A reflection on “The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Façadism” by the Gentle Author
Last year the Gentle Author published the intriguingly titled “The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Façadism”. This is an important book for the world of central London development. Façade retention or “façadism”, as the Gentle Author calls it, is standard practice in property development but this book highlights some of the absurdity of the practice.
It raises this vital question for developers: how can we adapt our physical environment to our modern needs, without destroying our past?
What is Ghastly Façadism?
More specifically, what is façadism? (i’ll come on to the subjective “ghastly” in a minute.)
Façadism (more commonly known in the industry as façade retention) is where only the face of an historic building is retained whilst a modern, bigger building is built behind it.
Why is Façadism Practiced?
Often old buildings cannot cater for the modern requirements of an office building. Over the last few decades, companies have wanted to operate in large, flexible, open-plan spaces rarely seen in older buildings. Other requirements such as modern building regulations, underfloor cabling and air conditioning have meant it is simply more efficient for companies to occupy new buildings with these requirements built in.
However there is not enough space in London to keep building new buildings and this has resulted in the practise of façadism – the retention of the historic façade with a modern office built behind it.
In theory, this should be a good solution. It suits:
- Planning officers – the streetscape looks the same
- Historic England – old buildings aren’t entirely destroyed
- Developers – they get to build commercially viable buildings
- London’s Economy – supply rental levels stay reasonable, if no new buildings were built, high rents would either cripple companies or lead them to move to other cities (before anyone scoffs at the concept that rents are affordable, I will remind you of the London surveyor’s favourite fact that current rental levels for offices in the City of London are unchanged from their 1980s-high of £72.00 per square foot per year)
Sounds like a good compromise, why could façadism be a problem?
A building is not its façade alone.
As melodramatic as it sounds, a building is an experience. From first spotting it from across the street, to crossing the threshold, pausing in a cool hall, travelling between rooms, out into a courtyard or onto a sun-drenched balcony, a building is a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory experience.
A building is a living, breathing organism not a 2D work of art hanging in a gallery. No building is solely what we see from the street, it is the whole journey, how we feel as we work our way through, how the light falls, how the spaces contract and expand.
The compromise of façadism means that you get neither the true history of the building, nor the ideal modern building. Often building behind a retained façade results in compromises such as oddly placed windows where new floors do not align with the old. By retaining only a façade you keep only a proxy of a historic building, rather than the true building. As the author scathingly says it is a “kind of authenticity” and surely this means it is not authentic at all.
Why is façadism necessary and yet not necessarily a necessary evil?
It is precisely because a building is not a 2D work of art hanging in a gallery, that it has to adapt and change over the years, to become a place where we can thrive.
Historically people have been a lot less precious about buildings. The listing of buildings only started in earnest in the 1940s and that was to work out if a building should be reconstructed if it had been bombed 1. Prior to this, buildings were altered regularly to suit the needs of the time.
It must be better to have an historic building, adapted to be used and treasured, than a perfectly preserved historic building lying empty.
However, what the Gentle Author highlights is that façadism is not adaptation. Often it is destruction, presented as conservation. What is wrong, is the extent to which buildings are destroyed, without consideration for their re-use. Façade retention may be the best option, but my concern is that it is often assumed to be the best option, without consideration for the alternatives.
The Gentle Author describes it as a “trend in architecture which threatens to turn London into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio”, a funny image, if it wasn’t so accurate.
Happily, times are changing.
We are starting to understand more and more how to make better buildings for people. Or rather developers are realising that making better buildings for people affects profits more than it used to. Three key areas driving this are:
- Occupier Specifications – the occupier is the developer’s customer, their source of income. In recent years, there has been a weight of research, highlighting (what most of us architecture-obsessives know intrinsically) that happiness, productivity and creativity are extremely impacted by our physical environment. To attract and retain high-quality staff businesses need to provide pleasant environments and this no longer means rectangular, overly-airconditioned, white boxes. As the occupier will now pay more for a better-designed, more human-friendly space, developers are building them.
- Build Costs – the cost of materials and labour is increasing. Concurrently, due to the appreciation of quirkier spaces detailed above, the gap in rent between brand new buildings and well-designed refurbishments is narrowing. Therefore it often doesn’t make sense anymore to build an almost entirely new building, at great cost, to only achieve a marginal improvement in rent.
- Embodied Carbon – Developers are starting to take sustainabiltiy measures such as embodied carbon into their calculations. Embodied carbon represents the amount of carbon already expended in the creation of the existing building. This is a sunk cost, added on to the carbon cost of producing a brand new building. This means that, even if a developer builds the “most sustainable” building in the world, it is hard to justify from a cost of carbon perspective, if an existing building has been destroyed to create it. Again this will lead to fewer comprehensive demolitions, as developers are working hard to reduce their carbon footprints.
Fortuitously, these elements, the social, economic and environmental are colliding, meaning that facadism is no longer the profitable endeavour it once was. This should result in more thoughtful repurposing and adaptation of buildings, leaving façade retention to only take place when it really is the best option. I am hopeful, and I hope the Gentle Author will be pleased to hear that this practice will, in its most ghastly forms, be consigned to the past.
People | Spaces | Places 