Time to redefine competence?

Last Sunday, I was working an "Expert" at the Homebuilding & Renovating show and I got asked a question which set me thinking. First the question.

A guy is planning to build a house and he hates trickle vents, but he also doesn't want to use mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. His preferred window maker produces a window with a vent-open setting which he is happy with, but he has heard that this doesn't meet with British building regs. Is that right and, if so, what are his options?

It's a good question and it's not the first time I have been asked it. The ventilation regs - Part F - aren't exactly black and white on this issue but they make it difficult for people wanting to use the ventilation or night latch solution because they are required to demonstrate that the ventilation is controlled. Or, to be more precise, that the opening is not too big and not too small. A figure of 5000mm2 per room is bandied about as if this is the key - any less and you will suffocate, any more and you will be wasting energy. Whilst trickle vents are thus routinely manufactured for UK joinery firms to provide this opening (i.e. they are built to the regs), foreign manufacturers don't build with British regs in mind and therefore don't provide any information on their ventilation opening sizes. Hence they run into problems with Part F.

Now whether this is really a matter of public health, or a sneaky way of keeping Continental joinery manufacturers out of the UK market is a matter of debate which I won't dwell on here. My guess is that the more relaxed type of building inspector will be happy to accept the Continental solution, but the sticklers will throw the rule book at you and won't play ball. They will want a 5000mm2 (and not a mm2 less) opening or whole house MVHR, and nothing else will do.

Which brings me onto my main point. Why should this arbitrary power rest with the building inspector? The guidance in Part F has been written deliberately fuzzy so as allow a little leeway in interpretation, and yet the building inspector still gets to act as judge and jury on the outcome.

Which in turn brings me onto the issue of competence. As the building regs have grown ever more complex (and some would say intrusive), the power of the building inspector has slowly ebbed away. First, the role became subject to private competition, so that we now have different building control bodies with slightly different interpretations of the rules. Nowhere is this more pronounced than the world of multifoils where the TRADA-backed claims are now rejected by the establishment building control bodies (LABC, NHBC) but are happily waived through by many small private inspectors.

Secondly, areas of building regulation supervision have been removed from traditional building inspectors and placed in the hands of "competent professionals." Here we are talking about gas plumbing, glazing, electrics, boiler installation, solid fuel, SAP calculations, maybe even a few more I can't think of at the moment. The reason for this is mostly one of cost. Whilst the ambit of the building regs has expanded, the money available for their policing hasn't, so there simply aren't enough inspectors around to check every replacement window or boiler. So schemes like FENSA (for windows) and HETAS (for solid fuel appliances) have been created to supervise and sign off the work.

Can you see where this is heading? If we can accept private building inspectors, and if we can accept areas of the building regs that just get signed off as having been done competently by some bod in a van who has been on a course, why not go the whole hog and have suitably qualified builders and architects who can sign off entire buildings as "meets current building regs?"

Now this isn't a new suggestion. It was looked at in 1999 by the pre-cursor of the DCLG and "there was no support at that time for self-certification for whole buildings." But perhaps they didn't ask the right people? Or maybe professional practices baulk at the thought of the added liability of taking on all this extra responsibility. But it's hard to escape the logic and in an era of cuts, it's probably the way of the future. Afterall, surgeons don't have operation inspectors passing their every move, so why should competent builders or architects?


How would it work, such a system? Well big practices would probably hire redundant building inspectors to become part of the design team to keep everything tickety-boo and up to date. Smaller ones might still use the existing system, or hire in professionals as and when needed. There would have to be a spot-checking system in place (obviously) but there might also be the freedom to negotiate outcomes with clients, rather than the checkbox mentality which pervades the whole process at the moment. So if our trickle-vent hating selfbuilder wanted to use a Continental solution, he could do so on the understanding that it might be deemed to be non-standard and might effect the resale value of his house.

One area where I feel it could make a vast improvement is in the handling of listed building consents. At the moment, these get snagged up for ever and a day by conservation officers who are able to play God with what you can and can't do to a listed building, without so much as a nod towards cost or time. I'm frequently hearing of listed building projects being delayed by up to a year by the machinations of sometimes dubiously-qualified officials who find it very easy to say "No" to almost anything. Why not let the architects or builders take the same courses and get a similar qualification and then let them decide with the client how best to sympathetically restore a listed building?

Competence. It's all in that word. Perhaps it's time for our building professionals to step up to the plate and demand that they be treated like they have it.

Lynne Sullivan, OBE

I've been meaning to write about the work of Lynne Sullivan for some time, ever since I happened upon the Sullivan Report back in 2007. Lynne produced a really good guide to show how Scotland could develop its sustainable built environment, and it contrasted with many of the dubious outpourings from Westminster and Watford at around the same time. I've met her a few times since and been impressed by her understanding of all these issues that feature here on this blog, and she has helped me with one or two leads.

