So Why Do a Live Project?

Abstract

How far is a risk managed education a preparation for managing risk?

Understanding Beer's concept of 'variety' reveals how risk is attenuated, and helps determine where in the experience of architectural education risk needs to happen. Strategically the classic 'studio taught' self-selection project invents both brief and risk through tutorial and discussion, and the proposition establishes a number of key themes that are self fulfilled. This simplification – an aggregation of variety and risk to allow the studio tutorial model to operate within the School undermines the very complexity that the subject of architecture contains – resulting in naivety. Conversely, no risk attenuation allows for unacceptable levels of chance, lack of safety or determined decision-making. Result – also naivety.

We have to look at the interactions between dynamic conditions, not merely isolate conditions and events in order to maintain control. As such, a degree of interaction between aspects of architecture (materials, space, use, legibility, ownership) needs to occur in order to develop the skills to manage interaction.

Case Studies from the University of East London 'Construction' archive illustrate controlled risk exposure in operation through the 'live project', establishing a team context within which the variety of requirements from site, timescale, budget constraint, user requirements and an economy of means can deliver a synthesis, and showing how risk management is another name for social responsibility.

Keywords:

• live project
• social capital
• architecture

A conglomerate education

Professional studies, sustainability, social science, cultural studies, technology and design are all facets of the same experience we call architecture. This conglomerate nature is recognised in the way the subject is organised as an architectural education in the UK, encompassed by the phrase ‘comprehensive design project’. This is our pedagogic Holy Grail, yet the means by which we guide future architects through the development of this holistic endeavour and recognise its achievement is ironically through numerous criteria and sub-clauses, each to be disaggregated and placed under scrutiny, mapped, re-mapped and appraised against subject area Quality Assurance benchmarks often developed for other academic disciplines, and ratified accordingly. Thus synthesis and segregation are uneasy bedfellows, indicative of the inherent architectural schizophrenia of being art and science, creativity and management.

Even leaving aside the less quantifiable issues of ‘art and creativity’, we are still confronted with a duality – science masters nature whereas management masters events. Even the most un-artistic architect must therefore attempt to ride at least two of these four horses simultaneously, so it is little surprise that risk avoidance is inherent in our profession, but also that avoidance of risk is futile.

As an architectural profession we have to concede that risk management also encompasses all aspects of our architectural education – 'success' delivery is behind this, indeed is behind all aspects of our modern lives. Our criteria for 'approval' is prescribed to counter the risk of later professional failure, and this risk attenuation is understood and distributed through the structures of teaching. However, true to our un-reconciled profession, the educational strategy so often employed to attenuate risk is to dream up subjective sites, programmes and atmospheres, then invent complicated assessment criteria to counterbalance it with objectivity. Education becomes a game of certainty, with the output – the qualifying student –being its product. Let us explore this more carefully – David Pye in his book ‘The Nature and Art of Workmanship’ (Pye 2007) proposed two counterpoints in the way we define the outcomes of our manufacturing processes – the workmanship of certainty, where the regulation of each process in a product’s realisation is highly determined – allowing little room for error and achieving consummate predictability – versus the workmanship of risk. Here, each process also conforms to the designer’s intention, however each process from which the whole activity is made has within it a tolerance, a flexibility of execution that allows for a cumulative individuality to emerge, whilst still achieving the intended goal. The reasons for certainty within education are clear, that cash and time are expensive for all concerned, but what is the effect of using 'the workmanship of certainty' to define the basis of our architectural education? What does the student do in response to this risk-averse pedagogical framework? The risk of a ‘lack of success’ (also known as ‘failure’), can be seen to provide the impulse for personalised vision projects that provide too little detail to be proven wrong, and assessment mechanisms providing criteria that when ticked off determine that everything is right. I would argue that neither part of this process actually engages with the interweaving of all aspects of our profession. RIBA Part 3 measures competence in risk avoidance, but I would suggest that the inevitability of risk requires that we are weaned onto such solids during our design education so we know what needs avoiding and why. This brings us to the question:

How far is a risk managed education a preparation for managing risk?

Understanding Stafford Beer's (1974, p21) concept of 'variety' reveals how risk is attenuated, and helps us to determine where in the experience of architectural education risk needs to happen. Strategically the classic 'studio taught' self selection project invents both brief and risk through tutorial and discussion, and the proposition establishes a number of key themes that are self fulfilled. Stafford Beer would argue that this simplification – an aggregation of variety and risk to allow the studio tutorial model to operate within the School ‘kills that subtlety of information that requisite variety demands’ (Beer 1974, p38). Beer asks that rather than simplify the required response to fit the elaborated model of assessment, that we instead reverse this equation and allow variety within the task to allow the active participation in the process of elaboration to deliver the result – a result that is a product of complexity, engagement and risk taking.

