Ike Ijeh is Head of Housing, Architecture & Urban Space at Policy Exchange.
The schools concrete crisis brutally exposes one of the most important public policy issues of our day. The quality and design of public buildings is vital for any functioning and successful society, and there are few places where this requirement is more onerous than our schools. And yet the full or partial closure of a number of them last week casts light on how, for whatever reasons, the political and professional overseers charged with the protection of our public infrastructure have been unable to deliver the standards the public has a right to expect.
Beauty and good design are paramount in the creation of a healthy and thriving public realm. But beauty is not just a question of aesthetics, nor is it the preoccupation of a pampered few; Scrutonian philosophers who daydream of a bygone age. From the publication of Policy Exchange’s first Building Beautiful report in 2018 co-written by Roger Scruton himself, the Building Beautiful programme has been misconstrued as a vehicle for visual beauty alone.
This is not the case, and both the programme, and beauty itself, are based on an innate ideological preoccupation with the precepts of order, harmony, balance, efficiency and longevity in all things. As such, beauty is also directly related to the safety and performance issues that are at the heart of the concrete crisis and a stronger professional adherence to these principles could have helped avoid it.
Because the fact remains that for decades, we as a society have consistently failed to uphold the same standards of beauty, durability, craftsmanship and construction required to make our public buildings, including schools, last for 130 years and not just 30.
It is no coincidence that the schools affected were primarily built in the 1950s and 1960s, a period whose avowed Corbusien influences viewed buildings as machines and often designed them with a mechanistic level of soulnessness to match. All too frequently, this resulted in a preponderance of badly designed, poorly built and cheaply assembled glass and concrete slabs many of which, as RAAC demonstrates, are approaching obsolescence today.
And yet the failures of this approach to design are brought home when we contemplate the fact that we now have schools 150 years old in perfectly workable condition, while facing the need to drastically rebuild school buildings sometimes a fifth of this age because they pose a potential risk to staff and pupils. As with all old buildings they may require assiduous refurbishment, but how many of our Victorian and Edwardian schools are at risk of falling down?
Our endless pursuit of technology, standardisation and innovation has obviously had merits. But in that pursuit we have lost a core human understanding that our forbears were all too aware of: that good design just doesn’t matter because it is beautiful – it matters because it lasts longer and therefore costs less.
The abandonment of this mantra now leaves us with an architectural stock whose need for near constant rehabilitation not only renders it a periodic drain on the public purse, but makes it far too piecemeal and ephemeral to ever meaningfully impact on our urban landscape or communal consciousness in the way that good architecture should aspire to do.
And public buildings should be the primary forum where good architecture stakes a visible presence. Places are the critical civic channels that transform private buildings into public realm and, as Policy Exchange’s Better Places report argued earlier this year, they are vital to constructing the high-quality urban fabric necessary for social wellbeing and economic growth. Schools are part of this social and civic infrastructure – therefore, their performance in both architectural and academic terms is of paramount importance.
Moreover, history offers a precedent for schools that are designed well, durable, built for the working classes, constructed from traditional materials rather than complex concrete solutions, delivered in a successful national programme and are still in use today – effectively many of the characteristics Policy Exchange’s Building Beautiful programme advocates: the Victorian Board Schools.
With their tall windows, multi-storeyed facades, red and buff brickwork, Dutch gable ends and segmental arches, Victorian Board Schools are amongst the most distinctive built features on the British urban landscape with almost 400 built in London alone. Their chief London architect, E.R. Robson, described the schools as “sermons in brick” and, in a remarkably prescient nods towards our own levelling up preoccupations, was unequivocal about their intent:
“If we can make the homes of these poor persons brighter, more interesting, nobler, by so treating the necessary Board Schools planted in their midst so as to make each building undertake a sort of leavening influence, we have set on foot a permanent and ever-active good.”
Of course the Board Schools had their problems too, as successive waves of refurbishment in recent decades have proven. In particular their vast windows, high ceilings and paltry insulation produced vast heating bills and made their occupants liable to freeze in the winter and roast every summer. Equally, it would be absurd to propose building schools today in the way they were constructed in Victorian England.
But in their seamless consolidation of aesthetics and utility, the Board Schools arguably remain the high-point of any British state school building programme and offer us much to learn about how beauty and efficiency can be delivered within an ambitious public works template that lasts for generations.
It is ironic that the Building Schools for the Future programme, the Labour government’s flagship school rebuilding programme in the 2000s, recommended demolition of several board schools for sparkling modern replacements that would inevitably and probably sooner rather than later, have fallen prey to the same weary cycle of periodic oblivion RAAC is now inflicting elsewhere. All of this indicative of a government mindset obsessed with expediency over excellence.
But is only an unwavering political commitment to excellence that will stop the RAAC crises of the future occurring. As Policy Exchange’s School of Place report argued last year, we need to improve the skills of the professions charged with creating our public realm and buildings to ensure that they are capable of delivering the quality and endurance society expects.
We need a school rebuilding programme that more forensically identifies the schools in most critical need of refurbishment. We need more efficient building management systems capable of alerting owners when key building fabric components are approaching the end of their lifespan to allow replacement before they become critical.
But first and foremost we need a step-change from our planning, political and professional classes that no longer dismisses beauty as a hostage to subjectivity but ensures that our public buildings are crafted by the timeless and age old adherences to durability, performance and civic responsibility that beauty intrinsically demands.
