is even more important, as accelerating technological and social change makes it hard or impossible to predict how we will live and work in the decades to come. If our buildings are to be sustainable, they must cope with radical changes in configuration and use.
Romig and O’Sullivan’s graph, published in Hospital Engineering in 1982, compares the replacement frequency of parts, systems, buildings and urban infrastructure. Flexible buildings should allow for the replacement of services with minimal disruption to the structure.
Researchers have analysed the differing replacement rates for different parts of the built environment: basic appliances (and nowadays IT systems) have a life of ten years, systems like air conditioning and heating can maybe last 40 to 50 years, buildings themselves can last 100 years or more, while the cities’ infrastructure and layout date back centuries.2 A building’s framework should allow for services to be replaced and renewed, with minimal disruption.
Reliance Controls, built on time and for a very modest budget in 1967, was Team 4’s last project.
The factory was constructed from standard components – I-beams, braces and corrugated steel.
Internal partitions were moveable, creating flexible and democratic space – bosses and workers used the same entrances and the same canteen.
Allowing for change in the design and construction of a building is a constraint, but constraints are a critical driver of our aesthetic language. Cost, time, the availability of materials, planning and building regulations, evolving technology, political decisions and clients and users requirements – these all shape buildings. But constraint defines the area of possibility, and gives direction to design. There’s a famous anecdote about the seventeenth-century architect Inigo Jones being commissioned to build St Paul’s in Covent Garden. The Earl of Bedford said that the cost needed to be as low as possible, saying ‘I would not have it much better than a barn.’ Jones replied, ‘Then you shall have the handsomest barn in England!’ You do not have to sacrifice beauty or function to a reduced budget, though money always helps, as my mother used to say.
A Beautiful Barn – The Reliance Controls Factory
The window, added by the factory’s occupiers, showed that we needed construction systems that could respond easily to changing needs.
The Reliance Controls Factory represented a leap forward both functionally and aesthetically, a shift from the language learned from Wright and Corbusier, to one influenced by Fuller, Soriano and Eames, and by the industrial structures we had seen travelling round the USA. It was the first building that we built using standardised components and systems, rather than the chaotic construction of traditional building techniques. The commission came about when Peter Parker, later to be chairman of British Rail, asked Jim Stirling to recommend young architects who could build an expandable 30,000 square foot electronic component factory near Swindon – to be completed within ten months of the first client meeting, and at a cost of £4 per square foot, a tiny budget even in those days.
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