THE GAP IN THE PROCESS

For over 20 years I've seen the construction industry make a fundamental mistake with existing buildings. It treats them like new builds. And I've found that it costs clients money, time, and strategic focus.

The problem is that no one is telling organisations they need to understand what they have first, even before they write a brief and lock in direction and, more crucially, no one is helping them do it. I’ve noticed that nobody discusses the pitfalls of starting without this work, warning clients that without it they could end up getting halfway through and then going back to the beginning. Or worse, ploughing through and building the wrong thing.

So I've built a consultancy to do exactly that.

SPOTTING THE PATTERN

I first saw this pattern play out in my first year working in an architecture practice. I was helping with a large high-profile, complex building and the architect I was working with had been commissioned to design how the education department of that building worked, he’s been developing design for over 6 months when it became increasingly clear that the project couldn’t continue until the entire building and functions had been understood and so they commissioned a masterplan from us. The urgent redesign of the education department stopped.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen and experienced time and time again ever since. You get midway into a project, you are right into the weeds of details and suddenly everyone realises that this work impacts all sorts of other parts or functions of the building no one had anticipated. Suddenly everyone is asking if perhaps the brief wasn't quite right and they need to stop, take a step back and reevaluate, to zoom out and look at the whole, to understand how the interweaving functions and uses work together, and what they already have.

They decide they need a master plan. But the problem is that the master plan might change all that work that has already been done. All those consultant hours they have already paid for and those meetings they have attended.

Going back to that high profile building - so we went to work on the masterplan, but for the education department that meant months of work, momentum, and strategic focus. Lost. The real issue became clear: the industry hadn't provided them with a service to understand how their whole building worked as a system before the project started. How that one space connected to everything else. They'd spent time and consultant costs on a design that they wouldn't know if it worked until the masterplanning had been completed and it might have to change entirely. Because no one had helped them ask the right questions upfront.

Only a year later, a swimming pool client had decided what they needed - a redesigned shower and toilet block to accommodate an accessible WC. They commissioned an architect to do exactly that. But the industry hadn't provided anyone to help them step back and ask: where is the best place for this? What do we already have? What are the real constraints? They'd been left to write a narrow brief without the support to understand their options first. So they paid the architect for a redesigned toilet block, but there was a perfectly sized cupboard just there, ready to be reutilised. This single move saved them over £30,000.

In both cases, clients moved forward without foundational understanding. Not because they were careless, but because the service to help them build that understanding didn't exist. It cost them in fees, time, and lost strategic focus.

This pattern persists even when organisations have Conservation Management Plans, masterplans, feasibility studies. These tools exist. But they don't address what's actually needed: foundational understanding before direction locks in. CMPs are heritage-focused. Masterplans are commissioned after you've decided something needs to change. Feasibility studies answer the question with a brief already in place. None actually fulfil the need for a wholesale understanding of what you already have, its value and what it will take to make changes.

Over the next 20 years I saw this again and again. At huge scales and at small scales. With big organisations and domestic clients. Always the same root problem: the industry hadn't provided a service to help clients fully understand what they had before they decided to change it.

WHY THIS KEEPS HAPPENING

Simply because the construction industry treats existing buildings like new builds.

There are two reasons why this happens. One is that the construction industry assumes you're building from new on a greenfield site, so there's no allowance for taking the necessary time and effort to understand what you have. The other is that building today is much, much more complicated than it was even just 30 years ago.

When you're designing on a greenfield site, the process is straightforward: identify the problem, design the solution, build it. Yes, there's usually a nod to the local environs, but no deep understanding is necessary because there isn't much to understand.

Conversely there's a huge amount to understand with existing buildings, they're systems, they have inherent processes and interdependencies. They have structural dependencies and all sorts of constraints - heritage, ecological, statutory, and more, and each of these elements has value. Existing buildings cannot be treated like new buildings. The system and the value must be understood first before anyone tries to change it.