So when students say ‘people’, we ought to be asking ‘who, exactly?’, when they say ‘site’, we might enquire who owns it, when they say ‘climate’ and refer to a single photograph from the study trip when it rained, we know that the requisite variety of experience needed to elaborate a meaningful architectural project is lacking. Not only is the subjective design project often thin on relevance, but such an approach leads to a reliance on metaphor to fill the meaning gap – ‘urban flows’ and ‘interstitial spaces’ are common architectural parlance and manifest surrogate realities that stand in for the users and the place, and worse hampers the ability of the student or the tutor to judge how the interaction between them can be enhanced through the elaboration of the project. Do architectural projects based on a simple observation that through personal interpretation result in a sensationally complex composition offer more than a resolved design that handles multiple users, demands and requirements? Do we risk making good students, but poor architects?

The question appropriate to defining risk in architectural education is 'where to attenuate variety'?

Clearly architecture – both as visualisation and realisation is complex – requires management, but how is that management realised? We can explore two scenarios.

Let us try to edit out excess variety at the commencement of the project: limiting the range of variables at the outset will therefore deliver a greater chance of synthesis. This model is popular because a greater number of participants are able to achieve a product which can be cross referenced back to the attenuated requirements. The process of development is simplified, the number of needs contained, the democratic potential harnessed. Quality Assurance requirements are satisfied. The student ‘passes’.

If this is not acceptable, scenario two may be attempted: where variety is not attenuated at the start of the project. How then is complexity managed? If the process of developing the project works through a constant feedback of action and reaction, the ability for the project to contain complexity is enlarged, however the final shape of the 'product' may emerge only at completion – and if truly successful will never actually be complete as its participants would effectively continue the process themselves. The potential for ‘failure’ is enhanced, but only through this method of dynamic variety management could a project be said to achieve the integration desired by the profession, because it is what the profession does. Within the RIBA Part 2, I suggest that as teachers we should actively familiarise the student with the risks that require avoiding in a controlled and positive manner.

So we are to take the high road? What tools are therefore required to put into practice the ambition of teaching an integrated and democratic design process?

Live projects at the University of East London

The live project is a strategy for teaching and engagement that has been available to all Schools of Architecture to adopt or decline as they choose. In 1992, Mockbee, together with Auburn architecture professor D.K. Ruth, founded the Rural Studio, which Mockbee directed until his death in late 2001, establishing a programme of community engagement built projects that received international attention through a series of publications, most prominent of these is Oppenheimer & Thursley (2002) ‘Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and the Architecture of Decency’. Mockbee’s Rural studio published and as a result staked a claim to the fatherhood of ‘live projects’, whereas work by Peter Sulzer with students in Frankfurt, designing and building their own dormitories in the mid 1970’s went unpublished and therefore unknown. Peter Sulzer was a Professor of Architecture at the Architecture School in Frankfurt throughout the 1970s, and presented his Dormitory project at the ‘Material Matters’ Conference at the University of East London (UEL) in 2004.

Currently the number of Schools in the UK undertaking live projects are few – fewer still when one separates ‘design consultancy’ from the ‘design and realisation’ definitions. Each School would have its own reasoning for embarking on student engagement with the risk of real clients, their expectations and needs. At UEL our reasoning stems from the critical evaluation of the studio culture itself.

We must recognise some of the structural limitations of a studio culture within which our profession conducts its training, in order to clarify teaching strategies to address the idea of achieving the integration of risk within certainty. Core to the studio/’Unit’ system is the concept of individualisation – managing the personal development of the student with ever worsening staff/student ratios, the difficulty in tracking individual student achievement, maintaining a parity of assessment, the problem of teaching core skills which are able to be integrated within a personal design project – note all of these ‘flaws’ relate to how the lone student is nurtured – how his or her particular output is categorised within agreed standards across the piece. Our training is to be the fountainhead, rather than the delta, to become the original form-giver rather than the collaborator. Yet despite the emphasis on the individual, and the difficulty in delivering that emphasis within the institution, the ability for an individual to have the time and space to come to terms with the complexity of architecture by knowing their own limitations, preferences and predispositions is, I would suggest, a prerequisite to being able to effectively participate in a team – the task within a teaching institution is to maintain a clear position on how both self awareness, and team awareness can be fostered.

I would suggest that the current studio system requires strategic support, rather than replacement. That support, for me is via the engagement with users and place that occurs with the delivery of a live project, where the users become participants and the students become professionals. Through engaging with the issues of risk and variety, Architecture at UEL has effectively removed the segregation of sustainability, professional studies and technology from design within Part 2, and uses the live project as our Diploma student's first educational experience within the School to exemplify this integrated attitude.

The experience of professional engagement sets up an expectation that alters the relationship the student maintains with their subjective Unit work, the desire to invent becoming directed outwards towards the intended users of the project, rather than inward as personal fulfilment. At its best the live project is not simply a team of students making effectively a 1:1 model, but is the opportunity to engage with the requisite variety and risk that clients and users bring (Figures 1–5).

