One possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts in property, housebuilding, planning and local government and then ask them for proposals to put an end to the appallingly slow rate of construction and development. Another possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts who know absolutely nothing about property, housebuilding, planning or local government and ask them for proposals to put an end to the appallingly slow rate of construction and development.
My money’s on the second group to solve the problem. We vastly underestimate the value of healthy ignorance in overcoming seemingly intractable challenges. There is a Chinese proverb which states: ‘If you want to know what water is like, do not ask a fish.’ Steve Jobs didn’t know how to write code. The Beatles couldn’t read music. James Dyson did not come from the vacuum cleaner industry. Elon Musk did not come from the car industry.
Henry J. Kaiser, the genius industrialist who part-won the second world war by running the Liberty Ships programme, did not know anything about shipbuilding. He did, however, know a great deal about pipeline construction, which is why he decided to weld rather than rivet the ships. This helped reduce the median time for ship construction from more than 200 days to under a month.
The only person in history ever to produce an attractive caravan came from the aviation industry. Hawley Bowlus, from whose designs all Airstreams are derived, built the fuselage for the Spirit of St Louis. (The Bowlus company has recently been revived, and its new creations are exquisite.)
It has always surprised me that the best attempt to formulate a theory of innovation came from the Soviet Union. TRIZ, or the ‘theory of inventive problem solving’, was the work of the naval officer Genrikh Altshuller, whose helpful advice to Stalin earned him a spell in the gulag. Yet the Soviet origins of TRIZ should not be surprising: Altshuller enjoyed an extra level of insight because he was observing western innovation from the outside.
One of the central principles of TRIZ holds that ‘Your problem has already been solved – it has just been solved in a field other than your own.’ And here I think we can bring a harsh light to bear on the whole of the construction industry. Because almost every other field of manufacturing has arrived at a solution for how to make things efficiently which the construction industry overwhelmingly continues to ignore.
Ships, cars, aircraft, nuclear power stations and computers – all of which are inordinately more complicated than a domestic house – are produced using some form of modular assembly. But for some deranged reason, despite the efforts of people from Henry Ford to Buckminster Fuller, housebuilding continues to operate as if it’s 1680. Along with the failure of the housebuilding industry, we should also get architects to step aside and admit that they have completely failed as a profession. It is high time for someone else – the car industry, perhaps, or the military – to take over the design of homes.
It’s high time for someone else – the car industry, perhaps, or the military – to take over from architects
Why do I say that? Simple observation. Despite years of dogmatic debate, most people, including architects themselves, prefer to live in old houses. As a failure of innovation, that is quite something. Imagine if contemporary car designers chose Ford Model Ts as their runabouts, or if doctors applied leeches to their own children, and you have some measure of the sheer lack of progress.
We will know we have solved the housing crisis when Grand Designs is taken off the air through sheer lack of interest. ‘My wife and I have chosen this attractive house from a catalogue, and we are going to put it over there.’ ‘Ooh, that looks nice, doesn’t it?’
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