‘The horrific fire at Grenfell Tower … may emerge as the latest, and most tragic, manifestation of decreasing oversight that architects have been warning about for so long … Design and build [produced] a transfer of risk, with the balance of power shifting from the contract administrator (a role most often fulfilled by the architect) to the builder.’
I wrote these words just a few months after the inferno at Grenfell Tower took 72 lives. This quote and the article it was taken from were submitted in evidence by the Bereaved, Survivors and Residents (BSR) group to the public inquiry, which last week published its long-awaited final phase 2 report.
There’s a lot to digest in the more than 1,700 pages, and they make for a sobering read. It’s difficult to feel proud of being part of an industry that allowed this to happen.
The inclusion of my article in the evidence demonstrates that the BSR group understood from early on that a pervading culture of negligence, ambiguity and obfuscation enabled the Grenfell tragedy to happen. Yet, working through the final report, it seems there’s little acknowledgement of this fact. While the public inquiry has diligently diagnosed the symptoms, it has ignored the disease. And that malady is design and build.
There are just 19 mentions of design and build in the 326 pages of Part 6 of the report, which covers the refurbishment of the tower itself. The inquiry did not look closely at design and build because industry procurement somehow fell outside the scope of its investigations as defined by the terms of reference chosen by then prime minister Theresa May in 2017.
But the inquiry was tasked with examining the decisions relating to the tower’s ‘modification, refurbishment and management’ and, to me, it’s an inescapable fact that poor procurement and the diminishment of quality are inextricably intertwined with the decisions at the heart of what went wrong. Design and build doesn’t just allow a culture of dereliction of responsibility to perpetuate; it positively encourages it.
Consider for a moment one striking scenario outlined in the findings, when the Celotex RS5000 insulation was suddenly switched for Kingspan K15 without approval by anyone in a position of authority or oversight. The report describes how photographs ‘indicate that [Kingspan K15] was certainly used on the west side of the tower, but the precise locations where it was used are not known and cannot be established given that much of the insulation was consumed in the fire.’
The report goes on to describe how nobody from main contractor Rydon ‘consulted the TMO [tenant management organisation] or informed building control that a substitution was going to be, or had in fact been, made’.
So, a unilateral decision was at some point made to switch one product for another, without this being approved prior, or recorded afterward. As it happens, neither product was suitable for use in this application so the outcome was the same. But what if they’d decided to replace a non-combustible product with an inflammable one? And how many other changes were made that weren’t recorded?
More importantly, this poses serious questions about our knowledge of what else is out there. We are already too aware of the thousands of buildings that have been covered in combustible cladding, but how many more are there that we assume are safe but have in fact been wrapped in flammable materials, hidden away behind innocuous façades? And what other perilous changes have been made to details or material selections in buildings that have yet to come to light? I know of at least one building where flammable cladding was removed to reveal a previously unknown problem with the concrete frame that rendered the entire building structurally unsound. Make no mistake: this is design and build in action.
Design and build became the default form of contracting for large projects in the late 90s and early 2000s when clients realised that they could offload much of their risk on to builders willing to accept it. Yet all that happened was contractors passed that risk down their supply chains; on to subcontractors and consultants – those least able to accommodate it. Architects had their fees slashed and their authority diminished, and were incapable of understanding their place within the increasingly entangled web of responsibilities.
The inquiry found that ‘Rydon was responsible for inspecting the work done by [façade contractor] Harley and other subcontractors at Grenfell Tower’, but failed to acknowledge that it is nonsensical for one company to be responsible for checking what’s happening on site, and a different consultant, Studio E in this case, to be recording this information.
‘As built’ drawings, according to the inquiry, ‘are part of the information that should be handed over to the building owner as part of the health and safety file and are clearly an important record of the construction for future users of the building’. Yet this is a source of never-ending dispute. Building contracts and CDM Regulations demand this information is produced at the conclusion of every project, but it is a foolish architect who takes blind responsibility for others’ work. Instead, we’ll usually settle on insurer-approved phasing: ‘final design’ or ‘as instructed’ or something similarly non-committal, but this hardly gives confidence to the facilities management team when they need to replace a broken window or a concealed pipe.
That Studio E appears to have stamped drawings ‘as approved’ speaks more to their naivety than their negligence. How can any architect in their right mind claim to know what’s been installed on a building when others routinely change specification without regard to the documentation setting out what needs to be done?
There are also limits to what a reasonably competent architect can be expected to understand, and we are increasingly reliant on the specialist expertise of others to fill the gaps in our knowledge. The conductor of an orchestra knows how a symphony should sound, yet she might not know how to play each and every instrument. Design and build not only deprives the architect of the baton, it demotes us to somewhere in the second violins, leaving the podium vacant. And while we might all be looking at the same sheets of music, even the most capable musicians will struggle to make much more than an unlistenable cacophony.
None of this is to let Studio E off the hook. It was neither qualified nor capable of taking on a project of this complexity, and fully deserved the condemnation it received for its lack of professionalism and cavalier attitude to risk. Its acceptance of a fee of around half what it should have charged for a project of this size is a lesson for public sector clients everywhere. But every decent architect out there will know the familiar feeling of being undercut to a level where we know it’s impossible to carry out the most basic of services. There must surely come a point when rock-bottom fees should be considered professionally negligent: there’s no miraculous way to design a building for half the cost; you just end up making 50 per cent of the effort.
Fundamentally, the inquiry has misunderstood the nature of the relationships between different parties within modern contracting. It demands that the architect take responsibility for approving the work of others, as if some unwritten hierarchy exists that empowers them to instruct changes, order the redoing of unsatisfactory work, and keep the client informed when things go awry. Yet we jettisoned these powers when we allowed our appointments to be transferred to builders.
Instead of serving society, our obligations are now to the interests of shareholders. Post-planning, Studio E was novated to Rydon, with any contractual bond with the original client, and its tenants severed. Any temptation (or moral obligation) to report derogations from the employer’s requirements would have constituted a breach of contract. Why did the inquiry not question this?
The report concludes that ‘such a casual approach to contractual relations is a recipe for disaster if events take an unexpected turn. All those involved in whatever capacity in a complex project need to understand clearly what they have agreed to do and what they are responsible for.’
This may be true, and we can introduce all of the legislative reforms and corrective regulations we like. But until we fundamentally transform the culture of construction in the UK, I can’t see that we’ll have learned very much from the Grenfell tragedy at all.
This article originally appeared in the Architects’ Journal on 13 September 2024.