MEANS TESTING ARCHITECTURE.

The noble ideal of being able to create decent and humanly rewarding backdrops for all members of society has inspired the best elements of the profession for a century. To aspire to it, we need economical and sustainable methods of building which can make architecture democratically accountable. They are what this issue is about.

From the Pharaohs to French presidents with their Grands Projets, patrons have hurled resources at buildings to try to impress their subjects with magnificence and munificence. Standard architectural history textbooks tell the story of the expenditure of wealth on a (literally) colossal scale. Palaces, cathedrals and temples are the built embodiment of the surplus wealth of the societies which created them: that is one of the reasons why they move us, and why so many survive. They were not only the most valued works of their time, they were the best made, hence for instance in the bombed cities of Europe after the Second World War, the churches were often the only structures to survive.

It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that architects began to find that there was a demand for design talent to cater for the needs of others besides those at the top of the social tree. The great push for universal education in countries like Prussia, France and Britain generated totally new architectural approaches to schools, which suddenly became a new kind of building type. Philanthropic industrialists in places as far apart as Bournville in the English Midlands and Hellerau in Saxony began to commission new forms of housing for their workers, and the most adventurous local authorities like the London County Council started to build for the poorer members of the community. Architects (who had of course always complained about not having enough resources, even on the most expensive projects) suddenly really had to come to terms with building economically.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the value system had been largely reversed. Wholesale destruction in the Second World War necessitated rapid, cheap, large-scale building, the theoretical foundations of which had been laid in the '20s and '30s with ideals like Existenz Minimum and its practical applications such as the Frankfurt kitchen, designed as precisely and neatly as a ship's galley. Existenz Minimum sounds sinister to us now, as does Le Corbusier's notorious declaration that the house is a machine a habiter. Yet originally, these were noble ideals that had the aim of generating at least the basic conditions of civilized life for even the poorest.

Results of the postwar building boom often look pretty shoddy now. Partly as a result, architectural values sometimes appear to have turned on their heads again. In the post-modern world, the idealism which was one of the main drivers of Modernism between say 1880 and 1980 sometimes seems almost irretrievably faded. Yet the proposition that the benefits of architecture should be available to all, and therefore it must be possible to make architecture economically is still vital if the profession is to have more human depth and relevance than the production of vulgar villas for millionaires and glitzy office blocks to gratify developers' egos -- the two driving types of PoMo (Post-Modern Classicism). It sometimes seems that the world is being covered by tarted-up shedding.

The tendency is exacerbated in the west by increasing government commitment to methods of building procurement like PFI (private finance initiative) and BOOT (build, own, operate, transfer). These have yet to demonstrate that they can produce buildings which have qualities other than cheapness (and even this may be more apparent than real, for future generations have to pay the bills). By putting control of the whole process in the hands of developer-contractors, it is inevitable that human issues will be put last in any calculus of values, and architectural imagination and innovation will perforce be stifled because the process of bidding for the work is so expensive that there are no resources left for what politicians and developers consider to be inessential frivolities.

But the post-modern condition can be much richer than this. One of the key notions of post-modernity is that several sets of values can operate at once: 'either-or' has given way to 'both and'; the certitudes of bureaucratic Modernism at its worst can be countered by dual or multiple coding, so beloved by Charles Jencks. A building can be economical and efficient, and have the traditional values of architecture like placedness, psychological succour, urbanity and so on. Getting on for half a century ago the California Case-Study houses, particularly the Eames one, showed how the combination could be made. In subsequent decades, industrialized construction was supposed to do the same for a whole range of building types, but rarely lived up to that early promise. Whole systems were found to have inherent defects: to leak or generate disastrous condensation. Many of those which kept the water out and condensation at bay proved difficult to maintain, so what had appeared at first to be good bargains turned out t o be far from being so when costs in use were taken into account.

Now, industrialization (in a rather different form) is in favour again, and it seems unlikely that economical building can be delivered without industrial techniques, standardization of parts and so on. Much has been learned from the mistakes and problems of the first generations of industrialized building, but sometimes it is difficult to be entirely sure that techniques we take for granted at the moment will not be as troublesome as some of the concrete panel technologies of the '60s and '70s. For instance, will all those wall constructions that are no more than rendered insulation, now almost universal throughout Europe, really remain crack free? Certainly there are new forms of render, and new ways of applying them, but will they last? If they don't, massive deterioration could begin very fast. But if, as many expect, they will remain impervious, and easy to repair when they go wrong, we really do have walling techniques which are simultaneously cheaper and more thermally efficient than most of their pre decessors.

Because they are hybrids of industrial and traditional technologies, such techniques offer a great deal more architectural freedom than did, say, the heavy panel systems half a century ago. We have only vague notions of what kinds of architecture and city really effective economical construction might produce (provided that we can avoid being overwhelmed by the dim products of PFI, BOOT and the like). But it is quite clear that, in a democratic society, we do need to learn to make the benefits of architecture available to all in ways that are sustainable for both users and the environment. This is not to say that all building will be economical, or that craftsmanship will no longer be necessary the rich will make sure of that, and we must hope that decent societies will continue to celebrate their honorific structures. But the search for architectures that can provide varied, humanly rewarding backgrounds to everyday life that began with great idealism more than a century ago must continue. If it does not, w e shall descend into the kind of world that is already suggested in some US and Asian cities, with islands of vulgar opulence isolated in seas of mediocrity -- or worse.