She now runs her own consultancy called Sustainable By Design and in truth she doesn't need bigging up by me because she has a CV that might be described a glittering if you were that way inclined. And now to top it off, she has been awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List. Well done, Lynne.

Are there any architects out there?

In my unofficial role as selfbuild agony uncle, I get some interesting and sometimes off-beat requests. But Janice Diamond's email last week stands out from the crowd. She's had such trouble finding the right architect that she's built a website to advertise for one. It's here. And it looks like a fantastic site as well, deep in the heart of the Lake District. She writes:

I was hoping that you may be able to give me some advice about how to find the right architect.

For some years I have been looking for an architect to design a new home on an existing plot in Rosthwaite in the Borrowdale valley in Cumbria.

The site is in a National Trust area, a very sensitive area. At present on the plot is a pre-fabricated building built in 1921. I have spoken to the planning officer so I know that I will be able to build a two story dwelling.

I have spoken to quite a few architects in the region. I specifically wanted the architect to use 3D technology and this ruled out quite a few. A few that were recommended were too busy even to get back to me. One told me that there was over a two year waiting list, and I couldn't get back to speak to him.

One architect that I contacted did go as far as doing an outline design , did all the measurements etc but had not understood me when I said that I wanted the best of the views. He put the ensuite and walk in wardrobes for the main upstairs bedroom where the view should have been. Downstairs he put an open fire where you would want the glass windows to look at the view and insisted that this was a good idea.

I thought that I'd found the right architect when I found one that was brilliant on the 3D. However, to cut a long story short he was already very busy with too much work and I didn't feel that he had the time to spend the time on my project.

It seemed to me that the work that most architects in the Lake District are fully occupied with renovations as well.

I next contacted RIBA and they sent me some contacts in the Lake District. Two of these I had already been in touch with. I phoned a third who was based further down in Kendal and they weren't really interested as they too were very busy with renovation work and suggested I try architects further South, like Lancaster.

Please could you advise me on the best action to take, ie would it be best to advertise ? and if so where would the best place be to do this.

Rogers v Windsor

I must say I am enjoying this spat. For all the nice noises the Prince has made about architects recently, and for all the RIBA’s welcoming the Prince back into their midst, fundamentally they loathe each other and the Chelsea Barracks affair has brought it all out in the open.

Rogers sounds just so piqued. He asks rhetorically: “Are we going to have royalty dictating to us modern art? Are we going to have royalty dictating their taste in music? Are we going to have royalty dictating their belief in medicine, modern or not?”

But who was the client at Chelsea Barracks? None other than the Qatari royal family.

Europe's smallest towers?

I misread the headline. I was sure it said “Foster unveils Western Europe’s smallest towers.” I smiled. I thought, what a lovely story, the guy’s got it at last. Let’s hear it for tiny towers.

But it was, of course, tallest, not smallest. And here they are in all their glory lording it over Paris. No, our tax-exile starchitect doesn’t get it at all, does he?

God, I think I’m turning into Prince Charles.

How to sack an architect

Interesting question today at the Homebuilding & Renovating show on which I was stumbling over the answer, when up turned Julian Owen, leading figure in ASBA. The questioner had used an architect for planning drawings but wasn’t overly impressed by the service and didn’t want to employ him for the follow-on stage, the detailed drawings, and was looking to appoint someone else. However the architect was acting miffed and said he couldn’t have the drawings because they were copyrighted and he had to employ him for the follow-up stage as well. An impasse had ensued.

Julian reckoned that the architect in question was pulling a fast one. Unless the client had specifically signed a contract with the architect saying that he would employ him to undertake a complete design service, then there was no way he could insist that he should be hired for the rest of the work. As for copyright issues, he thought that was a red herring because there now existed a licence for the client to build the plans as drawn on the site in question (though not, interestingly, on a different site). He suggested that the client had a right to have and to use the plans as drawn, provided he had fulfilled his side of the bargain – i.e. he had paid. This had been proved in case law with paper plans, though not, as far as he knew with electronic CAD drawings, but it’s unlikely that they would be treated any differently.

Thinking about it, the architect’s position was basically untenable because if the relationship had broken down, there is no way the client would want to use his services again and digging his heels in like this would gain the architect nothing more than a reputation for being truculent. He suggested that a way of ending the impasse might be to offer the said architect a small fee, like £50, to pass on the CAD drawings to someone else.

On Zaha Hadid

Yesterday I finally got to see the Zaha Hadid exhibition, which is on at London’s Design Museum till late November.

Three things struck me. Firstly, the place was jam-packed full of art and/or architecture students who were busy photographing and sketching the various exhibits. I suspect (it being a school day) that they had all been sent their by their tutors. Hadid is therefore obviously seen as a suitable case to study.

