Scale and substance

Architecture is one of the few remaining cottage industries, where many work as sole practitioners and a medium scale company numbers below 50 people. In a world of supermarkets vs corner shops Architecture has, in the main, remained small scale. This is largely due to the desire by those heading the firms to stay in touch with the projects – they became architects to design. Of course larger teams are needed for larger projects and so some have grown to deal with just that. Despite the intense dialogue within the industry about craft-based vs international-scale, there are good and poor designers at all scales of practice in an industry geared up to match practice to project.

Recently however public procurement has been bundling smaller projects for ease of paperwork and economies of scale. This can mean a ‘small’ project (primary school or health centre) being given to larger practices for whom the total value of the all those projects is important, but no one project within that bundle is. However each project is vitally important to the people commissioning it and those who will use it; and here sits the mismatch in capacity and expectation.

The challenge for the cottage industry is how to provide the bespoke service that clients require in order to develop a facility that responds to local needs, whilst not wasting money reinventing the wheel. The answer probably lies around a more open and flexible approach to adopting elements of design that are tried and tested, requiring greater public ownership of that knowledge, and a way of cutting down the paperwork around appointments.