Lean design is nothing new, we just need to relearn it

Just the other day my IT friend was telling me the term ‘lean design’ comes from a post-war initiative by the Toyota Company: ‘improve process, reduce waste’. Everyone involved contributes ideas towards a continual improvement.

In construction it is an ageless and fundamental way of working. At design school in the 1980s, it was implicit in everything we were taught and tried to do. It didn’t need to be expressed.

There was no formal tuition on embodied energy, carbon footprint or the circular economy. The emphasis was on lightness and weight reduction. There were (very good) courses on aircraft structures, concrete shell design and construction techniques, how to make buildings safely and elegantly connected – nothing on dismantling, amending, safeguarding. But references to a moral coding were beginning to appear: architect Richard Horden’s exhortation to ‘touch the ground lightly’; Buckminster Fuller asking ‘how much does your building weigh?’

Lean design can manifest itself in many ways and at any time. Engineer Jacques Heyman put a cathedral’s structure through a modern design code to show that the stone structure was as refined as we could make it today. Design codes are continually updated but, with each iteration, carefully mediated to achieve the same acceptable safety levels. 

So the emphasis was on lightness. Then it got subsumed into other sustainability concerns, reappearing in Frei Otto’s 2005 RIBA Royal Gold Medal address (he spoke of planning the reconstruction while in a prisoner of war camp, all based on a new form of ultra- light design) while this year’s Institute of Structural Engineers gold medallist, Werner Sobek, re-presented it almost as an apology for something not to be forgotten in the sustainability universe.

There can’t be a legal obligation towards lean design. We can do what we want with resources if it adds value to life as lived now. But any waste whatsoever is criminal. Don’t temper back what can be achieved now for an uncertain future but don’t waste a thing.

Down-speccing isn’t an essential part of lean design. Andrew Carnegie complained that bridge engineer Joseph Strauss treated structural steel as if it were silver – but the future standard of the American product was thereby set forever. Many structures operate on utilisations of 70 to 80 per cent of their capacity. The remainder amounts to pure loss and is there for the taking.

Lean design is an antidote to the construction industry repeatedly chasing ‘innovation’. The full palette of materials is retained and ever expanding. Lean design is agnostic. That means different materials for different typologies; no more universal applications.

As with anything new, lean design starts with a partial embrace and even that with the greatest circumspection and risk aversion. Setting up a problem, then solving it flamboyantly, is the obverse of instead finding the line of least resistance where the cleverness goes almost unnoticed and is made by accumulation and nuance.

The presentation of architecture as high art, with every building potentially a masterpiece, may well be fading. And if the auteur is on the way out, the crafted can fill the void. We see Shaker simplicity celebrating the everyday – something beautifully made, and so economic in all its parts.

It is the internet revolution that now needs to be exploited. Everything has been tried before, and proper documentation will allow AI to roam freely – not to design (we’ll do that) but, like a chess computer, to run through all the examples and ramifications and test against the ‘leanest’ criteria, offering sub-optimal models we can choose to develop or reject.

AI and the internet give us an infinitely deep referencing resource. We shouldn’t lift out Bargain Breuer or Prouvé Pauvre, the motifs or even the forms, but get behind the appearances to the metasystems generating deep form. I’ve often speculated on an engineering student exercise whereby you take a classic example – the Forth rail bridge, Edith Farnsworth House, Mart Stam’s chair – and engineer it down, manually or by machine.

The internet of things becomes vitally important for the next phase of lean design. Data-logging the actual environment by using the installations themselves as sensors should continually add experiential learning to our understanding of the environment.

In the hundreds of buildings that Techniker has constructed over the years, there are only two where future demolition or full reuse has taken centre stage. Our Royal Victoria Dock bridge was copied from the French transporter bridges. It is erected without any bolts or welding and comes down as quickly as it goes up. An arts centre on the Old Kent Road, meanwhile, was intended to one day return to a pile of B&Q products to be offered at the side of the road. Allowing any more energy than necessary to be deferred to a decommissioning stage is wicked. Reconfigurable infrastructure might yet be more approachable and desirable an objective than currently imagined. Roman bridges were always demountable.

We have to start recording everything that happens to us in the design process. Everything. The waste is there in the contractual procedures, everyone knows it. Lean design offers an alternative path to the recentring of our entire field of operations, moving it away from the notion of an ideal condition to strive towards one where we take our place in a benign world.

Our technology is the only thing that stops us getting wiped off this planet right now. It’s a mixing desk of making the best of things till we’re gone. It’s not going anywhere and it’s never going to get there. It’s in the doing of things now. The technology will get more labyrinthine but there is nothing new to invent. The internet stores all the ways of doing. The deliverable of design has altered. It is no longer about invention; it is the simple accumulation of knowledge.

Which architect’s work best embodies lean design? Why Gunnar Asplund of course. Working within a very clearly defined idiom – neoclassicism/modernism – the way things are arranged, physically realised and modestly expressed is utterly detached and complete within itself.

Matthew Wells is an engineer and founder of Techniker Consulting Engineers