Should Architects be the only ones allowed to make Planning Applications?
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@missarchi wrote:
Should a full service be a condition of planning applications?
No, of course not. Many planning apps are for minor work, often without the need of a full service, why force this extra cost on to people
Who are architects really working for?
This thought coincides with a report on last week’s RIBA Council meeting, which included the news that 50% of architects now work for contractors. It is not reported whether this announcement was greeted with a rousing cheer or the passing round of garlic and crucifixes, but it is another mark of an irreversible shift in the balance of power between the professions and contractors.
@Bren88 wrote:
There are many people who have formal training, and are qualified to prepare plans, who you are grouping with the above non-architects, this is wrong
Well said Bren88, I agree. Things are rarely Black & White.
Some Urban Planners courses do not give urban design training – it seems weird that they are responsible for assessing urban design in government? Would architects really want to assess planning applications? Dreary plus plus but very very important. Yeah for planners who have a design focus – just need more of them
@PlanE wrote:
Only doctors, vets and dentists can write prescriptions, only judges can give sentences, priests give absolution, teachers mark exams, licensed bus drivers drive buses, the list goes on. Why shouldn’t it be the same for architects?
Lets face it, good planning requires good design.
Sorry obviously coming in late to this thread. Good design and or bad design is not always down to the architect. Clients often have very good ideas too.
In designing for development It has been my experience that many planners get too involved in the building design and instruct a lessening of design or reduction of original content and regularly suggest keeping in with the traditional or vernacular existing developments. I have had many a battle for my clients to move away from much of the Bungalow Bliss if I may use such an expression and not offend anyone responsible for them, I am sure looking at the amount of these littering our countryside the sales of these books and pre-prepared plans must have made someone very wealthy.
The fact remains however that our planners or certainly many of them have become smitten by these wonders of modern design and often insist of them being copied. So bad design is in my opinion not soley the responsibility of the humble architect who gets caught between trying to improve the built environment and obtaining the permission he/she is being paid to seek.
We have bills to pay as well as everyone else and if we do not moderate our design standards to the whim of the planners a refusal issues and there goes the project and no recommendation for further work.
Look at the work stages of the RIAI or RIBA and you’ll see the level of fees specifically allocated to statutory approvals – this is retarded thinking, because in my experience unless you are a skilled negotiator you will not get what you and your client want or what the building needs to be to function and make a profit.
The outrageously low plot rations imposed around rural towns are responsible for the bungalow bliss blight on the landscape, and planners without much in the way of building design skills were guided by what was there and what their poorly educated councillor bosses thought looked right, or at least thought didn’t look better than the one they were living in – and there’s the rub.
Fear of censure by others on the pecking order ladder and a desire for pre-eminence has resulted in coinservative decisions and unsustainable low density, not the extension of the urban form required for the growth of a town.
ONQ.
@PlanE wrote:
Only doctors, vets and dentists can write prescriptions, only judges can give sentences, priests give absolution, teachers mark exams, licensed bus drivers drive buses, the list goes on. Why shouldn’t it be the same for architects? We have it bad enough, God knows.
Lets face it, good planning requires good design.
The countryside (in particular), and towns have undeniably been ruined over the last 40 years, mainly through unqualified cowboys and developers allowed to run rampant, providing for individual interests, all in the name of ‘competition’.
The last Building Control Bill (and the Eurocratic system responsible for it), has not gone far enough. Protection of title should have been extended to include protection of services, and thereby protection of the ‘common good’, the fundamental aim of good planning.
When I look at your post I cannot help but to think that you are in fact John Graby as you post is something very dear to his heart.
Plan E is only saying what CK and I ahve both agreed, although he has put a different spin on it.
Protection of title does nothing, in and of itself.
Making is a legal requirement that people who design building for financial reward should be competent to do the kind of design they do is only common sense, and yet to be implemented.
The issue for CK is how this competence is assessed.
The issue for me is how existing qualifications are recognised.
Neither is incompatibal with the idea of registration, given an equitable mindset.
