Staying Involved is Critical

Designers have got to try and get all the way through. The process of disturbing should mean benefits: social benefits, and educational benefits.

My background is as an architect but working for a large contracting company, Sir Robert McAlpine, and I swapped over from the dark side to work for the Eden Project.

At Eden we’ve received top-down, bottom- up funding. We're a millennium project, so we work with government and got funding that way, but also we educate a million people every year, but what we’ve also found and we do a lot of development. And we've found that the process of disturbing is critical.

My soapbox stance is to ask designers to stay involved in the whole process.
 

Working for McAlpine on the Eden Project, I found that the architects would just disappear: it’s a big criticism. They’re a London-based practice, they’d do their design, they’d come down do their site visits and actually they missed a huge amount of things.

When we sort of stepped in it was not without opposition. We were actually asked to be removed by the developer initially, because we were causing so much trouble. We were stirring things up. What we found was when it was integrated with people, all sorts of people, the design involved hugely and actually ended up saving a huge amount of money.
 

We’ve created a completely new way of working with the Fire Brigade, which is going to be adopted nationally, and that was done just by talking to people through it.

Designers have got to try and get all the way through. The process of disturbing should mean  benefits: social benefits, and educational benefits.

With the eco-towns we are now talking about that’s critical. With eco-towns the end result shouldn't just be some houses, it should be real skills that have a real impact. As designers we can be really fundamental, but we have to get inside that process and guide it.