The second thing was how glorious the canvases are. She is a fantastic painter, in a rather surreal, science fiction sort of way. There was bumph in the brochure about how she had studied Russian Constructivism as a student: it’s not a movement I know anything about, but it makes for some really stunning images. If there was a readily identifiable school, I would have said it was Star Wars crossed with Thunderbirds. In fact, her first house design (Peak House?) looked suspiciously like the one on Tracey Island to me. It all had a strangely 60s and 70s feel to it: perhaps a little dated now, but also rather re-assuring. It’s how we used to speculate about what the future would look like before the internet was invented.

Finally, the buildings. One word will do: sterile. They really didn’t do it for me at all. Maybe I am already starchitected out on Libeskind and Gehry, but Hadid’s buildings just looked like more of the same to me. Clever? Yes. Outrageous? Yes, but so what. More like: rich clients wanting to make a statement about their wealth and taste.

I think she should have stuck to painting. Or maybe film sets.

What is it with architects?

This piece in the Times today caught my attention. It was hung on the announcement of the Stirling Prize shortlist.

“In Britain no one wants to take any risks,” thundered David Chipperfield, the aforementioned shortlisted architect. Richard Rogers agreed: “There should be more exciting buildings in this country.”

But it was the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Jack Pringle, who hit the nail on the head: “[In Britain] it’s all about making the business case... Everything has to be justified in a terribly Presbyterian way.”

Hang on a minute? Maybe I am turning into a Puritan — actually I think I am — but isn’t this just a bit rich? Can you imagine any other profession complaining that their customers are boring and value-obsessed? Criminals? They are just not what they used to be, we have no fun defending them anymore. The sick? Why don’t they catch some really interesting diseases, ones that we could really test our mettle against.

What is it with signature architects that makes them act out like a bunch of spoiled brats?

Libeskind and Embodied Justice

I am always interested in where people come from and I was fascinated to hear world famous architect Daniel Libeskind, at a Shape East event in Cambridge this evening, discoursing on his youth in Poland, where he was born in 1946. He described being taken into the centre of Warsaw by his parents where there was only one tall building, which was the HQ of the Communist Party. It gave him a feeling of dread.

The connection with tall buildings and power has stuck with him. He doesn’t mind tall buildings, it’s totalitarianism that upsets him. He said he has turned down project after project in China because he doesn’t like the regime. He’d much rather tussle with the problems of tough assignments, none more so than his designs for Ground Zero in New York. His original design for the Freedom Tower was to have been 1776 feet tall, to reflect the year of American Independence. He calls it embodied justice.

Incidentally, by my reckoning he looks rather like Elton John, but he talks more like Woody Allen. That alone makes him quite a draw. He doesn’t appear to have got his first commission until the age of 43 but has signed off over 25 major projects since. In terms of global impact, he is now only rivalled by Frank Gehry. They have a lot in common but, whilst Gehry is known for his impossible curves, Libeskind is all about unfeasible angles and shards of light. They have both achieved fame and success through designing iconographic museums, which then went on to be commercially successful. Now he is inundated with requests from developers who want to build shopping malls that look like off-the-wall museums, hoping to add cultural significance to the shopping experience.

Dunstervision: Part 2

Yesterday, I went to Think07, a new conference/exhibition put on at London’s Excel by CMP Information, owners of Building magazine and Property Week. With my press pass whisking me hither and thither, I spent a really enjoyable six hours there talking to a variety of people and listening to talks from a number of distinguished speakers including green skyscraper-builder Ken Yeang, Sainsbury’s boss Justin King (very slick performer, a politician-in-the-making) and BedZed’s Bill Dunster. Having featured Dunster in this blog very recently (Apr 3rd) and been somewhat critical of his obsession with wind turbines and PV cells, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see what he has to say about the matter.

To his credit, he doesn’t shrink this issue. “Let’s throw away this offsetting concept,” he said. “The job we have ahead of us is to get the world ready to run on renewable energy because fossil fuels are running out.” So far so good, I am right with him. However, he then launches into some very contentious stuff which he admitted got him into long arguments with engineering buffs. Firstly he insists that renewable energy will only ever be capable of supplying 30% of our current electricity use and, furthermore, that a green grid would only be able to supply about half of this 30% and that, consequently, the rest had to come from on site renewables.

I quizzed him about this in the Q&A session at the end, chaired by Zero Champion’s Phil Clark. “Bill,” I said, somewhat over familiarly perhaps, but what the heck, this was my moment in the limelight, “generating renewable power using mega wind turbines is much more efficient than on site. Isn’t it a mistake to mess around with microgeneration and shouldn’t we be concentrating on greening the grid instead?” Bill wouldn’t be moved. “It’s not either or, it’s both,” he said. “There simply isn’t the capacity to be able to produce that much renewable power from the grid.” It’s not exactly easy to have a conversation when you are in a room with about 100 other people listening in, but I managed a counterblast. “The North Sea is very big, you can get an awful lot of wind turbines out there.” Bill was unmoved. “It’s not nearly big enough. You are restricted to the Continental Shelf and you have to leave a large gap between each turbine and there simply isn’t enough space out there to generate all the electricity we need.” And that was the sum of our discourse.

