This week has been interesting, mostly because of the mix between business and pleasure. A friend of mine is staying with me and has never really explored the UK before, so when I had a meeting to go to outside Oxford I decided to bring him along with me and drop him off at Blenheim Palace, whilst I went to work. After my meeting I joined him for a tour of the Palace, something I’d done 25years earlier. Now Blenheim Palace is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough (not of the cigarette fame!) and was the result of the 1st Duke winning with allied forces in the battle of Blenheim (well it was actually Blindheim, but he Brits could not pronounce it so we settled on Blenheim!). The Queen of England (Anne) gave the Duke several thousand acres of a former hunting lodge and built a little present! The largest private Palace in the country, probably in Europe. It took over 20years to build; even the lake took 1,000 men one year to dig! But, it’s still here, 300 years later and looking magnificent. It got me thinking, would any of the buildings we erect now last even 100 years, let alone 300? As the speed of life seems to have increased 100 times since the 1st Duke in 1704 who would have taken 2-3 days to get from London to his new home, as opposed to my 1hour, we appear to want everything at a breakneck speed and sacrifice quality and longevity. Will the “Gherkin” the Swiss Reinsurance building in London (a new iconic landmark) still be standing in 100 years time? Will the New London County offices stand longer than the old ones on the banks of the Thames? I doubt it.
The parallel is there for other things we acquire too and in this case, software. Now I know we don’t expect it to last 100years, the rate of change in technology means that it’s almost out of date the moment it’s put on the market. However I do expect quality and that the application will last (and not crash) as long as I need it to, however long that may be. More and more I see organisation going for speed over quality and simply getting the product or revision out the door, with the intention that we can always fix problems later. Agile development strategies have been developed to enable this form of production to become more accepted. Is speed really more important than reliability and quality? Perhaps it is, perhaps we really do need to enter and own a market 1st to ensure success. Maybe being 1st is not such a great idea after all, when we simply create a market and then allow others to enter and because they have had more time to prepare, then end up with greater share of the market, not because of speed, but because they have more time to reduce the risks and costs and maybe even improve quality. It has to be a balance, a balance between “not missing the boat” and offering a quality service that will ensure customer retention. The world will not slow down anytime soon. It’s now better to make the same amount of millions in a short period of time, than over a longer sustainable period of time, simply because with speed and agility you can move onto the next project and ride the next wave before waiting for the current one to run out.
Now this is fine for IT, but not so fine in architecture. It’s not very “green friendly” to use resources, like steel, glass, cement etc to build homes and offices that will only last a few years, all to be pulled down and lost with something else erected wasting more of the worlds resources, simply to gratify someone’s ego for a few years. Will we ever build for the long term again? In 100, 200 or even 300 years time, will people then see what kind of society we lived in, what style of home and work place we built, lived and worked in. I fear not. I think leaping forward we’ll still see Blenheim Palace and the local Pub in Woodstock, but we’ll not see anything that we built in the late 20th and early 21st century. What legacy will we leave? What reputation do we currently leave behind when the focus is on speed over quality? Maybe we’ve not progressed much since the Vikings after all, where we come, rape, pillage and leave!
Any feedback and comments are always welcome!!
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