?
Architect | Director of ArchitectureM | North West | London
5moi do have serious concerns that i feel have not been addressed by the reaction to what has happened since Grenfell Tower. Quite simply, we need to ensure that our education teaches us the fundamentals of construction, and understand the consequences of bad decisions. The public look for architects and other construction professionals to be the “gold standard” and this requires us to actually be the “gold standard”. Today, it’s still too easy to avoid doing things properly, and i am happy to discuss this offline. the legalisation needs to be simpler, and effectively be: you design - you are responsible you build - you are responsible you sell a product- you are responsible you rent a property out - you are responsible there are too many excuses, too many job titles, too many “apparent” exceptions we need proper licensing for contractors, designers, management, and not just for the big stuff, the small projects to. it will cost more, but we need to build better