Bill Dunster has done his homework. I can’t fault him for that. But has he got it correct? I had no idea. This morning I got out that swot’s handbook, Wikipedia, and started to look for an answer.

As you’d expect, there isn’t exactly a simple answer to such a question, but there are lots of pointers to suggest that I am right and Bill Dunster is wrong. Denmark, the country that pioneered wind turbines, already draws 20% of its electricity from wind and plans to make that 50% over the coming years. OK, it’s a small country, but it’s hard to imagine that the UK couldn’t do the same. There is another telling sentence in the article on renewable energy, although of course being Wikipedia there is no way of verifying it. Globally, the long-term technical potential of wind energy is believed to be five times current production global energy consumption or 40 times current electricity demand.

George Monbiot looks at this problem too in his book Heat where he has a chapter called How much energy can renewables supply? He mentions a 2005 government White Paper paper called
Offshore Renewables — The Potential Resource which confirms the figures coming out of Wikipedia — i.e. that our potential offshore wind generation capacity is enormous, over eight times our total current electricity demand. Obviously, there is a big gulf between what is potential and what will ever be practical but exactly what the limits to practicability are remains a matter of conjecture. What is clear is that assumptions are constantly changing and that off shore wind turbines seem to be getting bigger, and are getting placed further from shore and at ever deeper locations which suggest that the Danish expectation of delivering 50% of its electricity requirements from wind may not be far fetched at all. There is obviously a problem with the fact that wind is intermittent and that therefore wind on its own may never be able to supply all the electricity requirements. But then there are other technologies that may step up to the plate and fill the gap.

In truth, I haven’t spent as much time as I should researching this fascinating subject, but you can see that you don’t have to delve very deeply into it to see that Dunster’s contention that we will only ever be able to supply a small fraction of our electricity needs from large scale renewables looks pretty silly, as Denmark has already shown. So no, Bill, I am yet to be convinced that every home needs to be covered in PV cells and have a micro wind turbine attached to it.

There was another aspect of Dunster’s 40-minute lecture which raised the hackles of someone else in the audience. It was his contention that ground source heat pumps are bad news: “There is no heat pump anyone has yet designed that doesn’t double the electricity load.” As heat pumps are a form of electric heating, this is hardly surprising, but a heat pump can reduce the overall carbon emissions from a house because of their gearing effect — they manage to shift three or four units of heat energy from the ground outside into the house for every one unit of electricity used to run them. So to dismiss them out of hand because they use electricity does seem a tad eccentric.

Bill Dunster’s goal is, it seems, to always aim for zero-carbon on a site-by-site basis so the fact that heat pumps get you only part of the way there becomes a big drawback for him. Instead, he seems to prefer burning biomass. He mentioned something I hadn’t come across before, a National Biomass Quota, which suggests that each individual in the UK can burn up to 250kg of dry biomass per annum without causing undue stress on our resources. I think this is a concept born out of his own research and I have no idea how you would check it (Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have heard of it), but I can at least see where he is coming from. The problem for many biomass schemes is that whilst they can be seen to work fine for a handful of small developments, they don’t really represent a mass-market solution because of a shortage of biomass to burn. Whether this is so or not, who knows, but I guess that a Biomass Quota is an attempt to quantify just how much there is out there.

But the net upshot of all this is that Bill Dunster comes with lots of opinions and lots of baggage. He therefore causes debate and controversy. Put simply, not every agrees he’s got it right. His Zed Standard, which he touts as the best solution for zero energy living, is even more prescriptive than the German Passivhaus standard which I have been mildly critical of over recent months for itself being too prescriptive. At one point in his presentation, he asked, almost poignantly, “Why does the industry have such a negative view of BedZed?” This was very revealing because, by and large, I don’t think the industry does have a bad opinion of Bedzed. Far from it. Rather they maybe don’t have quite such a high opinion of it as Bill himself does. They give it 8 out of 10, not 10. I think he could more usefully ask: “Why doesn’t everyone agree with me?”

Dunstervision

This week’s Sunday Times has an interview/article about Bill Dunster, rightly described as one of Britain’s foremost green architects and pictured here at his home with wife Sue. He’s still best known as the designer of
BedZed, the south London housing scheme that sits at the top of every magazine and newspaper’s stock photo library and gets aired every time they want to illustrate a feature on low energy housing. His more recent work expands upon the reputation he established there and he’s sort of trademarked the Zed-bit so that anything with a Zed in it, like ZEDHomes or ZEDFactory, is likely to have Dunster’s imprint on it. It’s easy to overlook the fact that ZED, in this instance, stands for Zero Energy Development, a critical feature of all his designs.

