Honesty and Trust: What Chairing a RIBA Jury Taught Me About Commissioning Buildings

Honesty and Trust: What Chairing a RIBA Jury Taught Me About Commissioning Buildings

In 2017 I chaired the RIBA South Awards, one of nine regional juries that between them sift several hundred buildings a year down to a shortlist, then a winners’ list, then — for a handful — a potential National Award, which could then lead to Stirling mid-list, shortlist, and a big prize. It is a strange and privileged job. You are given a few days, ferried around together to a tightly scheduled timetable, and access to buildings that are otherwise locked to you: private houses behind electric gates, college quads you’d normally need an alumni badge to enter, or a chapel hidden mid-campus. You form a view, argue it out with other jurors who have spent their careers looking at buildings differently to you, and then you have to form a consensus, and agree on something.

Looking back at my notes from that process, for various articles and a speech that I gave, one thing stands out more clearly now than it did at the time: almost none of the buildings we rewarded were exceptional because of an architectural idea alone. They were exceptional because someone — a client, a college bursar, a lawyer building their own house — had made a specific, often difficult decision about how to commission architecture. The building was frequently the visible record of an invisible negotiation. That negotiation is the part nobody photographs, but it’s the part I think is worth writing about.

What follows is written in the first person, but the judgements and reasoning behind it wasn’t mine alone. The panel that year was Mark Shipton (Regional Representative, Oxford Architects), Debbie Dance (Lay Assessor, then chair of Oxford Preservation Trust), Ross Alyward (Conservation) and Patrick Osborne (Sustainability, Eco Design Consultants). Brian Eno’s word for this is scenius — the idea that insight is rarely the product of a single genius working alone, but of a scene, a group whose combined attention and disagreement produces something none of them would have reached individually. That was certainly true of our visits. Debbie Dance, in particular, had a reading of people that the rest of us lacked: she could pick up on the chemistry between architect and client, and the language each used to describe the other’s role, in a way that repeatedly unpicked the real story of a project long before the rest of us had worked out what we were looking at.

The building that made me suspicious of my own criteria
Start with the hardest case: a private house in Ipsden, Oxfordshire, designed by Richard Meier’s practice with Berman Guedes Stretton. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary piece of work — ten thousand square feet of that unmistakable Meier white, precise to the point of severity, sitting in open countryside. The construction quality was some of the best any of us had seen; techniques imported from the US were married to bespoke European detailing, including windows built into the render, for aesthetics, rather than thermal bridge detailing.

And yet the jury’s confidence, and clarity was challenged by it. Not because the building failed, but because we were being asked to judge a contextual argument — that a twenty-first century country house should contrast with its setting rather than defer to it, that the question that was asked by client and Meier “how did Blenheim fit into its landscape?” — yet without ever hearing that argument made to us directly. We inferred it from publicity, after the fact. A house this assured deserves a client and architect willing to defend its logic to the people judging it. It went forward to a Regional Award, but not a National Award, although I recommended that the National Awards jury also visit. This experience left me with a rule I’ve kept since: the quality of the argument for a building matters as much as the quality of the built object, and if I can’t reconstruct that argument on site, something has gone missing in the commissioning story, however good the render junctions are.

RIBA’s own judging guidance is explicit that this reconstruction is the jury’s job, not an optional extra: judges are asked to “listen to the story that both architect and client have to tell, interrogate them about the process and its results.” At Ipsden, that story reached us second-hand, through the press, rather than from the people who had actually made the decisions. That isn’t a failure of the building. It’s a gap in the commissioning story that no amount of render detailing can close.

The client who restricted their own budget on purpose
Compare that with Bedales School’s Art and Design building, by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Here the defining decision came from the client, not the architect: Bedales deliberately kept the budget tight, explicitly to avoid what they described as the independent-school building arms race — the tendency for each new facility to try to out-spectacle the last. Economy of means, the client argued, is itself an educational lesson and discipline. For a school built on ideas of self-directed, hands-on learning, a building that shows you how it was made is not a compromise; it’s the curriculum made physical.