Ike Ijeh is Head of Housing, Architecture & Urban Space at Policy Exchange.
The schools concrete crisis brutally exposes one of the most important public policy issues of our day. The quality and design of public buildings is vital for any functioning and successful society, and there are few places where this requirement is more onerous than our schools. And yet the full or partial closure of a number of them last week casts light on how, for whatever reasons, the political and professional overseers charged with the protection of our public infrastructure have been unable to deliver the standards the public has a right to expect.
Beauty and good design are paramount in the creation of a healthy and thriving public realm. But beauty is not just a question of aesthetics, nor is it the preoccupation of a pampered few; Scrutonian philosophers who daydream of a bygone age. From the publication of Policy Exchange’s first Building Beautiful report in 2018 co-written by Roger Scruton himself, the Building Beautiful programme has been misconstrued as a vehicle for visual beauty alone.
This is not the case, and both the programme, and beauty itself, are based on an innate ideological preoccupation with the precepts of order, harmony, balance, efficiency and longevity in all things. As such, beauty is also directly related to the safety and performance issues that are at the heart of the concrete crisis and a stronger professional adherence to these principles could have helped avoid it.
Because the fact remains that for decades, we as a society have consistently failed to uphold the same standards of beauty, durability, craftsmanship and construction required to make our public buildings, including schools, last for 130 years and not just 30.
It is no coincidence that the schools affected were primarily built in the 1950s and 1960s, a period whose avowed Corbusien influences viewed buildings as machines and often designed them with a mechanistic level of soulnessness to match. All too frequently, this resulted in a preponderance of badly designed, poorly built and cheaply assembled glass and concrete slabs many of which, as RAAC demonstrates, are approaching obsolescence today.
And yet the failures of this approach to design are brought home when we contemplate the fact that we now have schools 150 years old in perfectly workable condition, while facing the need to drastically rebuild school buildings sometimes a fifth of this age because they pose a potential risk to staff and pupils. As with all old buildings they may require assiduous refurbishment, but how many of our Victorian and Edwardian schools are at risk of falling down?
Our endless pursuit of technology, standardisation and innovation has obviously had merits. But in that pursuit we have lost a core human understanding that our forbears were all too aware of: that good design just doesn’t matter because it is beautiful – it matters because it lasts longer and therefore costs less.
The abandonment of this mantra now leaves us with an architectural stock whose need for near constant rehabilitation not only renders it a periodic drain on the public purse, but makes it far too piecemeal and ephemeral to ever meaningfully impact on our urban landscape or communal consciousness in the way that good architecture should aspire to do.
And public buildings should be the primary forum where good architecture stakes a visible presence. Places are the critical civic channels that transform private buildings into public realm and, as Policy Exchange’s Better Places report argued earlier this year, they are vital to constructing the high-quality urban fabric necessary for social wellbeing and economic growth. Schools are part of this social and civic infrastructure – therefore, their performance in both architectural and academic terms is of paramount importance.
Moreover, history offers a precedent for schools that are designed well, durable, built for the working classes, constructed from traditional materials rather than complex concrete solutions, delivered in a successful national programme and are still in use today – effectively many of the characteristics Policy Exchange’s Building Beautiful programme advocates: the Victorian Board Schools.
With their tall windows, multi-storeyed facades, red and buff brickwork, Dutch gable ends and segmental arches, Victorian Board Schools are amongst the most distinctive built features on the British urban landscape with almost 400 built in London alone. Their chief London architect, E.R. Robson, described the schools as “sermons in brick” and, in a remarkably prescient nods towards our own levelling up preoccupations, was unequivocal about their intent:
“If we can make the homes of these poor persons brighter, more interesting, nobler, by so treating the necessary Board Schools planted in their midst so as to make each building undertake a sort of leavening influence, we have set on foot a permanent and ever-active good.”
Of course the Board Schools had their problems too, as successive waves of refurbishment in recent decades have proven. In particular their vast windows, high ceilings and paltry insulation produced vast heating bills and made their occupants liable to freeze in the winter and roast every summer. Equally, it would be absurd to propose building schools today in the way they were constructed in Victorian England.
But in their seamless consolidation of aesthetics and utility, the Board Schools arguably remain the high-point of any British state school building programme and offer us much to learn about how beauty and efficiency can be delivered within an ambitious public works template that lasts for generations.
It is ironic that the Building Schools for the Future programme, the Labour government’s flagship school rebuilding programme in the 2000s, recommended demolition of several board schools for sparkling modern replacements that would inevitably and probably sooner rather than later, have fallen prey to the same weary cycle of periodic oblivion RAAC is now inflicting elsewhere. All of this indicative of a government mindset obsessed with expediency over excellence.
But is only an unwavering political commitment to excellence that will stop the RAAC crises of the future occurring. As Policy Exchange’s School of Place report argued last year, we need to improve the skills of the professions charged with creating our public realm and buildings to ensure that they are capable of delivering the quality and endurance society expects.
We need a school rebuilding programme that more forensically identifies the schools in most critical need of refurbishment. We need more efficient building management systems capable of alerting owners when key building fabric components are approaching the end of their lifespan to allow replacement before they become critical.
But first and foremost we need a step-change from our planning, political and professional classes that no longer dismisses beauty as a hostage to subjectivity but ensures that our public buildings are crafted by the timeless and age old adherences to durability, performance and civic responsibility that beauty intrinsically demands.