Design Build Summary

Each country's construction world forms an ecosystem. Builders, users, planners, architects and developers – among many others – interact and influence each other. One of the characteristics of the contemporary Swedish construction world is an architect's role that is easily circumscribed – where the architect can lose influence when construction starts. One risk is that the houses bear traces of a messy process, where profit margins have become progressively more important. Perhaps partly as a response to this, new organisms have emerged in the ecosystem. One is design-build projects - buildings where architects themselves are the builders – or perhaps rather where the builders happen to be architects.

The Association Byggande Arkitekter (architects as builders) was formed in 2015, and for a few years, municipalities have started formulating land guidelines that are expressly aimed at architects who take on client responsibility. In-house construction takes place in different forms and with different goals. For some architects, design-build projects are a tool for experimentation and knowledge gathering, while others see a better business model or even something that can transform the world of construction. Design-build is a field where a lot is happening, and in the exhibition, some of the most exciting offices share their thoughts and projects.

Brunnshög is a new district in Lund's northern outskirts, marked of the large-scale research institutions ESS and MAX IV. The district is part of Lund - linked by tram to the city centre – but is also a hub for research and knowledge work with visitors and visiting researchers from all over the world.

The architect rowhouses were developed to introduce a sense of permanence and variety in a place characterized by new buildings, research and large companies. Inspiration was drawn from Dutch rowhouses as well as townhouses in Lund's inner city. The project has been initiated and carried out by Lunds municipality through the Brunnshög project under the leadership of Christian Wilke.

Unlike the procedure in a normal developer competition the municipality explicitly turned to architects. Applications were to be submitted by architects, and they needed to contain guarantees that the architects who designed the houses also followed through with the houses throughout the construction process.

The applicants were to report on the project's organization, but no specific process or funding model was prescribed. One hope was that the developer competition could lead to discoveries and perhaps even a process and a cityscape that can be developed in other places.

The rowhouses are in various stages of production and the first move-ins took place in July. In the exhibition, the winning architects present the projects, the thoughts behind, and lessons learned from the process.

Presented here are projects from four Malmö-based offices, who made design-build a central part of their operation. The selection is not exhaustive, however the projects are some of the most innovative in the field. Three projects stem from the same plan – the Spårvägen district in Malmö – and others can be found in other parts of Scania.

Malmö is today the most exciting city in Sweden for design-build architecture. Siegel's Urban Villas, that in 2009 won the Kasper Sahlin prize, became a kind of  starting point, and there is today an unusual concentration of qualitative projects and offices, and in addition a planning department which takes an interest in the matter.

Design-build construction holds great potential for different buildings and urban plans. But design-build can also be a springboard for completely different ways of running an architectural business. Siegel and Egnahemsfabriken are two practices that used design-build construction as a gateway to particularly unusual ways of working.

During the last ten years, Siegel's business has expanded from design-build construction to a business that includes both long-term management and leasing, sales and hotels. Here, Siegel shares thoughts and lessons learned from three projects from a growing list of design-build projects. Egnahemsfabriken is an association and building platform that engages in co-creative design processes and carries out collective buildings where the process itself is a meeting place that generates cultural added value and strengthens social sustainability – the process is as important as the built result.

All projects in the exhibition are about residential buildings. Housing is not all that the construction industry deals with, but it is perhaps what matters most to most people. It is also a field of challenges. In the book Tiotaletets svenska bostad (2020), Ola Nylander - professor of residential architecture - claims that the decade is "the first time in the history of Swedish housing" that "worse housing than in previous decades" was built.

In the same book, Dan Hallemar, publishing editor at Arkitektur publishings, writes that we have a housing situation characterized by laxity; "between what is built and what is needed, the gap between what it costs to build and the prices charged, the gap between what the vast majority can afford to spend on a home and how much it costs.”

In addition to this, in recent years we have seen rampant prices of building materials (for some exhibitors they rose more than 20% during the construction). At the same time, the industry is facing a radical digital transformation and an environmental crisis that forces us to question the basics of how we build and live. Housing is a political issue. But despite the housing crisis and activism, interest is currently relatively cool from both politicians and the population.

