Introduce RIBA Stage Minus 1 to tackle embodied carbon – ADC

Introduce RIBA Stage Minus 1

Architects need to find a place at the table at the very earliest stages of a project – not to win or monopolise the work, but to help investigate whether the project is needed at all. This is not professional suicide or an admission of defeat, but a long overdue response to climate change. This is not RIBA stage 0 and 1 by a different name, nor is it intended to compete with or replace a client advisory role – it is doing what architects are good at: thinking, reimagining and questioning perceived wisdom.

At this stage of a project, much work has already been done. But it is often predicated on poor information and has often been completed in fragments over a long period of time and by the wrong people. Surveyors shouldn’t be expected to masterplan; neuroscientists are not schooled in brief writing. Estate departments rarely know enough about their stock. Initial briefings often exclude the building users. They focus on numbers, desk allocation, class sizes or utilisation rates and hide behind fluid business cases or unseen grant criteria. Briefs are reduced to numbers. Due diligence is assembled but isn’t crossed referenced.

Defining the problem

In the 25 years I have spent working in the educational sector I have never been shown a brief that is based on a holistic interrogation of user needs or any clear idea as to how the project fits into the university as a whole. Millions of pounds and unknowable quantities of enthusiasm, carbon and time are wasted because decisions are based on poor information, or at best, information that hasn’t been cross-referenced or interrogated, or interpreted with open eyes.

There are good historical reasons why this phase is underestimated, and therefore under resourced. There is often no seed money for research. Funding comes as the cement sets, not whilst it’s still pliable, and just at the tipping point where the pressure to continue outweighs the costs of aborting.

The sheer number of people involved makes open and common-sense dialogue hard. Universities are riddled with unspoken personal agendas, alliances, territorial beefs, hard fought-for fiefdoms and pyramids of power making it hard to know where the power is, or, more critically, who cares. Consultant teams are not employed by the users, but by estates teams. Projects often fester for months, sometimes years, before an architect is involved, by which time many of the big decisions have been made. This early work defines a carbon budget, the level of ambition, and suggests the type of consultancy team required before the fundamental issues have been adequately identified or agreed. The consultant team is brought in to deliver, rather than to collaborate or question.

Planning ahead

It shouldn’t be like this. This is the most precious time in any project. It has the most potential to lead to the best outcome, save time and costs, and lead to a project which is loved and so will last. It is also the part of the project with the most potential to make significant carbon savings. It is reckoned that around 80 per cent of a project’s carbon footprint has already been committed by RIBA stage 2. It’s the part that sets the trajectory for all other decisions to follow. This phase is deeply analytical but also requires imagination and some bravery.

In an attempt to redress these issues we have developed a tool kit, or process, designed to sit in front of any project. It has been designed around our experience in higher education but the principles are applicable to any construction project.

Evaluating the key issues

We began by acknowledging some fundamental immutable principles. Climate change is a reality. Scientifically speaking, we are teetering on the edge of a waterfall in a single-use plastic canoe, while arguing about the most effective way to calculate the height and velocity of our fall.

Changing legislation will dramatically impact on the way estates are built, refurbished, operated and maintained. But we are not going to specify, legislate, or petition our way out of this mess.

Smart use of existing assets, alongside modern, cleaner materials, is reducing operational carbon but the only effective way to reduce embodied carbon is simply to build less.

People are more flexible than we imagine and have vastly different concerns from those who build their environments.

Technology is out-pacing everyone, so there’s no point in making everything bespoke.

Universities, for all their magnificence, are failing to deliver education that acknowledges a radically changed future. Their uninterrupted growth can no longer be assumed. Digital competitors pose a potentially fatal threat to institutions that can’t or won’t evolve. Conversely, university courses are increasingly designed to be ‘digital first’ supplemented by face-to-face, human support.

Today’s students are discerning, diverse and savvy with a post-grant, post-pandemic mindset. Their worlds are fluid, flexible, multi-channelled, and now digitally centred across multiple platforms. The average Generation Z bod will spend up to eight hours across a variety of screens and devices in a day. Their existence was never not facing a planetary emergency. They were born into the beginnings of a sharing economy, ideas of ownership are less rigid, and less likely, gig jobs are normal (and even embraced), and there’s no expectation to have a single career for life. Critically, they can and do compare anything in seconds, which includes the quality of their education.

