ScottishArchitecture.com

People who write things in magazines or the net are always being urged to rail against some injustice or another.  I mostly resist, because it strikes me as wasted effort.  It’s more productive to boost the good than to knock the bad.  Sometimes, though, rising frustration at the decline in architectural quality in Scotland forces you to break this unwritten rule.

The new Grove Academy in Broughty Ferry is shaping up to be the worst building in Dundee.  It scorns its context, overpowers its site, and is designed to a considerably lower standard than the building it replaces.  There’s no excuse for that – and I’ll declare my interest immediately: years ago, I attended the school while Ken Anderson was rector.  He strode through the corridors in his flowing academic robes and, like his principal teachers, left an immutable impression on us.  Ken was keenly aware of the school’s pivotal role in the community, and made every effort to explain the school’s history, which extended back to the 1880’s, a period before state-funded education.  As in other Scottish communities, the Grove was an integral part of the town.  By contrast, the new building betrays its ignorance of physical and historical context, and looks completely alien.

The school’s basic planning not only misunderstands the site, but has actually damaged it.  A playing field lay on the north side of Camperdown Street, with rows of mature chestnut trees lining its boundary.  We were told they had been planted just after the Great War, and still produced a healthy crop of conkers each autumn.  For some reason, the new building has been planned in a way that meant all the trees were cut down.  On the other edge of the site was a memorial to former pupils who had served in the Seaforth Highlanders and given their lives during various wars.  It appears to have gone.  The green space around the school has gone, too, thanks to the sprawling planning of the new building.  It is a giant arc with wings radiating backwards to Seafield Road.  The curve relates to nothing: all the surrounding streets were laid out on a grid when the area was feued in the 1820’s, to a plan drawn up by David Neave.  Its form and scale dominate its neighbours, partly because it stretches to the edges of the site.  Its footprint, hence its impact, has been maximised.  The old part of the school was planned efficiently, and has proportionately far less circulation: but why has a developer-led consortium created a building with such a poor gross:net floor area ratio?

Compared to the exisiting Victorian-era buildings on the south side of Camperdown Street, the new PPP scheme has meanly-proportioned classrooms (I had a chance to look at them before I wrote this), with small windows which often face away from the light.  The “Board Schools” procured in Victorian times had tall rooms with tall windows, which threw light deep into each room; clerestoreys in the internal partitions borrowed light from the classrooms to make the corridors brighter; and as at Grove, a run of classrooms often opened onto a bright, double-height hall.  It seemed to me that the classrooms and corridors in the PPP scheme are darker than in the old building, which means higher running costs due to a reliance on artificial light.  The orientation of the new building also means that few rooms enjoy either the bright estuarial light which made classrooms in the old building so bright and welcoming; or conversely, the even northlight which benefitted the art department.  Likewise, those tall windows had hoppers at the top, near the ceiling, which allowed for stratified air to be drawn off so that stuffiness could be removed without creating draughts.  The windows in the PPP building which are potentially openable are at pupil height.

The 1950’s brick-built “Extension” which the PPP building replaces (Grove also had an Annexe and a Centenary Building) was structurally sound, so I’m told.  The built-up felt roof and steel-framed single-glazed windows could have been replaced, and the Extension’s 50-odd year lifespan extended.  It had already lived twice as long as the PPP scheme is expected to.  Disability issues could have been addressed with a couple of lifts.  Extra accommodation could have been added to it – and scandalously, a recent sympathetic brick-built extension-to-the-Extension was demolished to make way for the new PPP building after only a decade in use.  Is that sustainable?  The teak benches, parquet floors and cast iron radiators in the Extension were several orders of magnitude better quality than the fittings I saw inside the new PPP building.  Another problem is the instrumentalist approach of the practices who design these schools.  PPP leads to “serial procurement”, which is arguably better applied to supermarket sheds on edge-of-town sites than to schools.  In the Dundee Schools PPP, we have been given standard responses to different problems.  Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, as Emerson noted, and exactly the same approach has been applied to all of the projects.

For example, the new Claypotts Castle Primary – which replaces Powrie, a first generation post-war school which learned from the famous solar school at Wallasey – and the PPP extension to Grove Academy are both white-rendered monopitch-roofed boxes of 2-3 storeys.  They have panels of lurid yellow and red render, and seemingly tokenistic areas of facing blockwork.  They look very much like basic Sketch-Up computer models brought to life, with no depth or surface articulation.  Were the colours and changes of material merely jaunty wallpaper to attract the eye of a selection panel at the first hurdle of a multi-stage procurement process?  They break up the form of the buildings and destroy any legibility the elevations might have had.  Regardless, a school in a 1940’s social housing scheme on a Radburn layout surrounded by playing fields and bordered by a trunk road; and a school in a Victorian suburb with a tight grain on a gridiron pattern, adjacent to the existing stone-built academy – are very different animals.  Why the same language, palette and parti for both?  We know it’s possible to design modern schools in a fashion that’s more appropriate to their context, and also more nurturing towards the pupils.  Recent schools at Auchterarder in Perthshire, and Newburgh in Fife, have less jarring forms, more sociable internal spaces in the form of internal streets or courts, entrances that draw you in, and classrooms which are clean, bright and airy.  Their procurement route differs from that used in Dundee.

In fact, several factors point towards problems with the procurement method.  It’s insanity to suggest a building’s lifespan should equal its payback period.  Yet that’s what PPP bidders were encouraged to think.  The asset is fully depreciated by the time its 30 year design/ build/ finance/ operate contract term is up.  At that point, it is in one sense “worthless”.  The materials and products used to build it are designed to need no major maintenance or replacement within that term – in fact, the consortium may look for guarantees on the life of the roof membrane, render and windows to virtually go “back-to-back” with the bank’s funding.  This is the most unsustainable way yet thought up to procure a building.  There is no inducement to create a building which will last for 60 years (surely the shortest sensible design life) or 120+ years, which is what the Victorians worked to.  It turns out that the PPP model is unsustainable in terms of funding, too – observe the Aberdeen Schools PPP, which looked to have sunk when the Icelandic banks funding it hit an iceberg.

This story is repeating itself across Scotland: my friends from Stirling, Livingstone, Cumbernauld and Aberdeen have all seen their former schools shut and demolished.  The waste of resources (both financial and material) is staggering – and in my research for this article, I found no evidence that novel teaching methods, didactic theory or any other paradigm shift in the colleges of education have forced this spate of newbuilds.  The truth is that PPP consortia can make more money by knocking down and rebuilding from scratch, than in renovating existing buildings – so these schemes stand no chance of being sustainable.  Energy-saving measures with long payback periods (such as solar photo-voltaics, ground source heat pumps) are unlikely to be used, since the consortia won’t see a financial benefit unless a particular charge-back arrangement is included in the contract. 

Amazingly, there have been calls from Michael Levack of the Scottish Building Federation for a return to PFI/PPP.  This despite the shortcomings I’ve listed above.  This discredited procurement route creates unsympathetic environments, some of which may prove to be unfit for purpose; it effectively champions un-sustainability; it now has little political support; and you would be hard pressed to find a bank willing to fund fresh PPP projects today.  In fact, now that many banks have been nationalised, we are in effect lending money to ourselves, yet still paying profits to large commercial consortia.  On the evidence of Dundee’s PPP schools, the profit motive has not introduced efficiencies, it has reduced standards.  Calls to continue down that road smack of political dogma … which is what spawned PFI in the first place.

My next piece for the blog will look at what the graduates of 2009 face as they enter the jungle of Work.