But Dunster’s not without his foibles. One of the things he’s really into is thermal mass, which requires the use of tonnes and tonnes of concrete to act as a heat store for his houses. This is done to facilitate passive solar design, already discussed on the blog (see Feb 21st 2007 entry). But using masses of readymix concrete upsets a lot of greens because, well, it’s concrete. And it also upsets the MMC set, because you can’t sensibly prefabricate it in a factory.

He also manages to upset the PassivHaus crowd by rejecting mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and instead espousing wind-assisted passive stack ventilation. This is indeed the raison d’etre behind the massive multi-coloured cowls that sit on top of BedZed, which make the place both other-worldly and photogenic. As you can see, Bill Dunster is not everyone’s cup of green tea.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with using lots of concrete or not using any fans. He puts forward credible arguments for both viewpoints and is all for recapturing the carbon used to make the concrete over the lifetime of the buildings.

But there is one aspect of Dunster’s vision that does trouble me. That is his predilection for site-generated renewable power. In the quest to create zero carbon developments, Dunster seems to have gone overboard on installing renewable technologies, and wind turbines in particular, that really don’t make much sense. And the Sunday Times feature has an interesting clue as to why that might be. In discussing Bill and Sue Dunster’s own house in East Molesey, Surrey, it states “Last year, the Dunsters took great pleasure in disconnecting from mains gas.”

Just why should this fact be a cause for celebration chez Dunster? I am going out on a limb here and speculating that it all stems from a peculiarly British strand of green building, which seeks autonomous or self-sufficient development as an end in itself. There were the John Seymour books published in the 1970s which put forward self sufficiency as a desirable goal, and there were also Brenda & Robert Vales’s books, the Self Sufficient House and the Autonomous House. These plotted a vision where each house was a little island which produced its own food, generated its own energy and disposed of its own waste. These self-sufficient stirrings were being mirrored on the TV at the same time by the antics of Tom and Barbara in The Good Life, a sitcom set in Surbiton — very close as it would happen to East Molesey, home of Bill and Sue.

But I didn’t get self-sufficiency back in the 1970s and I still don’t get it. What is the point? We are social creatures, born to trade and barter, and we get ahead by specialising, by getting a skill set that others don’t have and by making ourselves useful to a wide number of people. Aiming to be self-sufficient seems to be running counter to all this: you need to be part gardener, part engineer, part builder and part composter. In fact, you need to be full time peasant. It may well suit some people but methinks not that many. Most people would prefer to live by their wits and get specialists to look after these aspects of their lives, which is why supermarkets, builders and utility companies always do good business, whatever the economic outlook.

Following on from this, the trends towards decentralised power and, in particular, on-site renewables seems to be driven in good part by a Tom & Barbara agenda. We have a country criss-crossed with energy supply lines, and we have professional power supply companies queuing up to deliver renewably generated electricity into the grid, planning problems not withstanding. Yet at the same time we are being encouraged to bake our own electricity on site, as if this in itself was a worthy goal, and despite the fact that common sense says it would be much more efficiently generated off site. There is now a healthy ongoing debate about just what exactly the definition of on site should be, at least from a power generation standpoint. Could it include a neighbourhood wind turbine? Or a combined heat and power plant for an estate? Or, heaven forbid, just buying green electricity from the grid. You might think it’s all a bit academic, but it’s a point that has become central to the definition of what a zero-carbon home may or may not be. And it’s become central to the work of Bill Dunster, because without on site renewables he can’t build a ZEDHome.

But does it really make sense as a model by which to power the carbon-lite economy? Or are on-site renewables just a throwback to 1970s woolly thinking?

What is it with architects and contracts?

Can a blog handle a 3000-word article? It seems a tall order. Can a blog handle a 3000-word article about building contracts? That must be stretching the bounds of credibility. But this is what follows: a peep into the whacky world of the JCT Minor Works Contract. Does it really offer protection? Or is it a giant con perpetuated on the general public and the building trade by a bunch of bow-tied dandies?

I’ve never built under a formal contract and in all the years I have been writing and talking about building I have warned people off them, saying broadly that a contract is not a substitute for a well-designed job. But various architects I have come across over the years have been appalled at my slack stand and one or two have even suggested that I might be putting myself into sticky legal position for not defending the use of contracts. Late in 2004, I was emailed by an architect who wrote “it occurs to me that you might just be on very exposed ground if you advise people not to bother with a formal contract like the JCT. If things went wrong and they had no recourse because there was no clarity in a dispute, lawyers could very well direct the blame it on you. Ruinously.”

