It is known that the construction industry in the UK has been losing skilled workers to retirement faster than it has been able to attract newcomers and that because of it we have a widening skills gap.
Also known is that, pre 2020, this gap had been partially filled with a EU skilled labour force that is now heavily reduced as a direct consequence of the Brexit and Covid combination.
In addition to this, the past 15 years have seen our industry normalise a sense of short termism where public interest seems to be missing from the agenda and quality (of construction and design) is often sacrificed at a cost that is already too high.
Our industry seems to be suffering what one can only describe as an insular lack of imagination that prevents the collective "us" envisage a new life for buildings through adaptation, repurposing and retrofitting. And instead, as it is hardly a surprise, we are seeing demolition establishing itself as the default option in the next evolutive phase of our cities.
I want to clarify that I don't mean lack of design imagination, although I have to admit that one needs a special kind of resilience to remain creative at times when good design is portrayed as a superfluous expense by those with the louder voices or the deepest pockets....
I mean the kind of creative curiosity one gets from exposure to other ways of procuring projects, or case studies that have reimagined a certain built environment without the need to flatten a site or to fall into facadism.
It is highly frustrating to know that ,as an industry, we have the skills to do better if only we were allowed to do more upfront thinking and look beyond skin deep appearances.
Image:
Last year I was lucky to visit some examples of reinvented/transformed buildings and I will be sharing them (keep an eye) . Today, however, I just want to show you a very small detail that, in my experience, should the challenge be in the UK, it would (quite likely) have resulted in the reduction of the platform length or a full reconfiguration of the lower level to facilitate "a clear headroom"... Do you imagine what I might be talking about?
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