Figure 1 Galleons Reach 2010 – with MUF for Design for London/Newham Council.

Figure 2 Children’s Garden 2008 for Arts Lettres Techniques/UEL with Buro Happold.

‘Children’s Garden’ (the English version of ‘Kindergarten’), is the name of the Rudolf Steiner inspired nursery run for staff and students of UEL, designed by the author’s architecture practice.

Figure 3 Community Room 2009 for the Tottenham Community Allotment Group with Buro Happold.

Figure 4 'One Tree' emergency shelter research 2010 for Article 25.

Article 25 is a UK based NGO focused on providing shelter as part of disaster relief. The author receives annual commissions for students to develop prototypes to address real constructional situations in the field.

Figure 5 Bird Hide 2009 for St Josephs School with Pat West Architects, Buro Happold.

To go beyond the 1:1 model, each workshop at UEL establishes a strategic role for the student work, either as part of a funded research project such as ‘Fabric formwork’ (Figure 6), or with actual clients. Both provide the requisite variety to challenge the students, but with clients the role of the professional mentor becomes key. Here the teacher’s role is not strictly academic – there are no fixed terms of reference to bestow, rather a body of past experience that is utilised as and when required to support the situation that the relevant teams find themselves in. This is variety amplification rather than attenuation (in Beer's (1974) terms), where knowledge is not standardised but tailored to the task. The work of the staff is that of mentor and fellow participant – breaking down the teacher/pupil relationship is extremely important in a live project, a fact that may contribute to the relative scarcity of such projects within academia used to more prescriptive pedagogic structures.

Figure 6 Fabric Formwork research 2004.

A case study from 2010 demonstrates how the roles play out.

Pier Road: a meanwhile use

‘Meanwhile use' is a term used for a physical intervention in a place that anticipates a future use or redevelopment, and is used for the purpose of engaging the local community in that place, either to mitigate the effects of anticipatory abandonment, or to set in place patterns of use that the future development will rely upon to set up its own success.

Our ideal workshop scenario is finding a role for the student project between the client, in the case of the Pier Road Project this was Newham Council, and the architect – muf. The commission for the realisation of a strategic masterplan for the former docklands territory encircling City Airport allowed muf to identify key areas where the local community could engage with the new opportunities (Figure 7). UEL students were asked to develop tactical interventions that re-engage people in their own place, gauging at a small scale how relevant versions of masterplanning (Figure 8) where the incidental and the inconsequential are large scale investments, could be targeted. The live project is a strategic tool socially identified as an intrinsic part of the fabric of a place, which in its formal recognition becomes valued.

Figure 7 Pier Road Site photograph 2010.

Figure 8 Pier Road 2010 client presentation - planting research/design development.

A strategy for engagement as much as a design, the muf workshops, and those commissioned from us directly from Newham elsewhere in the borough, created a form of social infrastructure. This is intended to span across localised social capital or networks by introducing new information and opportunities (Figure 9) – in Putnam’s (2000) terms 'bridging social capital'. At Pier Road this was achieved by making a strategic intervention within the park where the sense of a shared ownership of the space needed underpinning by the introduction of a shared activity. Drawing on the potential of the adjacent community centre to support such an endeavour, a growing and gardening initiative was developed that could form a starter piece for the future muf proposals. The level of interest and engagement could therefore be tested through this student led pilot. Recent regeneration initiatives by Newham Council within the park, with the provision of new play equipment, had not been accepted by the local users, with a JCB stolen by local youths in order to rip out the good intentions of the Local Authority (Figure 10). This was a challenging site.

Figure 9 Pier Road 2010 students promotional poster for the public event.

Figure 10 Pier Road 2010 risk assessment revision B (site work).

With this context discovered early on, the students began two lines of enquiry, one social, engaging people at a personal level and developing interest in a gardening event, and in parallel refining a high quality installation that would provide a focus for the event and hopefully gain acceptance, becoming integral to the sense of ownership of the park and allowing new forms of use.

The intention of the UEL workshops is for students to fabricate the project themselves, historically the workshops were technical studies, and focussed on students' experience of making 1:1. With the development of our integrated approach over the last four years, this requirement became secondary to the relevance of the whole experience of project delivery, and especially in light of a reasoned discussion about stolen JCBs. The particular 'variety' the students encountered here required an execution to a standard they recognised as beyond their skills – it is to their credit that they came to this conclusion, and looked for an alternative delivery mechanism.

