Stirling Prize winner urges architects to 'walk off unethical jobs'

Stirling Prize-winning architect Steve Tompkins has urged architects to walk off projects they consider to be unethical.

The profession must speak up and use its collective voice to insist on sustainable design, said the Haworth Tompkins founder on the opening day of the Ecobuild conference in London.

“We have to work more ethically,” he said. “We are in a position to negotiate or withhold our labour if we think a project is being driven in the wrong direction… There is an element of protest in being an architect.”

He said his practice, which won the Stirling Prize last year for Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, as well as being named BD’s Architect of the Year, is selective about which clients it works with, despite the implications for its bottom line.

“It’s time for us to speak up as a profession about this,” he said.

“We have to try to insist collectively on an ethical position in the way we work. We all know ethically what the right course of action is but it often gets drowned out in the procurement process or in the choice between your favourite detail or material and a low-energy strategy that no one will see in the journals. That’s easy; that’s up to us; we just have to get on with it.

“But the other thing – and it’s incumbent on the whole construction industry to take this issue more seriously – is we have to work more ethically.

“There comes a point where you simply have to withdraw from a project, or don’t work with people who aren’t going to listen. It’s commercially difficult but I think we have to do it.

“I think increasingly we have to make our voices heard. Now is the time to do the right thing explicitly and implicitly.”

He criticised the way buildings are procured, saying architects are forced to design too fast and agree a budget before a relationship can be established with the client.

“Architects and perhaps the whole construction industry need to re-establish the importance of working relationships of trust and candour as the stage 0 of the design process,” he said.

He singled out housing association Peabody as a client which “leads the charge in trying to establish an ethically and socially-led position on urbanism”.

He conceded it was more difficult with commercial developers but said his practice “try to self-edit our client group into people we think we can do business with”.

Designing sustainably was “absolutely germaine” to Haworth Tompkins’ processes, beginning by questioning whether a building needed to be built at all and if so how lightly it could sit on the earth.

This was all the more important because of the unpredictable and radical changes today’s buildings will live through, he said.