The complexity issue compounds it. Architectural lore has it that the Economist building by the Smithsons, beautiful, built in the 1950s, had a drawing set of around 50 drawings. That's it. The whole thing. And a lovely building as a result. However, a building of that size and scale now could easily have 10 or 20 times that number of drawings, plus several stage reports and specs the size of the Gutenberg Bible.

The issue isn't necessarily that architects produce too much information, but rather the issue is that, due to the complexity, once you start producing that information, every decision is much, much, much harder to unpick. Shifts in brief have a much higher impact. And it gets to the stage where those initial decisions, however small, are essentially hardwired into the drawings.

Which is exactly why understanding must come first - way before detailed design, before the concept locks in, before the brief is set and an explosion of information and constraints locks everything in place.

Heritage buildings are the exception to the rule above - some of this understanding work is inherent within the processes of working with heritage buildings, but it's fragmented and incomplete. Heritage consultants and archaeologists look at heritage significance. Architects look at design solutions. Project managers manage the project they're given. Nobody looks at the whole building, the whole site, the whole picture, before the brief gets locked in.

WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN EVER NOW

We cannot build our way out of climate change. There are masses of embodied energy already locked into the buildings we have and those should be our starting point. We have to make existing buildings work harder. The constraints of net zero requirements, heritage constraints and regulatory complexity all layer onto what already exists.

This is not the moment to change something you don't fully understand. The cost of getting it wrong is too high: in carbon, in money, in time.

Construction costs are at unprecedented levels and economic uncertainty is real. Capital building projects are so expensive, you cannot afford to build it wrong, and the industry still isn't helping clients understand what they have first so they get the answers right in the long run.

Stopping to do a masterplan or not understanding the full range of regulatory constraints and requirements for projects up front causes delays, and those delays can cost you access to funding. Grants, government schemes, heritage support, net zero grants - these all have deadlines. If you get halfway through and are hit by an unknown regulation or extra requirement, you can miss the window. Often, that funding is what made the project viable in the first place.

THAT'S WHY I CREATED THIS CONSULTANCY

Doing the work of understanding the site, the buildings, the grounds and the surrounding area, and learning its value is great, really important, vital to organisations, but much better if it has been done at the start, before the project briefs are even written.

It is the moment that matters most, and in the long run it makes the decisions - the direction of travel easier because you are making decisions with full understanding of what you already have - so it's easier to see what you need to change and understand what change is possible.

When I set up my own practice I realised there isn’t a service for this vital step, architectural design, conservation management plans, masterplanning are easy to commission but there wasn’t someone who specialises in helping clients understand what they actually have before they decide what to do with it.

Someone needs to be on hand to help organisations, without preconceived notions about the answers, but it also needs to be someone who understands all the implications of the likely solutions. This is why it matters that I'm an architect. I could design the solution, but I really want to help clients ask the right questions first so they understand the potential and the constraints. Then I can help put the right team together to design solutions that make the best use of what already exists.

WHAT CHANGES WHEN ORGANISATIONS DO THIS WORK FIRST

When this foundational work is undertaken before a project, clients don't end up halfway through realising the brief wasn't quite right. There’s less redesign and mid-project scope changes, fewer budget surprises and fewer delays that cost access to funding windows. Clients don’t need to rethink the brief halfway through because they’ve got some new knowledge.

Clients get better cost and programme certainty.

Construction will always be complex, you can’t eliminate unknowns from the process, but you can do more work upfront to understand the context which always leads to a smoother process further down the line.

COMING BACK TO WHY

I still love designing buildings and getting projects built properly. But I've spent twenty years watching organisations reach a point of crisis, realising they should have done something else first and I’ve thought, “Gosh, if only they’d only known x, y or z it could have saved them a huge amount.”

So I set up a service which would help clients benefit from all my experience where I’ve seen construction projects go wrong to try to avoid those issues in the first place, and save clients time, money and strategic focus from day one.