The trouble is that the RIAI doesn’t seem to be operating from an equitable mindset.This is going to bite them in the ass if they ever take anyone to Court.
High-handed administration of authority may not sit well with a judge, in the face of precedent supporting rights established over ten years.ONQ.
@onq wrote:
………
Making is a legal requirement that people who design building for financial reward should be competent to do the kind of design they do is only common sense, and yet to be implemented.The issue for CK is how this competence is assessed.
…………….the assessment standard of the ‘competence’ is completely obvious……
bad design (incompetence) should result in planning refusal.
good design (competence) should result in grants.
This should be the yard stick by which competence should be measured, not some ‘registered list’ in which the public would be forced to choose a practitioner and forced to pay prescribed rates from a ‘cartel’ market system.
History has shown in many cases that the public are not protected by registration.
Unfortunately, Henno, there are few Locals Authority [LA] architects involved in assessing planning permissions.
It is an utterly retrograde situation when you think about it, given the results to date.
Planners, Engineers and Conservation Officers advise on permsisions.
Are they competent to do so – what do the results suggest?
ONQ.
@onq wrote:
Unfortunately, Henno, there are few Locals Authority [LA] architects involved in assessing planning permissions.
It is an utterly retrograde situation when you think about it, given the results to date.
Planners, Engineers and Conservation Officers advise on permsisions.
Are they competent to do so – what do the results suggest?
ONQ.
i completely agree with you ONQ…
But isnt that a prime example of “dont hate the player, hate the game”..??
If the system is set up to work the way it is supposed to, then the question of the suitability of the agent wouldnt come into question at all.
People equating architectural designing to doctors, vets etc is completely nonsensical. Design is completely subjective. Anatomical diagnosing is an absolute matter of life and death. Ive heard of some architects having an inflated sense of themselves, but that comparison takes the biscuit.
Is there a restriction on fashion design?? furniture design?? is there a restriction on who can create a work of art??… .answer.. NO!!
success and failure in the world of design is based on competence, not on whether the artist name is on a list!!
My concern is that people’s taste in fashion and art is like their taster in buildings – different strokes for different folks.
You can forget that horrible dress you saw yesterday and you’ll never want to see your friends provate collection of dastardly artwork again, but a building affects members of the public 24/7/365/100 – forever, effectively – or until its pulled down or “facelifted”.
Personally I don’t like a lot of Rem Koolhaus’s work.
He went from “dumb boxes” to “ugly shapes” a long time ago.
I know the guy gets plaudits worldwide and some of his stuff isn’t offensive to me.
But every day on this forum I’m reminded he won that Canadian competition and has stuck a scaleless cantilvered glass and steel concoction beside a beautifully proportioned church building.
(shakes head)
I could accept Foster’s reflective and anonymous glass box [itself now a listed building] because it wrapped cutting edge modernity in a reflective glass shell – a very clever solution, but these beetling oversails and cantilevers that look like they’re about to fall on people – what’s that about?
An engineering tour-de-force, or a premonition of the next world war with buildings falling on our heads?
I find it terribly oppressive architecture-for-effect, without the mediation of scale and resolution of forces that say, a collonade gives, or even the light touch that a skeletal canopy or brise-soleil brings to soften a dumb box facade/form.
Now we have dumb boxes in garish colours removed from the human concourse sailing over our heads – what’s the intended subtext there?
So you see, I differ from the OMA school of design.
Maybe I’m just a crappy boring designer.
Too “safe” to be as balls-out as OMA.
Others will differ from me.
Who decides?
Are the planners best fitted to make these decisions, as representatives of “everyman”?
Who is doing the complaining apart from architects on the make, ministers looking for re-election and pseudo-intellectuals with too much time on their hands.
Is there an objective reason for complaint, apart from the fact that one would like the 3,500 sqft Bungaloid on two acres and the mercs in front of it for oneself?
Are our complaints mere bregrugery dressing in the clothes of academic appreciation and artistic criticism?
If we criticize others, we must first be brutally honest about our need to criticize.
ONQ.
@henno wrote:
i completely agree with you ONQ…
Is there a restriction on fashion design?? furniture design?? is there a restriction on who can create a work of art??… .answer.. NO!!