What struck the jury most, though, wasn’t the material honesty — laudable as it is — but the process. Students were involved from the selection of the architect through to the detail of the spaces. One student representative was drawn into the profession by the experience; she went on to work experience with FCBS and is now training as an architect herself. You cannot specify that outcome in a brief. It happens because a client treats the users of a building as participants rather than recipients, and gives an architectural practice room to respond to that. An economy of means, the restrictions actually encourage relationships to flourish.

When the architect has to talk the client into more, not less
The Point, a youth centre in Tadley by Ayre Chamberlain Gaunt, inverts the Bedales story. Here the ambition had to come from the architects pushing against the client’s caution. A cramped backlands site, complex funding, and a client initially reluctant to commit to a two-storey building. Had the architects not made that case, the project would have been a single-storey box — safe, and much diminished. Instead, the extra storey created the space for what became the building’s emotional centre: internal windows looking down from the first floor to the ground, which the architects and the young people using the building both described, unprompted, as a tree-house. It is a small, specific image, but it only exists because someone was willing to argue with a client about ambition, rather than simply deliver the brief as written.

Restraint as a discipline, not a default
At Lincoln College, Oxford, Stanton Williams and Rodney Melville & Partners produced what the jury regarded, without dissent, as the outstanding building of that year’s awards — the Berrow Foundation Building, an extension to a 1905 college building. It wasn’t entered for a Conservation Award, and it didn’t need the drama of contrast that the Meier house relied on. Its success came from a patient reading of the existing building’s composition, form, material and features, continued rather than copied, so that old and new sit in dialogue rather than competition. The garden wall was opened with a new gate, dissolving a boundary between the Rector’s garden and the Fellows’ garden that had existed for generations. The measure of a building like this would be to remove it, and the whole site would now feel diminished. That is a much harder thing to achieve than a striking new object, and a much easier thing for a jury to underrate on a first walk-through. This took discussion, debate, deliberation and ultimately we all immensely enjoyed the visit and an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the project.

What have I learnt, and what I’d say to a client now?
The thread through all of this — a country house, a school workshop, a youth centre, an Oxford college building — is that none of these buildings can be explained by budget, sector, or architectural signature alone. What separated the outstanding, memorable schemes from the merely competent ones was trust, and its direction of travel: a client who trusted its own restraint and its students enough to hand them real influence, architects who had to earn a cautious client’s trust to argue for more ambition than had first been asked, a college that trusted a patient reading of its own fabric enough to build in dialogue with it rather than against it, or — in the one case that gave us pause — a client and architect whose reasoning we simply never got to hear, and so a trust we were never given the chance to extend.

The Meier house sits in that last category. It is, on the evidence of the building alone, as accomplished as anything on that year’s list. But a jury can only trust an argument it has actually been given, and the contextual reasoning behind that house reached us second-hand rather than through the submission. However good the render junctions are, that gap is a failure of trust between the people who made the case for the building and the people asked to judge it — and, whatever the National jury’s own reasons, it is not a story I could carry forward on the house’s behalf.

If there’s a single piece of advice in this for anyone commissioning a building now, it’s this: the best buildings I saw that year were not the product of the biggest budgets or the most confident briefs. They were the product of clients and architects who trusted each other enough to be specific and public about why they were doing what they were doing — and that argument, made honestly, is very often more visible in the finished building than either party realises.

RIBA was founded, in its own words, to advance the art and science of architecture. That is a large and easy phrase to nod along to. What chairing this jury taught me is how small and specific its actual mechanism is: an architect and client who trust each other enough to change the brief mid-project, and who trust the people evaluating the result enough to show their working. That, I think, is the real criterion behind all the others — the one nobody writes into the judging notes because it can’t be measured, only recognised when you stand in front of it.

Photograph credits:
The Berrow Foundation: Nick Hufton
Bedales School: Matthew Rice
The Point: ACG

Rupert Cook chaired the RIBA South Awards in 2017 and is a partner at Miltiadou Cook Mitzman Architects.