Seeing the end in the beginning

Over the last couple of years I've become slightly obsessed with thinking about how things end. How organisations, businesses, masterplans, policies and, of course, buildings come to the point where they are redundant: superseded by the change that happens around them. 

Cassie Robinson's brilliant blog How do we help things to die? crystallised a lot of those thoughts for me and I've been considering how this applies across a whole field of things ever since. I admired how FAT announced their disbanding rather than fizzling out through mediocrity like so many architecture practices. I've been involved with some charities and one came perilously close to shutting down, prompting a lot of thought about when a charity's mission is complete, or when it no longer becomes relevant. 

I've watched buildings be built for all the right reasons, but with little thought to the sustainability of the organisation that they were built for, resulting in disillusionment in the communities they were meant to serve. I’ve seen funding given to develop digital resources with no plan to maintain them, resulting in zombie websites continuing to feed out of date information into the world. And of course in the world of buildings, understanding what happens to the huge amount of material that goes into a building when - as happens to most - they get knocked down or substantially remodelled, should have always been vital but, until relatively recently, was not something I took that seriously. 

In this age of climate and biodiversity collapse, it feels important, across all aspects of life, that we think about the end at the same time as the beginning. Playwrights and filmmakers know this, of course, plotting out the arc and often starting with an ending. And more prosaically, in project management, working from the end goal, the desired output, back along the critical path that will lead there, is normal practice. But the problem with this is that the output, the goal, is not actually the end of the project. It is just the end of the bit you think you control. The thing - whether it's an app, a building, a product - goes out into the world and get used, ignored, bought, lent, adapted, taking on a mutant life of its own with a myriad of unintended consequences.

The tendency had been to say that responsibility for this phase of life is down to the client, the end user, the consumer, the host. But I'm not so sure. I think the designer, the funder, the project manager, the founder, can design in - or out - ways that allow that thing to have a good end of life. We shouldn't be putting things into the world which will end up polluting, wasted, unable to be reused or recycled. The built-in redundancy of an iPhone or an electric car is inexcusable. Clothes made of fibre mixes that can't be separated out for recycling; widgets where plastic and metal are so tightly connected that they defy the recycling stream; there's so much stuff in the world that gets made without any thought for its afterlife. 

For a while at HAT we've been trying to improve one factor in this - the manual that gets handed over to our clients on completion of their building. This is actually something that the contractor is meant to compile - a compendium of all the relevant information in a health and safety file and building manual. I've never seen a contractor do a good job of this. Contractually it's a condition of practical completion, but in reality, you can be waiting weeks only to receive a bunch of badly organised ring binders, a USB stick of random product sheets, a set of drawings that don't represent what was actually built, and nothing to help a client make head or tail of it.

With your car you get a properly designed manual, indexed and comprehensive. Yet with a building costing millions, you get nothing to help you operate it efficiently, maintain it correctly, to prolong the lifespan of key elements, or even to make sure you touch up the walls with the right colour paint. So from our first completed project, we've tried - with no extra fee, it has to be said - to give our clients a manual that we've put together, that might actually be helpful. At its simplest, we wanted a way to remind them to clean the gutters and when to get the automatic doors serviced. 

Each iteration we've tried to improve the way it's put together and presented, and to adapt the structure and content to the nature of the project it describes. A few projects ago we realised that we were doing practically the same thing - presenting the full technical design of the building, with details of all the products and materials specified - in our Stage 4 detailed design reports for client sign-off. The main difference was that we weren't telling them about the maintenance implications of those product choices at Stage 4 but we were already showing them, in a user friendly way, the full integrated design. So it was pretty simple to restructure the Stage 4 information to include maintenance instructions - then, at project handover, we just needed a quick update to pick up any changes during construction, and the manual was good to go. 

When Architects Declare came along we had a lot of discussion about whether to sign. I'm instinctively a FOMO type person while T is a natural sceptic of any self-appointed club. We didn't sign but we did ask ourselves what we could do better, and more explicitly, within our practice in order to reduce our climate impacts. We looked at a number of things, from basic stuff around travel and resource usage, through to how we make design decisions and talk to our clients about climate issues. We decided to ensure every report we write includes a section up front about how the design mitigates and adapts to climate change - or how it doesn't, if decisions had been made which were not climate beneficial. We would ask clients at interview about their climate and carbon brief. We would actively point out to clients when they made a decision or set a brief that prioritised something else - cost, aesthetics - over carbon reduction. We would talk to planners, consultants, contractors about carbon and waste reduction from startup, as well as trying to educate ourselves a lot further. We knew we didn't have all the answers - and we still don't- but we thought that having active conversations was going to help us figure out the thinking and pose difficult questions, maybe prompting some change in priorities and real action.

When looking again our our reports and manuals, it seemed a logical next step to include end of life instructions as part of this spotlighting of environmental impact. If a client was being asked to sign off all these detailed design choices, shouldn't they make those decisions with all the facts at hand? This became particularly pertinent when looking at our project in Jaywick Sands. Not only is Jaywick really threatened by climate change - the 100 year future looks scary - but the project is explicitly a 'long meanwhile' project with a 20-30 year expected lifespan. So how the building can be deconstructed, reused, recycled is central to our conception of the project as designers - even if, to be honest, it's not the client's top priority. 

So this week we delivered a full tender pack and Stage 4 report which starts with 1000 words on the climate response and then makes the client confront the reality of what our collective design choices will be putting into the world, product by product. How to recycle the roof; how to dispose of a light fitting; what has value at end of life and what won't. 

I don't think we made perfect decisions or the least resource wasteful building we could have. It's on a very tight budget and with the massive rise in construction prices since the project's funding was secured, there will be demands for savings to be made. But when we do so, we can also be pointing out the carbon and resource impacts. Sure, change this or that, if you are comfortable that your choice will make the space more energy intensive to run, or will put more unrecoverable waste into the world. 

Look at the end at the beginning. We've got loads of learning and work to do on how to really do this, and few clients who are willing to fund this deep dive, but we keep trying.