The architect went on to recommend that I took a look at the main contract used by architects to administer jobs up to £1 million, the JCT Agreement for Minor Building Works. He continued “The contract is a 32 page A4 document; it doesn’t‚t look that daunting and is very user friendly. It has footnotes and side notes to explain each clause; and the clauses are in no nonsense English.”

Now, I thought, it’s time for me to roll over and at least take a look at this contract business. So a few weeks later I actually got around to buying the aforesaid JCT Minor Works Contract. It is cheap(ish): it cost me £15 to buy mail order from the Building Bookshop in London; would have been £11.75 if I had picked it up in person. But I suppose cheap is relative seeing as it has so few pages, esp. as pages 2, 8, 10, 30 and 31 are utterly blank save for a helpful footnote which says “This page blank.” Immediately I am impressed by the user friendliness. I suppose on a price per page basis it actually works out very expensive compared to a book or a magazine, but what I am getting at is that this contract is not a bank breaker. You can’t argue that you haven’t used a contract because it’s too expensive.

But what of the rest of the contract outside the blank pages. Well the most important point about this contract hits you in the eye on page 3, a little box that says “This agreement is only intended for use where the Client has engaged a professional consultant to advise on and to administer its terms.” Immediately I understand just why I have never built using this contract. Whenever you see the word “Client” in something to do with building, you know there just has to be an architect involved because no one else in the building game ever refers to anyone as “clients.” It is such a strange word, isn’t it? In a shop you are a customer, on a train you are a passenger, in a hospital you are a patient, in a class you are a student, in the economy at large you’d be a consumer. But client? The only people who have clients are lawyers, architects and prostitutes, all of whom have to live with the reputation that they are simply out to screw you. Only the prostitute is honest about it.

It’s not a bad joke, if a little tired, but is it fair? I have it on good advice that an architect in practice on their own is likely to earn between £25,000 and £35,000 per annum, considerably less than either a lawyer or a prostitute, so it’s perhaps a little unfair to suggest that architects are feathering their nests at their clients expense. But it doesn’t stop them going through the motions. For tellingly, the professional’s fees are not covered by the JCT Minor Building Works Contract. No, the contract is between the Client, a.k.a. the Employer, and the Contractor. In fact, page 3 is taken up with writing in the names and addresses of the Employer and the Contractor, plus that little box which has so exercised me.

Turn the page and you are faced with the word “Whereas” in bold, in large print, a sort of floating headline. Whereas what? Suddenly we have left the realms of everyday English and gone to some Dickensian legal office where grey suited, bespectacled clerks write with quill pens. I fully understand what whereas means, though it’s not a word that falls into the vocabulary of my children (whereas mingin’, canin’ and fukin’ frequently do). But what does it mean as a headline? And why is a legal document more correct because it has “whereas” as the page title rather than “furthermore” or “mingin?” I have this strange feeling that this architect has been leading me up the garden path. Page 4 doesn’t get any better for it turns out that Whereas is the heading for five recitals. Or should that be The Five Recitals. Suddenly we are cast adrift into the world of chamber music? I fear not. In JCT terms a recital is a sort of declaration of intent. I think. The 1st recital appoints the architect or the contract administrator. Well which is it to be? Well there is a helpful footnote on this one and I have to quote it in full because it’s so much fun.

“Where the person named is entitled to the use of the name ‘Architect’ under and in accordance with the Architects Act 1997 delete ‘the Contract Administrator’: in all other cases delete ‘the Architect’. Where ‘the Architect’ is deleted the expression ‘the Architect’ shall be deemed to have been deleted throughout this Agreement: where ‘the Contract Administrator’ is deleted the expression ‘the Contract Administrator’ shall be deemed to have been deleted throughout this Agreement.”

So there you have it. It’s all about soothing the egos of the architect. All that training — seven years, wasn’t it? — just so that you could delete the words “Contract Administrator” from the JCT Minor Works Contract.

What might be more useful would be to tie the aforesaid Architect/Contract Administrator (henceforth A/CA) into this contract, not to simply appoint him or her. But that’s not what the 1st recital seeks to do. It does however require the A/CA to have prepared drawings and a specification before the contract is signed. Now that is useful. The 2nd recital requires the contractor to carry out the works for a fixed fee, or at least for a schedule of rates. The 3rd recital requests that the contract is signed on page 9. The 4th recital appoints a Quantity Surveyor, although there is an option to delete this if no Quantity Surveyor can be found and the 5th recital requires that the works be carried out in accordance with the latest CDM regs, the health and safety legislation.

Jobs for individuals are not covered by the CDM regs, but it doesn’t do any harm to fill them in and administrate them as if it was required. I could write at length about the CDM regs, but here is not the place otherwise we will never reach page 5, let alone page 32. On pages 5, 6 and 7 the recitals are replaced by a series of Articles, numbering 1 through 7. Article 2 is left mostly blank for the price of the job to be filled in. Article 3 names the A/CA (but no price). Article 4 names the Planning Supervisor, a role required by the CDM regs. Articles 6 and 7 name or at least provide a series of names of bodies that can be requested to be referees, in case of dispute. Page 9 is for the parties to sign up, page 10 is one of the blank ones and then, at last, on page 11 we are into the small print, the very meat of the contract.