The educational ‘space’ has expanded, it is no longer campus based or even physical. The smart devices used to order pizzas and submit assignments are also a portal directly into that space between their ears. Teacher-centred learning has given way to learner-centred progress.

Following the latest wave of the Covid 19 pandemic we know just how flexible society can be. For two years we (mostly) followed orders, stopped hugging and kept apart. The physical relevance, the collaborative possibilities, and that almost antique glow of civic protection that universities once offered has been dimmed. It is no longer as clear who they serve, how to serve and what they ought to look like.

It makes sense to consider these issues at the point in the project’s lifecycle where decisions cost least and the impact is greatest. It’s helpful to think of change, not only in terms of its physical implications, but also through the lens of operational, cultural and psychological factors. We call these the ‘soft’ levers – everything else that can change before the building needs to.

Reading cities

One director of estates said to me recently, “Campuses are actually only three things: people, buildings and technology” – which is technically true. But as a student who grew up under the spell of Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities; I know there is more at stake. Both texts have always occupied a mythical space in my consciousness. Soft City was out of print for most of my education, so its contents were more a rumour than actual. Calvino’s offering to my twenty-something provincial self was mostly unintelligible, but completely captivating. I knew something important was being communicated but I couldn’t exactly say what.

In Soft City Jonathon Raban talks about the metropolis in terms of its ‘software’ and ‘hardware’. About the stuff that flows through it: people, wealth, time and now data; and the rocks: the hardscape and buildings that alter their course and in doing so are both forever changed. Both books say something about cities that is palpably true but very hard to get into a spreadsheet.

Cities – read also buildings and universities – are more than the sum of their physical parts; they are also what we bring and take from them – they are meditations on culture, language, time, memory and then death.

Soft levers

Last year a London university recently took the radical decision to pull hard on these soft levers by condensing two-year masters’ courses into a single year, hence quadrupling the number of MAs it can offer without adding to its building stock. It did this by taking out most of the holidays, extending hours, and requiring its students to alternate between two weeks on campus and two weeks working from home. Every night some three million London commuters leave a shiny heated box and spend an hour or so travelling in another shiny moving box to arrive at the smaller box they left that morning, which has been mostly empty all day. Only 6,000 people actually live in the square mile, but this jumps to 358,000 on an average weekday. We have plenty of space. The critical issue is how we choose to share it.

Starting with the now and why

So before we make more space, or draft another schedule of accommodation, let’s look at what an ideal world might like. Let’s test the limits of the software: people, time, technology, culture, and be more precious with the physical environment that constitutes the hardware.

Get to know your building inside out. What it can do, can’t do, doesn’t do. Understand its fragilities, its dependants, its worth and its state of decay. Talk to the users, not the users’ boss, or the users’ boss’s boss. Better still, let them talk between themselves.

Start with the NOW. How do you work? How do you communicate? What types of activities are distinct; what are common? Then the WHY. Why do you exist or matter? What are your values – your collective purpose? This is rarely discussed, but is everything.

Move to more granular questions. What do you have? Catalogue everything: rooms, storage, equipment, IT, people, skills, capacity, staplers. Identify ‘roles’. What types of work need to be done and what is required to make it happen?

Would longer and more flexible opening times work? Where are the limits – the edges? Is there scope to adopt different working practices, embrace overlapping functions, explore different funding models, make existing space work harder through the use of responsive timetabling and booking apps? What happens if nothing changes?

Agree the future. What are the differences between the future that I aspired to and the reality that already exists? What needs to be added to the ‘catalogue’ – and what does not belong? What are the obstacles? Think about ‘soft’ solutions: working hours, locations, other peripatetic possibilities, and the limits of the sharing economy – ideas that are cultural, managerial, and not necessarily nailed down. Think about ‘hard’ solutions. What is rigid? What can bend? And, the biggest question of all: what happens if all this changes?

This needs to be an internal conversation, led not by estates departments or hired guns, but by the faculty itself: the workers, thinker, cleaners, students, and teachers who have little interest in grand gestures, sunk costs or consultancy fees but a very direct interest in the institution’s long-term survival and ability to thrive. The architect’s role is to listen, to analyse to exercise, and to encourage imagination, bravery and care. To use architectural skills to define and map complex relationships. To visualise different possibilities and futures. To see and unlock the value in what’s already there.

Greg Shannon, LTS Architects