Work ethics.

There are signs that the nature of work is being re-evaluated by contemporary managements. A new humane approach to the provision of workplaces may be emerging. If so, architectural imagination will be needed in many different ways.

What should ordinary buildings be like? We know that churches and temples, museums and galleries, theatres, stadia, palaces and even great hotels and department stores must have a special presence. History sanctions the celebration of these types; libraries of books have been written about the nature of such buildings; they are featured in literature and film and form the backdrop to many of the news stories in the newspapers and on television.

Yet the places in which we spend most of our time - ordinary dwellings and working places - usually receive much less attention than the posh building types. This is not to discount the enormous outpouring of publications on housing, and to a lesser extent on offices, between say 1990 and 1970. But, taking the history of modern architecture as a whole, that was an unusual period, largely conditioned by enormous wars and their consequences.

Today, architectural debates continue almost as they did before 1914. The focus is mostly on the high building types. Housing, offices and factories are largely left to the building industry to create, with the most minimal architectural contribution - hence the success of PoMo, the wrapping paper style which disturbs so little the most basic processes of development. That there is so little discussion of the nature of ordinary building types is perhaps partly a recognition of the fact that in many cultures architects are increasingly marginalised in their production. Perhaps there is also a degree of embarrassment and proper modesty about what happened last time architects were heavily engaged in these areas.

It must be confessed that architects' involvement in producing housing and workplaces has not been an unqualified success. During the reconstruction period after the Second World War, the intrusion of architectural games into housing for the least powerful and advantaged people in the community often had disastrous effects on their lives, on society and on the esteem in which architects and architecture are held. Architects are still making play with-large-scale housing even today (p23).

Yet, now that blame can be more justly apportioned than it was say 10 years ago, the failures of post-war mass housing can be seen to fall not just on architects but on over-enthusiastic politicians, a building industry that promised too much volume and delivered too little of substance, a general underfunding of management and on lack of political will to maintain decent standards. Against this picture, the achievements of architects in creating decent and humane housing should not be forgotten. There is a noble Modern tradition that stems from, for instance, turn-of-the-century London County Council estates, through Siedlungen like Britz and Siemensstadt, to experiments made by the Internationale Bauausstellung in Berlin during the '80s (AR September 1984 and AR April 1987) and the more recent Scandinavian ones like those at Boras in Sweden (AR November 1993). Here are particular places created for individuals and families using the full power of industrial processes to enhance potential for individuality amid the mind-numbing faceless anonymity of the modern city and suburb.

The tradition of architectural involvement in the creation of places to work in is less distinguished. Behrens' famous factories for the AEG in Berlin have been much promoted as formal crossroads in the evolution of Modern styling, but there is no evidence that they improved the lot of people working in them - if anything, rather the reverse (AR January 1994). To be honest, it must be admitted that until recently, architectural contributions to factory design have been virtually negligible, the little that was done was mostly, like Behrens' contributions, more cosmetic and stylistic than constructively humane. (There were of course a few distinguished exceptions - the Fagus works, the Van Nelle factory, Haring's Luckenwalde hat plant and a handful of others - significantly none a building for heavy industry.)

The profession's record in office building is scarcely more distinguished. Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin building, for all its formal and environmental properties, was a built embodiment of F.W. Taylor's mechanistic and exploitative scientific management theories. The celebrated skyscrapers of Chicago and New York may have made wonderful skylines, and represented extra-ordinary developments in the science of structures, but they did very little for the well-being of the workers who were obliged to occupy them.

The advent of the computer and new management attitudes have changed, for better and worse, the potential for architectural involvement in the workplace. Factories for heavy industry are increasingly automated, and human involvement is reduced to supervising machines - a much more agreeable role than being part of the mass production process itself like the hero of Modern Times. Many new light industrial factories are more like offices in terms of their cleanliness and lightness than the sweatshops which were the predecessors of light industrial plants. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see where the boundaries between traditional clerical work and factory work should now be drawn, if at all.

Yet sweatshops of the worst kind still exist both in the rich countries, and in the rising ones to which work is increasingly diverted from the west. In an age of electronic communications, work has become one of the major exports of rich nations to poorer ones. Partly as a result, the nature of many workplaces in the West is beginning to change. The principle that no- one has a personal workstation, but that facilities are made available to people when they need them (hot desking) is not, as yet, very widespread. But it will certainly grow as managements try to contain their costs to compete with cheaper work from developing countries. Factory work may in some instances be becoming more like office activity, but at the same time, office labour is becoming increasingly industrialised.

In such a world, there is a desperate human need for stability: notions of place and shelter on the anonymous plain of life swept by the icy winds of Post Modern economics. Architectural imagination is clearly of the greatest importance in trying to provide this psychological shelter, and there has been a number of very distinguished examples in the last couple of decades, ranging from Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer (1974) which elaborated the possibility of the office organisation as a colony of small groups, to Niels Torp's SAS building in Stockholm (AR March 1989) and Ralph Erskine's Ark in London (AR July 1992), both of which in different ways elaborated on the Scandinavian notion of the combi-office in which there is a clear spatial lattice from the individual office, through the small group space to that of the organisation as a whole. But all such developments have been company headquarters (save the Ark, a speculation which could not find tenants until a single large corporation took the whole building). They cannot offer much more than inspiration to architects (and managements) who struggle to invent stable places in the ever-shifting world of speculative development, hot-desking, short contracts and continuous re-organisation.

A decade ago, at the height of Thatcher/Reaganism's cold-hearted triumphs, the suggestion that place-making has a part in the creation of workplaces would have been laughable in most Anglo-Saxon circles. Only Germany and Scandinavia, and the odd idealistic US company like Chiat Day (AR May 1992) kept alive the notion that work does not have to be brutish and degrading. Now, there is a perceptible change in climate: managements are beginning to see that companies are not simply economic entities, but social organisations as well. For instance, enlightened chairmen now ask their colleagues if the staff look forward to coming to the office, and if not, why not? The stakeholder concept, of which such utterances are characteristic, ought, like Taylorism, to create a distinctive generation of office design, the results of which will rival in place-making the best of today's housing work.

There should be many opportunities for the use of architectural imagination in such a culture: the examples illustrated in this issue are very diverse, but all show different approaches to giving presence and sense of place to working environments. We hope that they are precursors of a new, thoughtful, plural and humane generation of buildings to work in - ones which offer rewarding and imaginative qualities of ordinariness.