Architecture, cost and politics.

The decision to award the Stirling Prize (the premier UK architectural award) to the late Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament complex in Edinburgh provoked a predictable controversy. Wasn't it just like architects to vote for a building that had overrun wildly on both budget and time? Wasn't this a typical response to process failure? Didn't it fly in the face of responsible treatment of the client? The clamour came largely from people disinclined to analyse what underlay cheap headlines accusing the architects alone of being responsible for cost outcomes--not the contractor, not the cost consultant, not the client--thereby perpetuating the myth of the all-powerful designer, oblivious and/or resistant to any notion of cost accountability. This stereotype can have a relationship to truth, as at the Farnsworth House, where Mies van der Rohe took his chances on not being fired and created what he felt a very long-suffering client really desired. However, it seems to be the case that politicians and public authorities fear telling the truth about building costs because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that voters will oppose the creation of buildings that sound 'expensive' (that is to say most of them).

All this results in the self-satisfied prophecies by commentators who imagine they are being wise in predicting that out-turn costs will be much higher than the original prediction. They are not being wise at all, but merely stating a truth that has been determined in part by their own ignorance, and in part by the unstated conspiracy to keep them in ignorance on the part of the design and construction industries. Disguising the truth about costs may allow projects to proceed which otherwise would not have happened, but there is a price to pay: hostility and cynicism on the part of the public which picks up the bill. This is particularly true of architecture that is in some way symbolic; one rarely finds the same cost objections to construction of, say, a ring road (even if there are objections on environmental grounds).

It is precisely because of its symbolic nature that architecture can act as a magnet for discontent that has nothing to do with a particular building, or its cost, but everything to do with separate cultural or political concerns. What is routine in some countries--a new opera house--is the occasion for controversy in others. Memorials often trigger off huge arguments about location, choice of sculptor or architect, the nature of what is being memorialised and the appropriateness of artistic response. It is rarely the cost of a project that informs underlying objections. The budget figure is merely the occasion for protest; the final cost figure an excuse for excoriating a project which was never liked in the first place. So complaints by Scots about the cost of the Scottish Parliament building are in reality about political concerns. It is impossible for architecture to exist independently of the social and economic forces which bring it into being, but it is not unreasonable for an architectural jury to make its judgement independent of those considerations, treating the cost of symbolism as a desirable reality rather than the first candidate for the value engineer's routine excision.