Enabling Innovation in Public Building.

UNStudio Te Papa competition proposal 2005 

Originally Published in Architecture NZ No. 2 March / April 2013 

If you want a pie you go to the pie shop, easy. If you want an inspirational, cutting edge piece of public architecture where do you go? 

Post awards season, with a fresh new year upon us, it may be time to contemplate what the profession and public tend to forget in all the red carpet and daring cantilevers, Architecture is about ‘process' as icebergs are about what lies beneath. Architecture is also about ‘speed’ as a sloth about rush hour. What is flaunted at awards time is by and large the result of a long and convoluted process the more so with Public buildings. The time from which client demand initiates a creative idea, catalyzing capital, project management  and consultants to produce architecture with a capital “A” can span years. That process is usually initiated by the commissioning of design services.

In the private sector market forces, competitive practice and connections form the basis for divvying up the x-dollars-worth of design fees in any given year. But in the public sector where tax dollars and rate payers money are underwriting architecture with a capital “P” (for Public in case there was confusion) clear process needs to be in place in order that the Public can have faith that what is been delivered is both best practice and best possible outcome from a global point of view.

Currently, strategy and processes for procurement of design services are at the mercy of individual councils, council controlled organizations, government departments and project managers. Requests For Proposals (RFP) and Expressions Of Interest (EOI) are the status quo method of alerting the design community to a demand for services. The local gentlemen’s club is, by and large, no place to spend public cash on design procurement albeit a paper napkin has traditionally been the basis for sketch design.

Any RFP is going to have a rigorous schedule of required documentation, key dates and clear criteria for selection. Most RFP selection criteria is weighted capital P for Price and Past experience which just possibly equates to P for market Protection and Please tick the fair and open democratic society in theory box. Is this process enabling the best value for public spend on architecture ? Is it enabling Innovation? Is it growing a culture and industry. Probably not. But project managers see it as a fairly risk-free method and the firms with the experience can continue to notch it up. It would be interesting to see an RFP come through, where the project is such that previous experience is irrelevant because the building type is completely new and requires a completely new way of thinking, like a 21st century library, for instance, or house of culture in a tsunami zone.

The NZIA has a clear policy on the value of design competitions as a method of procurement and means of delivering best practice to the public realm, especially relevant for any project with high cultural significance. The RIBA, RIAA, AIA, etc, all have similar policies. Having recently provided advice to the Hastings City Art Gallery (HCAG) competition project, I had a valuable insight into the positive and negatives of what I thought at the time to be a rigorously designed procurement process.

The outcomes of that process: 150 ROIs became about 30 submissions, a couple of internationals and zero students, even with a decent student prize. The quality of submissions across a broad range contained no clear wow moments. The wow’s, perhaps, left at the door by a brief filtered through the politics of local government and the local monarchy. Feedback from various architects has suggested timing was to blame for the poor turnout, as well as a bit of burnout post the Queens Wharf  design competition; the one you have when you are not having a competition – the resultant segmented sluggish ode to the Cloud is testament, perhaps, to that particular broken process.

The HCAG competition was an opportunity to see if it was possible, via a competition procurement process, to enable innovative outcomes. I was not surprised all the big studios got their graduates busy. I was surprised none of those graduates went it alone, with the carrot of prize money, accolades and a potential public project. The process did not shine a light on any notable new providers, albeit the third place getter was relatively unknown and young compared to the aged winners. There is some humour in a Athfield and Austin taken out first and second at this stage in their careers. Where were the kids?

Gone are the days when gradates can rely on friends and family to build the practice around baches, single family homes in the burbs, and renovations to Ponsonby villas. There is a new paradigm in place, driven by GFC, urban expansion and evolution, where urban design, multi-unit housing, public space and buildings, the city,are the focus of architectural research. So what vehicles are there in place to grow the culture or enable new ideas and thinking, hammered out in the academies to evolve in this area? The RFP process doesn’t necessarily engage with growing the industry’s pool of talent, which creates some tension regarding the use of that process and public money, which responsibility suggests should be used to do precisely that. It is in other industries where culture is the product.

Ultimately, architecture is about celebrating new ideas, the environment, technology and culture; what better way to invigorate the sector than using public money. We are the culture makers. The Northern Europeans run a democratic model regards procurement but their culture industry is much more highly evolved than ours, with an evolved understanding of the opportunities of integrated research in the building industry, where the value of logs are considered much more than a pile of wood chips heading towards a paper plant and the value of the new generation’s ideas and technological and cultural innovation are celebrated. All public buildings are put through a design competition model, whether an open invitation or invite. Design concepts are given weight, as well as other criteria, with world leading results.

It will be interesting to see how the current New Urban Village competition in Christchurch pans out, already at odds with a Department of Building and Housing RFP, which was released almost simultaneously as well as sharing HCAG end of year/ holiday timing.

