... that is to say, architects. According to the Guardian, dirigists in the DfE have clamped down on bendy walls, novel materials, open spaces, glass-substitutes, internal partitions, and glazed walls in the new design templates for their new, cheaper, Building Schools for the Past programme. DfE says ...
This information is for contractors, members of school building project teams, local authorities and promoters of schools. It will also be of interest to the leaders and governing bodies of schools. These demonstrate good practice that can be achieved within the set cost and area allowances. The details of the baseline designs are set out, together with associated drawings and technical analyses.
See, who needs architects. It's back to the Mary Baker schools mix. But why? Is it just that old civil servant adrenaline rush of telling people what to do? Or ... . Well, The Guardian reports Mr Gove saying at a conference on free schools in 2011:
We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school; we won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer.
Peter Clegg, a partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios which has designed more than a dozen schools, is reported as saying:
It is extraordinarily over-prescriptive and it shows an extreme lack of trust in the architectural and construction professions to deliver schools to budget. Why are they not just telling us how much they want to pay per square metre? I can understand them wanting to turn the screw on the budget, but why do they not give architects who understand these things the ability to decide. Materials such as the ETFE plastic used as a roofing material on the Eden Project did not make sense as it was often a cost-effective way to bring light into a building and was cheaper than glass.
None of that trendy green nonsense for us, then! Sad; pathetic, really.
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