ABSTRACT

When I worked as an architectural journalist, I sometimes heard the clients, particularly of public buildings, mention that the architects had never returned after completion to ask what had worked well or not so well. In one case, a public librarian expressed considerable anger at this, not because she was unhappy with her new library, but because she felt the architects didn’t care about the happiness of the people using it. When I mentioned that conversation to the architects, they seemed concerned - and a little angry at 204me for being the messenger - and I suspect they called their client soon after I left, and paid a visit to the building afterwards. Architects are busy people, but the regularity with which I heard this from clients reinforces a relative weakness in much of the design community, which has generally focused on creating new things rather than on revisiting and evaluating old ones. This reflects a characteristic of most design schools, in which the reviews of student work often focus on the student’s intentions and their success in realizing them, with relatively little time spent analysing what worked and didn’t work in projects from the past.