From here to page 29 we are faced with dense type, two columns of 9pt Helvetica without a picture to break the monotony. Being a legal document it is naturally split up into numbered paragraphs. I have a feeling they will be known as clauses. The main conditions are in clauses numbered 1 to 8; these take up 8 pages. They are followed by Supplemental Conditions, also 8 pages but these are lettered clauses starting at A1 and working through to E7. And it’s all finished off with three pages of guidance notes.

This doesn’t really strike me as being at all user friendly. I can’t ever imagine sitting down to read this through for pleasure. I can just about see myself referring to some of its clauses when things have started to go wrong, but surely that’s not the point of a contract.

So just what are the main conditions of this JCT Minor Works Contract?


Main Conditions

1. Intentions of the parties - defines the rules under which the contract shall be administered. It is governed by the law of England, so tough luck you Celts who hoped to learn about contractual matters from this article. It states that the job will be run under the CDM regulations, involving the appointment of a Planning Supervisor and a Principal Contractor, and that the contractor will use suitable materials and, wherever possible, subbies who hold CSCS cards.

2. Commencement and completion:
leaves blanks to determine a start date and a completion date and then immediately qualifies this by putting in place a routine for determining an extension of the contract period. It’s adversarial: if the blame is due to the contractor, inc subbies or suppliers going bust, then the contractor is liable. If it is down to the A/CA, then an extension of time will be granted. 2.3 is a “liquidated damages” clause with a blank space to fill in the rate that money should be deducted per week overrun. Completion, or practical completion as it is known in these circles is defined by the A/CA. Cl 2.5 seeks the contractor to correct any defects at his own expense within three months of practical completion.

3. Control of Works: the work can’t be assigned to another builder, without the permission of the A/CA. Indeed, the main contractor can’t even employ subcontractors without written consent of the A/CA. In fact Cl 3.2.2 seeks to control the payments between contractor and subcontractor, and states that the sub contractor can charge interest on late payment from the main contractor. No mention is made of what might happen if the subcontractor’s work is in dispute. Cl 3.3 requires that the main contractor shall always have someone representing him on site. In contrast, the A/CA has the right to throw anyone off site that they don’t like the look of. The A/CA can also demand that instructions are carried out within seven days, or someone else can be employed to undertake the work at the contractor’s expense. On the other hand, Cl 3.6 states that mistakes made by the A/CA should be treated as “variations.” Variations and provisional sums are anticipated in Cl 3.7 and 3.8 but the gist of it is that the A/CA is the one who sets the price, based on a pre-agreed schedule of rates. This is a pretty dubious way of going about things and there is a let out where it states “instead of the valuation referred to above, the price may be agreed between the A/CA and the Contractor prior to the Contractor carrying out any instructions.”

4. Payment. The A/CA shall certify progress payments every four weeks, based on 95% of the value of work done. The employer should pay within 14 days of the issuing of the certificate and late payments attract interest at 5% over base. Upon practical completion, the A/CA issues a “penultimate certificate” for 97.5% of the work done. The final certificate should be issued within three months of practical completion and again late payment attracts interest. The contractor has to shoulder any changes in materials or labour costs which come into effect after the contract is signed.

5. Statutory obligations. The contractor has an obligation to meet all statutory requirements – cf building regs, etc. If the instructions from the A/CA conflict with the requirements, the contractor must notify the A/CA and then the ball is in the A/CA’s court: the contractor ceases to be liable for making good.

The sums in the contract are net of VAT. The employer is obliged to pay the contractor VAT on top of his regular payments. Interestingly, no mention is made of who is responsible for working out just which VAT rate is applicable to the contract.

There is an anti-corruption clause (Cl 5.5). The employer can cancel the agreement “if the Contractor shall have offered or given or agreed to give to any person any gift or consideration of any kind.” Bang goes Xmas, down at builder Joe’s house.


Cl 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 and 5.9 deal with the administration of the CDM regs and ensure that the planning supervisor role, the principal contractor role and the health and safety files are in order.

6. Injury, damage and insurance. Basically, unless the employer has been frightfully negligent, the Contractor has to take the rap for accidents on site. And needs to have adequate insurance cover in place – i.e. Employers’ Liability and Public Liability. Also requirements for the Contractor to have Contract Works Insurance to cover damage by fire, storms, whatever. Interestingly, the insurance of existing structures falls on the employer, which is logical. Both employer and contractor have the right to see documentary evidence that the correct insurances are in place.