Well now you see that’s an equally flawed comparison. Artists of any description can be as avant-garde or as safe as they want but they cannot influence the taste and choice of the consumer. As a consumer I can choose to buy a shirt, a chair, a painting. The chair and painting inflict my choices (and, by association, the choices of the designers) upon me, visitors to my house and nosey passer-bys. My shirt might delight or offend another for a fleeting second. It might do so even less if I am wearing a coat or a jumper. I am unlikely to wear a noticeable shirt often and even less likely to pass the same people whilst wearing it.
Built form is a completely different matter. It’s there. In your face. 24/7. It affects a huge number of people in many ways. If you like it you can choose to stop and admire. If it offends all you can do is choose not to look at it or take a route to avoid it. Whilst it is subjective there are basics in terms of form, function, proportion, relevance, technique etc etc that will form the basis of a pleasing building just as there are recipes for disaster. Public art and sculpture is different but, that said, very few councils approve a large sculpture because it was designed by someone’s elderly relative and given to them for Christmas
@wearnicehats wrote:
Artists of any description can be as avant-garde or as safe as they want but they cannot influence the taste and choice of the consumer.
:confused:
of course they can, they do every day…. what do you think fashion magazines… IKEA etc are all based around?? of course they influence the tastes and choice of consumers.
many architects can also be ‘avant guarde’ or ‘safe’, its a basic premise that defines difference practices…
architectural fashion can be as fleeting as any other type of art, which leaves us with dated buildings in our face 24/7, regardless of whether the designer is on a ‘list’ or not… the recent love affair with “the fold” will quickly become dated and gauche, in my opinion, and we will be left with these “signature” specimen buildings for years after they loose their immediacy.
@henno wrote:
:confused:
of course they can, they do every day…. what do you think fashion magazines… IKEA etc are all based around?? of course they influence the tastes and choice of consumers.
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Those things do not move me in any shape or form – they can inform my decision as to what is out there but they cannot make me buy what I don’t want. IKEA kitchens look good but if you want a kitchen that lasts longer than a wet weekend you’ll pay for Rationel. I have to ooh and ahh at every daubing that my kid does but I don’t frame it and put it on my wall. George Clooney might look good in a pair of crocs but I personally look like a dick in them.
If I don’t like a building I can object to it but, ultimately, the form of the buildings I have to look at every day is not mine. I rely on the informed decisions and the ability of others. I don’t personally care for the ODOS box but it’s a damn site better on the eye than some stick on pastiche that came out of a houseplan book.
@Solo wrote:
When I look at your post I cannot help but to think that you are in fact John Graby as you post is something very dear to his heart.
I’m not John Graby. And I disagree that this is something he would care for… from my knowledge of the man, he goes in the opposite direction: he seems to have done everything to get rid of the myth that the RIAI is a ‘closed shop’, and clearly has done very little at a political level for the cause of architects overall – most notably during this whole recession. And certainly in the area of overhauling the laughable planning system. Or maybe he is just ineffective…:confused:
@PlanE wrote:
I’m not John Graby. And I disagree that this is something he would care for… from my knowledge of the man, he goes in the opposite direction: he seems to have done everything to get rid of the myth that the RIAI is a ‘closed shop’, and clearly has done very little at a political level for the cause of architects overall – most notably during this whole recession. And certainly in the area of overhauling the laughable planning system. Or maybe he is just ineffective…:confused:
(chuckle)
If I read you correctly PlanE, you are saying that he has made the ” RIAI is a closed shop” Myth into stark reality!
Perhaps you ARE Grabby, and this is how you declare your victory!!!!11!11!11
(maniacal laughter trailing off into the distance…)
If you look at the machinations of the RIAI and Government both, there appears to be a distinct stragtegy pandering towards “big spenders” in both the qualification levels for pre-regristration for GCCC contracts and the attandances at CPD lectures.
We seem to be going from academic qualification to enforced RIAI registration to pay for your CPD or be de-registered.
Not happy about this.
ONQ.
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