Everyone is an architect. It is as easy as pie. You draw a box here and call it the kitchen, and another box and call it the loungeroom and so on. Any idiot can do it. Just like any idiot can write. Or teach. Ho-hum.
This message comes from a “”profession” that truly any idiot can do – be an economist.
The Productivity Commission put out a report a week ago on the architectural profession (www.pc.gov.au). It ran to 100 pages. They need not have bothered. We all know what a Productivity Commission report is going to say about anything: deregulate, let the market decide, allow and encourage self-regulation.
The report said there should be “”no restrictions on use of the generic title “architect’ and its derivatives”. Anyone should be allowed to call themselves architect, the commission thought. Instead of regulation, “”the practice of architecture and building design should not be restricted”. It rejected the idea that consumers would be confused. It thought that general building and planning laws and fair-trading laws would be enough to do the job.
We have had a decade and a half of this sort of tripe. Surely by now we should realise it does not work. Self-regulation means practitioners of whatever group get away with whatever they can without sanction. Letting the market decide presumes that consumers have perfect knowledge of the market, which they never do, and it presumes that someone will go into bat for the consumer when things go wrong, which rarely happens.
When you look at the state of professions in Australia it seems the less the regulation, the lower the esteem with which the public hold them. Journalism, I am reluctant to say, is perhaps the least regulated. Used-car sellers, real-estate-agents and prostitutes are slightly more regulated and respected. Economists slightly less regulated. Politicians are completely self-regulating (by their nature and are held in utter contempt. Professions held in high regard are the highly regulated ones: nurses, doctors, plumbers and electricians. Sure, it is not an immutable rule, but the trend is that deregulation brings disrespect and ignorant consumers left worse off.
Monopolies can be pernicious, but better to ensure open access to a profession that remains regulated than to deregulate and hope self-regulation works.
With architecture, now is the worse time to throw open building, landscape and city design to all-comers.
The report said, “”Evidence suggests that many consumers regard particular services provided by non-architects as closely substitutable with those provided by architects. The relevant market in which architects compete is the market for building design and related services.”
This used this as an argument for deregulation. The arguments runs that if the consumer cannot distinguish why allow what little regulation there is to distinguish architects.
But it should be an argument in the opposite direction. If the consuming masses are too ignorant or stupid to distinguish between architecture and a non-architect drawing lines on a bit of paper, they need to be protected against themselves in the interests of society as a whole, at least until great knowledge suffuses the market so the bad practitioners get starved out.
The commission thought that general building and planning laws and fair trading laws are doing the job better than the limited regulation that we have now – regulation that goes little beyond giving only qualified architects the right to call themselves architects.
The commission has got the wrong end of the stick.
It is wrong to say the present market is in building design. There is very little market in Australia for design. There is a huge market for building specifications that meet local government requirements. But that is a very different thing from design.
Most domestic building is done with an eye to a real-estate agent’s advertisement. Most commercial building is done with an eye to immediate building cost per square metre.
Very few people seem to understand the value of long-term cost, especially long-term environmental cost. They will only insulate when forced. They rarely orient their buildings to take advantage of solar passive heating. Very little innovation is tried. They just tick the boxes on the local-government compliance forms.
The remedy is not less regulation, but more regulation. At present, building standards are pitiful and local governments do not have the talent and staff to resist poor design. Indeed, a lot of regulation positively encourages bad, unsustainable, high-energy cost building. For example, in many places with maximum plot ratios, “”designers” chop off the eaves to get more interior space to make a more “”attractive” real-estate advertisement – 20 squares instead of 19. The result is that windows get the full blast of the summer sun. They dig garages in and under at huge cost so the garages are not classified as part of the plot ratio.
In commercial buildings the standards of insulation, passive solar and heat pump technology are woeful.
We should be concerned about greenhouse gases, the high cost of petrol and the high cost of heating and cooling. These require investment up front for later gain. But most of the Australian building scene is only concerned with up-front building costs and bang for bucks now. Too bad for the future occupiers of these buildings who will have to put up with spiralling energy costs to heat and cool them when it could have been avoided with a little design and investment up-front (compulsory if necessary).
NSW Premier Bob Carr is thinking of making design by architect compulsory for all three-storey and above buildings in NSW. He will still need to set some high government standards and fund government authorities to provide the talent to enforce them.
The path suggested by the Productivity Commission is for a very marginal lowering of costs up front at a huge extra cost in the future. It is a blinkered view that looks only at money now, not at total cost and the huge intangible benefits that come from good design.
The “”market” is not square meterage of building, but places to live, work and play that are attractive and functional for the very long time and market forces on their own will not do that.
There are exceptions to the dismal pattern, but far too few buildings are architect-designed. The achitectural profession has made a start, but it has got a long way to go in educating the public (the commission’s market) about the value of good design. And it does not help to have the commission hauling building standards in the wrong direction by suggesting anyone can draw a plan for a building. You do that cheaply in haste and repent at cost over a very long time.