The students identified and engaged with a local steel fabricator (Figures 11, 12) to deliver the robustness of fabrication in steel that they felt was required (and that their welding skills would not deliver), and used the ‘Design for London’ grant that was secured to fund the works as a means of supporting a local business. Their task became subcontractor liaison, shop drawings approval, value engineering, environmental appraisal and client sign-off – with responsibility to muf, the community, Newham Council Parks Department and 'Design for London' as the funders. This shift in intention and outcome was a managed, mentored process that responded to the unfolding experience of the project, and a clear example of how risk actively and positively informs the outcome when part of a process that accommodates variety, rather than editing it out from the beginning.

Figure 11 Pier Road 2010 steel sub-contractor.

Figure 12 Pier Road 2010 shop drawings for construction.

The development of the project, the liaison, refinement, frustration and execution (Figure 13) are documented by the group as a combined history and user manual, which is passed over to the clients and becomes part of the students’ technical and professional assessment.

Figure 13 Pier Road 2010 installation.

The planting event brought twenty volunteers (Figure 14) to the site to plant a thousand flowers in the park, with seasonal vegetables located in the striking red steel planter. Six months on the vegetables have grown tall and the crocus bulbs are coming up. Interestingly here is no graffitti on the red steel (Figure 15). This is not to claim the project as a guarantee of social cohesion, but when muf redesign the park, engaging again with the community in developing the design response, their engagement will already be anticipated as part of the culture of the place.

Figure 14 Pier Road 2010 community planting.

Figure 15 Pier Road 2010 completion.

Conclusion

An engagement with variety is precisely the counterbalance to the self directed project that Part 2 students need to demand – we have to look at the interactions between dynamic conditions, not merely isolate conditions and events in order to maintain control. As such, a degree of interaction between aspects of architecture (materials, space, use, legibility, ownership) needs to occur in order to develop the skills to manage interaction.

In summary, there are a series of key themes that I would maintain a live project strategy ought to encompass:

create value between profession and recipient – the root of the word 'educate' is ‘e-ducere' meaning ‘to lead out’, the live project questions our 'comfort zone' and demands that new interactions are made. In the manner of Aldo Van Eyck, we can recognise the value of relativity in comprehending how the actions of the small scale create fundamental reverberations through to the large scale. In feeling the pride of being responsible for positive change in people’s lives, the students understand what architects (ought to) do.

make contact – students act as agents of change through an open engagement with people, their needs and ambitions. This approach is counter to the subjective dream project, echoing the Smithson's notion of ‘as found’ (Lichtenstein & Schregenberger 2001, pp40–44) – requiring creative curiosity in picking up, turning over, placing with – in the words of Independent Group filmmaker Karel Reisz ‘wanting what you get, not getting what you want’ (interview with Reisz by Peter Wintock cited in Lichtenstein & Schregenberger 2001, p239).

the risk assessment – it is a creative tool that considers means, methods, actors and events, and requires active anticipation and amelioration. It is the means to make change, rather than a device to stultify change.

support – a professional mentor must be in place to help students develop the ability to consider the overview and the detail together. The appropriate range of specialists – structural engineers, craftsmen, experienced architects and landscape designers need to be available to support the students who are new professionals – this is real life.

The case study presented in this paper is precisely NOT an exemplary methodology for undertaking and realising a live project. To claim so would be to misunderstand the purpose of variety management. What may be claimed as key to a live project are parameters such as 'the client', 'budget' and 'need' that must map onto a timescale – achieving that is the task of the mentor who mirrors Beer's (1974) process of variety attenuation by exploring a wide range of options before settling on defined projects that meet those requirements. Key also is that the students are responsible for engagement with refining the client's needs, interpreting and receiving feedback in order to move forward. They must manage the interpretation of the need, they develop the language to speak to Local Authorities, children, residents or patients, with mentor support they develop and refine the built result. The mentor instigates discussion, advises on material availability, aspects of team management, provides helpful references, buys biscuits – whatever is required to allow the team to work more effectively. It is the proof of effective risk management that no-one is aware of being managed, yet everyone operates effectively (and safely) because that is the obvious way to work.

tactics – actions required to advance the intention. The awareness of tactical decision making and its contribution to strategic objectives is a valuable lesson, practising the skills required to practice. When variety is attenuated at the outset of a project, the need for this form of contingent decision making is lost.

completion – live projects are not 'one-off's' – were that the case they would be missing the point. Only a body of experience that underpins new activity can actually manage variety effectively. Reflecting on past projects allows for extended learning, and gives benefit to those who come afterwards – at UEL year 5 Sustainability Masters students revisit their year 4 workshop, re-evaluating the effectiveness of their decisions and their workmanship through a self assessment and user interviews – a version of RIBA Stage M if you will. Students understand that handover is not the same as completion, and that when finished, the usefulness of a project really starts.

In conclusion, the variety of requirements available from working with real sites, timescales, budget constraints, user requirements and an economy of means, challenges students to understand that the task of architecture is to deliver a synthesis, and shows how risk management is another name for social responsibility.