Procurement process for public works is a space that is in need of proactive engagement by the industry, academia and the public. It seems this has started to some extent in Auckland with discussion around the benefits/disbenefits of  the Super City having separate procurement processes for design phases and developed design,detail phases of projects. I am not certain what the answer is for the NZ context. I am certain that architecture is not always about building per se. There are some more highly evolved models of procurement out there which are creating some very interesting public projects globally. Perhaps it is time that awards were not only handed out to designers but also organisations for establishing innovative processes for commissioning architecture. Chicken or the egg. I can think of one Public project in Tamaki that recently suffered from a less than perfect RFP process at the expense of the community who will largely be happy with a new community facility just not necessarily aware of opportunities that may have been missed by not inviting the best ideas on the table prior to commissioning. Scrambled egg or fried chicken.

Auckland City Art Gallery rendering of FJMT/ Archimedia proposal

Meanwhile some words on procurement from Chris Saines, director of Auckland City Art gallery, who was charged with procuring and subsequently delivering one of the best public buildings commissioned in New Zealand in a number of years, the Auckland Art Gallery addition and renovation.

AV Question:

What was the process you followed for procurement of designers for the project and to what extent do you think that process enabled innovative solutions ? 

CS:The process began with an advertising campaign directed to the wider architectural design community. The call for Expressions of Interest, which was made through major newspapers and specialist architectural print and online media in New Zealand and Australia, essentially asked firms to outline their experience, expertise, personnel and capacity to undertake the project.

As I recall, we received around 35 EOI's in response - most were from New Zealand, a number came from Australia, and several came from outside Australasia. All proposed to partner with a New Zealand firm. We had been clear that, were the selected firm not New Zealand based, they would need to establish an Auckland office, which was widely interpreted as an opportunity to partner locally.

Once the project team had reviewed the EOI's, we returned to roughly half of the respondents, providing them with a high level brief for the project. At this point we issued a Request for Proposal, the aim of which was to seek more detail from the design teams on how they would respond to the broad requirements of the brief (albeit at a conceptual level).

Once those RFP's were received, we scored and ranked them against a series of key criteria, then invited the 7 top-scoring the firms to develop a high level response to a detailed design brief, which provided them with such things as bulk and location studies, geotechnical studies and planning reports, a report on the history of the site's pre- and post-colonial occupation, a conservation plan for the existing building, visitor and non-visitor studies, and so on.

We were wanting to see how the firms focused on such things as designing a building that was fit for purpose, as defined by the brief, the extent to which they had introduced design innovation, the extent to which they had thought through the Gallery's vision for the project, and the like. Of the 7, two withdrew and 5 firms ultimately submitted concept design proposals.

We conducted intensive interviews of each of the firms, then asked them to present their full team and their proposals to a meeting of all staff and a number of key Gallery stakeholders, including our Board and Maori advisory group, Haerewa. The proposals needed to be illustrated with a number of key views, plans and elevations, and several firms created computer-generated fly-throughs.

At the end of this interview and presentation process, the project team met again and went through a rigorous scoring and ranking against its key (weighted) design criteria. A number of external (non-Council) experts were also involved in the interviews, and we also took their recommendations into account.

In broad terms, this was the procurement process used to engage FJMT+Archimedia: architects in association, to undertake the design. The entire process, as I recall, took about 3-4 months, from advertising to announcement.

I remain convinced that the process did, indeed, throw up innovative responses to the brief. In fact, setting aside the ultimate design,, several of the unsuccessful concept design proposals had developed some genuinely exciting responses to the brief, none of which we had anticipated.

  

AV: How was the argument for a design competition process sold to stakeholders ? Based on economics? Precedents oversees etc ?

CS: We did not set out to create an open entry design competition. It was a more structured EOI and RFP procurement process, which we deliberately adopted, based on a number of relevant precedents within the then Auckland City Council's experience.

We felt that the existing building and its highly constrained heritage site required, at a minimum, a degree of experience, innovation and sophistication in the way that heritage and new built fabric could be integrated.

It was not a question of cost as either process would have likely cost more or less the same - albeit a design competition would have taken more time to conduct, and likely have given public visibility to the competing schemes. Our key stakeholders and funders did, however, have visibility on the final 5 schemes and expressed their confidence in the methodology we adopted.

I realise there are pros and cons of open competitions versus more restricted design processes, but in the end we were not building on a green field site and we were needing a design that could address a large number of complex technical, heritage and planning requirements - this was not the 'new iconic building on the waterfront' moment.

Interestingly Chris ends on the “new Iconic building on the waterfront moment.” Some might say Te Papa moment but we all know that he is referring to the Sydney opera house Bilbao moment that we have yet to procure and has been mouted for the super city harbor edge. Lets hope we can sort out the process to make that moment last a bit longer and inspire a a few newbies to put their money where their digital mouths are and hit the ground running, perhaps even a few lengths in front of their mentors…evolution.