Without even having sense enough to realize it, the provincial government appears to be on a mission to stamp out the architectural profession in Newfoundland and Labrador. Ignorance is bliss as the saying goes, and our current crop of politicians is every bit as clueless as their predecessors. If architects could gain status as an animal species, we’d be on the endangered list. There are less than fifty registered architects based in this province. Of that number, only about half currently have meaningful (i.e. profitable) work. And that number, under the crushing economic times we find ourselves in, is likely to shrink further.
Public buildings generate more work for architects than anything else. Thus it ever was. That is why governments (federal, provincial and municipal) are such coveted clients. But being reliant on government work can be extremely risky for architects, especially when the funding taps are turned off. New governments have a penchant for doing this. They want to demonstrate how fiscally responsible they intend to be.
For about twenty years, local architects have lost ground because of programming and design studies. These are “specialty” services that are undertaken when politicians and bureaucrats know that a building is required but have no idea what, in detail, will comprise said building. Let’s take for example, a hospital specific to mental health. Everyone knows we need one, but how many people could actually produce a list of rooms (together with associated systems and equipment) required for the facility and map out their interrelationships? This is where so-called architectural programmers come into the picture. They are supposed to provide that room list together with the crucial interrelationships so that preliminary budgets can be prepared and design architects can begin work.
Now forgive my bluntness, but in almost forty years of practice, I was handed literally dozens of programs for institutional buildings. The majority of these were completely useless as springboards for accurate costing or conceptual architectural design. But politicians and bureaucrats paid big money for these studies, and goddammit, they were to be implemented no matter how flawed. Worse still, regardless of how out of touch these programmers were with current treatment models or local situations, invariably, they were hired and rehired based on the sheer quantity of projects under their belt. With politicians and bureaucrats having moved on in their portfolios, the quality of the programming work, no matter how abysmal, was rarely questioned.
So for hospitals, courthouses or prisons (take your pick) bureaucracy dictated the need for a programmer. Their services grew. And they began to expand their credentials into conceptual architectural design. This was easy as they were never held accountable for the design and assumed no liability for it whatsoever. Their list of accomplishments grew, and this was equated to experience.
But as one of my old bosses used to say “Yeah, they had twenty years of experience – one experience twenty times over.”
Local architects have generally found building programs to be completely out of touch with resident conditions and demonstrate little evidence that the end users had had any say in program content. What worked in Seattle should work just fine in Newfoundland or Labrador. Right. Perhaps a scale and context issue. Let’s drive right over that…
Pier Luigi Nervi once said (allow me to paraphrase as I have spelled this out in a previous post) that the greatest stumbling block to the ideal architectural design was having done it before. Architects in this province cannot afford to specialize. They have to take on whatever comes their way, from strip malls to synagogues. This certainly broadens the mind in terms of approach – necessity being the mother of invention – but time after time, government proposal calls for design services focus on design experience rather than design success. Nervi rolls in his grave.
So local architects have been cut out of all front-end work and most institutional design work completely. We can’t be trusted. Not enough experience in specific building types. Despite this, on rare occasions when local architects have prepared building programs, they have been very credible. This is typical of responsible professionals given a chance: they research all the latest trends and determine what is pertinent based on direct engagement with the end users. However, given that this is usually in response to the revelation that the original program is not worth a tinker’s damn, they are seldom paid for their efforts. The bureaucrats insist that program “refinement” is part of the architectural scope.
For the past ten years, the Design-Build delivery model has further eroded architectural services and the quality of buildings. And more recently, we have the Ball government embracing the P3 model which tends to completely cut local architects out of any meaningful design role. We are nominated as “local associates”. The bulk of the fee ends up in the pockets of mainland multi-nationals and their shareholders.
What do we know anyway?
Well I was thinking of this today when CBC news reported that the Labrador Correctional Centre was suffering from chronic overcrowding. This was causing problems for inmates and guards.
I suspect that I am the only living soul that knows that each of that facility’s four wings was designed specifically for future expansion. Such an extension should have been declared a priority in 2008 when a report entitled “Decades of Darkness” called for structural changes to rectify deficiencies. Then Justice Minister Tom Marshall recognized the problem, but ultimately did nothing. In 2014, then Justice and Public Safety Minister Judy Manning was “looking at new and innovative ways to respond to these needs”. She ultimately made the same strides to address this as Marshall. None.
Our current Justice Minister Andrew Parsons says: “Capacity at the LCC is certainly an issue right now. In fact, capacity in all of our institutions in the province is a pressing issue, and something that really is a daily conversation for us.”
Well duh. Here’s a thought. Why not converse with the local architect. You might find out that each of the four wings at the LCC can be cost-effectively extended based on the original drawings. The number of cells can be increased by sixteen in a single construction season at relatively low cost, and that all the kitchen facilities, support spaces, security and building service systems were originally designed to accommodate this (now badly needed) extension.
But then why bother? You need a programming specialist to examine this you say? And then you we will need a mainland multi-national to take this on as a Design-Build or a P3?
Meanwhile, local architects close their doors for lack of work. Like the Great Auk, we are headed for extinction*.
*Please see Drew Brown’s excellent essay “Resurrecting the Great Auk” in the April 2018 online edition of the Newfoundland Quarterly. http://nqonline.ca/article/resurrecting-the-great-auk/