Professor Yvonne Jewkes brings a multifaceted approach to prison design, combining her expertise in criminology with architectural principles.
During the last few decades, while other large industries have gone through transformational levels of change, the construction industry has remained relatively static.Following on from the Latham and Egan reports in the 1990s, in 2016 the Farmer Report concluded that the industry must “modernise or die.”.
Sully says that the key element we’ve been missing in construction is the ethos of collaboration and innovation found in other industries.It’s a somewhat odd situation considering that the construction industry is inherently a collaborative one.Every asset we build requires many different parties to work together, but when the projects end, people go their separate ways as competitors.
Although that’s all fine and good, ultimately it means we aren’t taking learnings forwards from one project to another.Things aren’t being effectively fed back or built upon, and so we aren’t seeing the beneficial changes we desire.
Sully believes it’s this lack of considered collaboration, and the need to overcome such issues, which is ultimately responsible for the lack of government funding we’ve seen, despite long-standing acknowledgement of the problems..
Things began to shift when the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), and some of the large industry players, began to talk about how we could start to work together to be more effective.These feelings are called by psychologists Ontological Insecurity.
The irony is that in these times and moments we can develop the best ideas, breakthrough arbitrary boundaries and find amazing solutions..This is often the situation at the start of a design project.
Often called pre-project, this could be a time for exploration, broad thinking, analysis and imagination, however often it’s a time for reductive thinking.I have been in design meetings at these early stages where discussions are happening about what might be on the first, second or third floor of a building.