This month I’ve been reminiscing, looking back over the last 10 years of my working life…

I’ve been reflecting on the changes, prompted by an essay I was asked to write for a book on Stock Orchard Street – Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till’s straw-bale house and office, completed in 1999. I was the project architect, working with Sarah out of a vamped-up cupboard off the Cally Road in London for half the week and running a unit at the AA for the other half.  What a lot can happen in a decade: I’ve gone from a two to 60 person practice, seen my CAD skills both come and go, shifted from bespoke one-off to system-minded design, and left trainers for heels.

But what’s most noticeable looking over the last decade is what hasn’t changed.  It’s not an enormous surprise that straw-bale building hasn’t taken off a storm, but then neither has any other building technology. The vast shift and spread in communications technology over this time is blinding by comparison. When I joined P&P 10 years ago we had a sole iMac for email, with a sole ‘mail@’ address. Now barely a thought is had without technology assisting, recording or distracting us from it.

But on-site bricks are still bricks and still laid by brickies, unless of course they’re brick slips, the veritable turkey twizzler of construction.  A consequence, perhaps, of what the Bank of England laconically termed ‘the nice decade’? Change requires either incentive or demand. In a boom that’s not to be found in the market and despite the billions of government investment, nor has it come from the client, the true holder of power in construction.  But despite its big purse and long shopping list, this government hasn’t taken charge of its investment programme, lacking ambitious targets or demands of the industry for innovation, invention and experimentation. Instead it has reinforced our lowest price = best value culture.  The only glimmer of hope for an incentive-driven building revolution appears to come from the grimmest of sources; climate change.  I doubt that this will see the spawning of mass produced straw-bale houses, but it may be the catalyst for a shake-up of how we build and what we build with. 

May we all be ready for it.

Gillian Horn is a partner at Penoyre & Prasad