The state has, since the nineties crisis, basically left the housing issue alone

to the municipalities. Nor, since 2011, has the public good been allowed to act other than in a market-oriented manner. It becomes a mode where experiments and alternative models from below can become special significant. Architects' offices do not necessarily have the same yield requirements as larger construction operators and given that they are granted bank loans - and are ready to shoulder the responsibility and risk - there is the potential to create unique houses.

There are different opinions about exactly what design-build projects mean for housing construction. The architect Cord Siegel has stated that the entire country's housing needs could be covered if only 58% of Sweden's architects would design-build. Staffan Carenholm – Byggande Arkitekters' founder - sees self-directed projects as a catalyst that can change the construction world and the architect's role. As Malin Zimm, editor-in-chief of Arkitektur, writes in Tiotaletets svenska bostad, the housing issue, in its complexity, has the positive quality that the problem is well-articulated – there is a graspable narrative. Perhaps there are also – in some of the projects here – drafts for better stories.

The need for housing and what is being built today is widely discussed and many have opinions. Various arguments are raised in the debate: it is built too expensively, it is built too rectified, it is not built sustainably enough and it is not built according to people's needs. However, knowledge about the conditions of housing construction is highly variable and sometimes quite absent from the debate.

It is the municipalities that have responsibility for the housing supply, but it is private actors who build and private actors do not put the shovel in the ground unless there is a calculation that says that the project has good conditions to be profitable. It is now over 20 years since there was something that could be called a social housing policy in Sweden. Many years ago, housing could be built according to need, but for a quarter of a century, housing construction is done according to strict profitability calculations and according to people's ability to pay.

There is a housing minister. But it is a ministerial post where the holder does not have access to any real toolbox. A housing minister in Sweden can talk and think, but not achieve very much. And it is obvious right now, in the middle of an election campaign, that neither of the two main political alternatives that have emerged wants to change the game plan for Swedish housing construction. Today, housing policy is far down on the tone-setting political agendas. No change is in sight.

Even though the municipalities have a housing supply responsibility and their planning monopoly, it is the private market that decides what should be built, where it should be built, with what quality it should be built and how new housing should be designed. How about municipal housing companies then, someone objects. Yes, they build, but they essentially have the same market conditions to deal with as the private property developers and construction companies, even if the profitability requirements do not always have to be as prominent.

So where are the architects on this playing field? What influence do architects have on housing construction? What can the architects influence?

There is a fairly widespread notion that architects have great influence and power over the processes of housing construction. These notions have very little to do with reality. If you go back a generation, the architect was hired with the trust of his developer. Today, the architect is largely procured in price competition.

In his traditional role, the architect plans and projects, but today the influence is not the same and at the helm sits the client, the property developer and often also the construction contractor. The Swedish construction process is also highly fragmented, where many players are more interested in optimizing their own effort than seeing the overall good end result. The roles are mentally predetermined, and the various actors have their own perceptions of what other players should relate to and which role they should settle for.

The divided picture of responsibility, the political lack of interest in the housing policy challenges and the dominant housing builders' pursuit of profitability and efficiency is what both architects and critics of Swedish housing construction today have to deal with.

Today, it is someone other than the architect who sets the course and the agenda. In today's housing construction process, the architect is one of several suppliers in a complex and intricate collaboration with several other actors. Sure, there are good processes where the architect can have significant influence, but normally the architect lacks real power over the process through which housing is added.

The architects are faced with a choice. Either you try, based on an essentially unchanged position in the process, to fight for better quality and a slightly greater influence, or you decide to take a different place in the process, take on greater responsibility, a new role, a greater risk but also gain greater influence. You can become a construction architect. You step out of your shell, in whole or in part, and create and implement your own projects. You don't wait for the question if you want to draw something, you take the initiative yourself, assume the role of the developer and seek a land reference or find in another way a project opportunity that allows holding the whole process together. You can walk the tightrope and decide on this as your main track, but you can also combine your traditional role with a completely new one based on self-directed projects. An interesting observation in this context is that the person who shows his ability as a building architect also grows in the eyes of other developers and is regarded as a possible and interesting partner in other projects.

