‘Professional buck-passers’: why the excoriating Grenfell report was right to damn architects
The ultimate responsibility for the tower's safety lay with its architect, said the 1,700-page report, which highlighted a widespread failure among the profession'. Why are so many architects now utterly detached from the realities of construction?
Lying manufacturers, incompetent inspectors, muddled regulations, contemptuous landlords - the blame for the Grenfell Tower fire has been hurled in all directions, exposing a housing and construction industry that is rotten at every level. But, after seven years of waiting, yesterday's inquiry report makes it very clear that there was one professional actor that bore the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of what was designed and built: the architect.
In the excoriating 1,700-page document, the architecture practice Studio E, which led the tower's 2015 refurbishment, is picked out for numerous significant" failings, from its lack of knowledge of the building regulations, to its reliance on subcontractors, to fundamental errors in the design of the new cladding, which had catastrophic consequences". The combination of combustible aluminium composite panels, used with equally combustible foam insulation, and a lack of proper fire barriers in the facade, was the equivalent of wrapping the tower in firelighters, leading to the avoidable deaths of 72 people. Studio E, the report concludes, bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster" - some of the most damning language used for any party involved.
Architects have long complained of the erosion of their status, seeing their role at the top of the tree relentlessly undermined and usurped by specialist subconsultants. There are now separate experts for every part of the design process, from environmental performance to facade design, people flow to drainage, leaving the architect as an increasingly ineffectual middleman, supposedly presiding over these multiple specialisms while having little technical knowledge of any of them.
The role of professional buck-passer is made all too clear in the Grenfell report. It lays out how technical queries from the cladding subcontractor, Harley Facades, about such crucial details as cavity barriers - which prevent smoke and fire from spreading through the gaps in walls and ceilings - were simply passed on to the fire consultants, Exova, without [the architect] becoming directly involved".