7. Determination. How to end the contract if it goes wrong. The employer can end it if the contractor fails to proceed diligently or safely (the CDM regs again), or goes bust. The contractor can end it if the employer fails to pay, or becomes obstructive and difficult, or suspends the works for a month or more, or fails to comply with those CDM regs, or of course, goes bust.

8. Settlement of disputes: three routes outlined, being adjudication, arbitration and legal proceedings. What is the difference? Another article altogether, me thinks.

Then it’s into the Supplemental Conditions. Here the print really does get small and it’s very hard to take any of this in. I think the gist of it is that if taxes or levies change during the course of the contract, then the employer has to bear the difference. So if VAT is suddenly slapped on the job, or the rate goes up, then the change is passed on. There’s also a long section on adjudication and a shorter one on arbitration. They are slightly different: adjudication is cheap, fast track conflict resolution, arbitration is the middling option and going to court or issuing legal proceedings is cripplingly expensive.

The JCT contract ends up with three pages of guidance notes where it all, at last, becomes a decent, easy read. If you ever sign this JCT contract, I would recommend you start here.

Conclusion
But would I recommend that you use such a contract? Only if you are using an architect to administer your project. The contract is written specifically for this situation and, in reality, most small building jobs do not use architects or contract administrators. If you are an architect, you will be more or less obliged to use this contract, or one similar, if you are supervising construction, so you will foist it onto both the client and the contractor. It allows you to play God. Fine, if you are up to it, but feedback reaching me suggests that many architects are not up to playing God, and their attempts to merely create problems. A simple working partnership between customer and builder becomes much more complex when there is an architect in between and the builder becomes a contractor and the customer a client.

The architect often knows far less about the building process than the builder and designs impractical or unbuildable details that often have to be sorted out on site by the builder. Instead of the builder working directly with the customer in order to sort out teething problems, the process requires that everything has to go through the architect for both approval and pricing. Frequently, the architect has no idea what the problems are, let alone realise that they have been directly responsible for creating them. The contract is therefore, to coin a phrase, adversarial in that it is quite likley to set one party against another.

Worse than that, it’s a pain to administer and it more or less let’s the architect off the hook so that incompetent design is easily passed off as incompetent building. It also encourages the architect to ‘design’ without having to worry about how that design should be built. The architect’s fee is usually set as a percentage of the contract price. What sort of inducement is that to keep costs under control?

In a perfect world, the architect would be the builder and vice-versa. But that, of course, is never going to happen. So if you plan to use an architect to design and administer your project, then the selection of the right architect is the most crucial decision you will make. A formal contract like the JCT Minor Works will simply bind you into the working relationship you forge with your architect. This contract will afford some measure of protection if the builder doesn’t perform but if the architect isn’t up to it, then it’s probably more of a liability than anything else.

Jan Kaplicky: Architect, Snob

Why do architects have to be such snobs? They are always at it, so it would seem, deploring the “awful” and the “tasteless”, urging us to embrace wonderfully creative design and cutting-edge technology.

The latest to stick his head above the taste parapet is Jan Kaplicky, head of Future Systems, who are best known for the media centre at Lord’s cricket ground, otherwise known as “ET’s head”. Whilst his designs may be white-hot contemporary, his social attitudes sound like they have been lifted straight from "The Importance of Being Earnest."

Here’s what Kaplicky thinks of Britain in the 21st century (writing in The Quarterly, Autumn 2005)

• “We can’t endlessly convert Victorian properties, it leads nowhere.”

• “Look at the rubbish you see on the train an hour from London: the land can’t be trashed with little boxes again and again.”

• “Who cares what dull repeats grace the hangers of M&S, when Armani and Galliano are creating cutting-edge designs.”

The stuff Kaplicky designs is fun, in an oh-so-clever, post-modern way. It’s also amazingly expensive and needs very wealthy clients to commission it. As such, I have no problems with it. I have seen his “House for a Wealthy Labour MP in Pembrokeshire” — pictured here and if you walk the Pembrokeshire coast path between Broadhaven and Nolton, or simply drive along the coast road, you can hardly miss it — and it’s truly an amazing site, especially in comparison to the very unprepossessing timber-clad shacks which are its neighbours. The locals refer to it as “The Teletubby House”: they can see the funny side of it.

Not so, Kaplicky. Just why does he have to be so pompous? I don’t hear classical musicians moaning about how awful pop music is, or poets complaining that the Sun is terribly badly written. If Kaplicky chooses to wear an Armani dressing gown in his multi-coloured greenhouse, good luck to him, but must he put down everyone who shops at M&S and lives in a “dreary box within an hour from London.” That just happens to be about 15 million people. I have no doubt that a couple of million of them, at least, would jump at the chance of living in a Future Systems house, but there are probably only a couple of hundred who could afford to. Maybe that’s Kaplicky’s real beef.