Today, more and more architectural firms want to go all the way and show that they have the capacity and ability to take a comprehensive approach. The driving forces are many:

Show that, with overall responsibility, it is possible to achieve more interesting and well-planned housing qualities with genuine quality without cost increases for the residents.
Contribute to more varied and sustainable housing production and get the opportunity to fully implement the intentions for the project without other actors haggling over quality and demanding their own standard solutions.
Show that the architect can take on a different role and greater responsibility, that the architect can manage the costs of their project and be the practical implementer, not just the giver of ideas. There are challenges. In their traditional role, the architect does not take such great risks but consequently does not have a decisive influence either. As a building architect, you step into a completely new process with higher stakes, bigger money, longer times and increased uncertainty.

The fact that today we have more and more architectural companies choosing this positional transfer is gratifying and also the biggest change in the architect's role in the last quarter of a century.

Today there is the association Byggande Arkitekter which brings together these architectural firms and forms a forum for common knowledge and information exchange. Today, these architectural firms are housing construction microbreweries that complement and challenge the dominant housing builders' all-too-well-known and not always so interesting products.

This exhibition shows several examples that deserve attention. Today, the building architect companies have design-built well over 2,500 homes. It is not a very large volume, but what has been built is among the most interesting produced in the last two decades.

As in all times, today's architect's role is shaped by contemporary technological development and understanding. We have made a journey from the master builder who worked and communicated directly on the construction site with a deep knowledge of the craft, to the modernists' pursuit of efficiency and rationalization. Production was moved away from the construction site and into the factory, which also reduced the visibility, knowledge and proximity to manufacturing for the architect. There arose an era of the plan first and execution later. And the architect got stuck in planning. Today, we mainly draw static drawings with hard lines and fixed dimensions. We convey the geometrical building should have when it is ready.

We are facing a new leap in technological development. This time it's about digitisation, robotization and artificial intelligence. Just like before, this leap will also affect and change our role as architects. The development that is now taking place is largely about breaking the barrier between planning first and then doing. Things around us are becoming smart - getting sensors, sensing, reacting and adapting. Words like feedback, iteration and prototyping are increasingly important. There has emerged an understanding that the best result may not be that which is planned most carefully, but which is allowed to be tested, evaluated, influenced by and changed together with the users. We see it clearly in software development but rarely in physical products and environments.

Within robotics, the focus today is on collaborative robots, collaboration with people and being responsive to their surroundings. The new robots are easy to program and compared to before, they are better adapted to create or be part of the varied and site-specific architecture. At universities and schools of architecture around the world, we also see robotics becoming increasingly integrated into architectural research and education. Many newly trained architects have an understanding of and control over a digital process from sketching to manufacturing, and this shows the way for the architect to take a greater role with the help of digital support. With knowledge and control over how manufacturing takes place, we also get greater control over cost, risk and how what we design will work.

When the modernists dreamed of the building as a machine, we are now moving towards understanding the building as an organism. An ecosystem of functions and processes that sense needs and conditions - react, adjust, change and adapt. Where computers and robots are integrated into the building and become one with the architecture. The binary division between planning and execution is broken and instead, a continuum of ongoing processes is enabled. Perhaps in the future, we will see buildings that rebuild themselves as needed – on a seasonal basis, weekly, or maybe even every day. To understand and convey such a building, other tools are needed than the classic drawing, we need to convey logic and a process – a recipe instead.

And here there is also a shift in the architect's role. The focus shifts from communicating what the built environment should look like when it is completed, to producing the entire digital process that creates the architecture. We can once again get close to how buildings materialize, but also how they survive, which sensory buds they should have, and how and when they should adjust, change and adapt. Then the architect lives in symbiosis with their building throughout their lifetime.