There’s nothing new about major architectural or engineering disasters brought about by a combination of poor design and shoddy workmanship. There’s plenty of both behind today’s cladding catastrophe. But in this case the cause goes far beyond mere ineptitude
to a collective madness that gripped a whole profession for decades: the idea that in Britain’s damp and rainy climate, unadorned concrete is a pleasing material for the cladding of large buildings. Everyone who isn’t an architect knows that this material, grey when new, quickly turns dark, crumbles, stains and becomes utterly miserable in character.
Yet its use in this way became so widespread that the philosophy behind it acquired a name: brutalism. Certainly some of the buildings so finished were brutal enough to serve as the headquarters of the most repressive secret police. But the name came from the French word ‘brut’ which, when not describing the sweetness of a wine, means ‘raw’, ‘coarse’ or ‘unfinished’, beton brut being raw concrete.
In all the furore following the Grenfell Tower fire, no-one seems to have stepped back and asked why so many tower blocks needed additional cladding in the first place. The usual answer is to provide improved insulation and damp resistance, but while these may be factors there is an overriding reason which has so far remained unnamed. Unadorned concrete is so ugly that if the remaining tower blocks were to be sold to private buyers, it would be essential to tart them up.
Like so many ills of modern Britain the roots of this one lie back in the past, in this case around 100 years, to the 1920s when a Swiss-born French architect called Charles-Édouard Jenneret first published his ideas for a truly modern city. Writing as Le Corbusier (a title derived from family names) he advocated housing systems involving a combination of tower blocks set in parkland and low-rise buildings, all made of concrete. He was very keen on concrete.
Le Corbusier designed a number of buildings in a style that we would still regard as ‘modern’ and in the course of time became an architectural god noted not merely for his creations but also for his sayings such as that ‘a house is a machine for living in’ – meaningless claptrap, his critics might argue. But to the planners and architects of post-war Britain, his high-rise housing concept seemed the ideal answer to the problem facing them: the pressing need to fulfil a massive programme of home-building. The war had brought building to a standstill; the Luftwaffe’s bombs had destroyed or seriously damaged thousands of houses, and there were festering slums, relics of the Industrial Revolution, to be cleared. In all this there was a degree of urgency, even haste, in part because by the late fifties demolition had outrun reconstruction.
Since high-rise buildings made of concrete lent themselves to mass production or ‘industrialised’ methods, involving prefabricated components, the concept was embraced with fervour. And just to make sure the idea caught on, the 1956 Conservative government introduced a subsidy for every storey built above four.
The council tenants housed in these new tower blocks had no choice but to accept their new homes which at first were welcome by at least some. For those living in a damp back-to-back terrace house, a light and airy flat with its own lavatory could seem a big improvement.
But then some basic weaknesses in the concept started to become apparent. If you saw your child fall off a swing from a ground-floor back window, you could get to it in seconds, but if you were on the 14th floor and the distance was vertical rather than horizontal, it could take minutes – if the lifts were working. So after an initial phase of acceptance, a long cycle of decline set in.
Surveys have since shown that most people would prefer to live in terrace houses with their own small gardens. Ironically, due to the small parks that surround their feet, tower blocks do not allow a higher density of occupation than terrace houses.
The first stage of the tower block decline was accelerated by a combination of two factors: design flaws and the failure of local councils to provide proper maintenance. Damp, condensation and draughts became major problems.
In many cases the design flaws proved to be fundamental, not superficial. They were inherent in one of the systems widely used, the LPS or ‘Large Panel System’ in which slabs of prefabricated reinforced concrete were joined together, vertically to form load-bearing walls and horizontally to form floors and ceilings and the building was held together by little more than the weight of one storey on another. It was a Scandinavian system devised for building of no more than four storeys, but was adopted in Britain for up to 22 despite having little provision to withstand lateral forces such as wind pressure. Often the concrete components were poorly manufactured and badly assembled with missing bolts and ties allowing water and draughts to penetrate.
The fundamental weakness of this system was finally exposed in 1968 when a gas explosion destroyed the top corner of a tower block at Ronan Point in Newham. Several flats collapsed, just like a pack of falling cards, killing four people and injuring 17. A public enquiry followed, LPS buildings were strengthened and gas was banned from some of them. But in 1986 when Ronan Point was finally condemned, it was forensically dismantled to reveal that up to 50% of the mortar between the load-bearing wall panels was missing. Floor sweepings, bottle tops and cigarette ends were found in the gaps, some of which were stuffed with old newspapers. Since experience in the construction of safe tall buildings dates back to the early skyscrapers of Chicago built in the 1880s, the fundamental flaws of the LPS system represent another indictment of astonishing architectural negligence.
The tower block decline precipitated by the Ronan Point collapse was compounded by the practice, from the late seventies onwards, of local authorities to house ‘problem’ families in tower blocks, thereby reinforcing their growing reputation as undesirable places to live. The large, flanking corridors that many of the high-rise estates featured – the so-called ‘streets in the sky’ – which were designed to separate pedestrians from vehicles, instead became crime-ridden rat runs, stinking of urine and excrement. As a result many more tower blocks were demolished.
A further change came about when Margaret Thatcher came to power and the ‘right to buy’ was introduced. Most people were happy to buy ordinary council houses, but when it came to the remaining tower blocks, there was the problem already described: ugliness. Hence the cladding catastrophe we now face, triggered by the Grenfell Tower fire.
It is proving far more pervasive than was at first thought. Just recently (late October) 1,000 inhabitants of a Notting Hill high-rise estate have been asked to leave because of cladding and related fire risk defects – and this is a group of buildings finished in 2006.
The young professionals who bought flats in supposedly improved tower blocks – exceptions to the general dislike – because they liked the views and often central locations, are now facing ruin in several different ways. In some cases they are facing enormous bills for the replacement of the cladding. In others they are being asked to pay large sums for wardens to provide a ‘waking watch’ by patrolling the building day and night to sound the alarm if necessary. In yet others they may have to wait up to 10 years to obtain a EWS1 (External Wall Fire Review) certificate before they can sell their apartment.
But flammable cladding is not the only problem. The Grenfell Tower fire has caused renewed attention to be focused on the known flaws of the LPS buildings. Recent surveys have revealed that some of them have gaps between floor and wall panels big enough to put a hand in – a recipe for the rapid spread of fire. At least 575 LPS tower blocks across Britain are believed to be so weak that an explosion, fire or a high wind could cause them to collapse.
All this is having a ruinous effect on the housing market which is already in profound disarray due to decades of neglect. The government has offered £1.6 billion in help, but estimates suggest that the total cost is likely to be £3.5 billion, so a lot of people will lose out. This is the sort of situation which might ultimately be resolved by a class action against the manufacturers and installers of the flammable cladding as well as the designers and buildings of the LPS buildings. But the litigation would probably grind on for years and the ultimate award might be completely inadequate because many of the firms involved will already have gone out of business or would somehow be able to evade responsibility.
These disasters follow directly from the collective aesthetic blindness of generations of architects and their fellow travellers. Their folly is a special case of a peculiarly British malaise: the marked tendency since WW2, of the trendigentsia to espouse shallow intellectual fashions with inherent fundamental flaws. It is a disease which infects the right as well as the left – but that’s another story.
Grumpy Greybeard 