Emma Louise Gribble

Research

Subject

How do clients and building users talk about space and place during the briefing and design process for complex architectural projects?

Primary and secondary supervisors

• Prof Alan Penn
• Peter McLennan

Abstract

There is a persistent concern in the construction industry that buildings are failing to meet the needs of end users.  It has been suggested that this is due to inadequate briefing, and the Government Soft Landings policy now makes ‘early and ongoing engagement’ with operators and end-users a requirement for all government funded building projects. However, research indicates that clients are not ‘unitary entities’ (Green 1996) with pre-existing requirements that can be ‘captured’ by the design team (Alexander 2010), and clients may have ‘multiple and often conflicting objectives’ (Newcombe 2003) or lack understanding of their own organisation. Consequently, ‘building is emotional for the client’ (Boyd and Chinyio 2006).  

Clients and building users recognise that significant social goods are at stake during the briefing and design process for a new building. Questions of status, autonomy, identity, affiliation and distribution of resources are all thrown open to debate and stakeholders are prompted to defend their vision of the future. This thesis frames briefing as a situated and ‘value laden’ practice (Paton and Dorst 2011) and asks how clients and building users talk about space and place during briefing and design review meetings.

The principal case study is a new university campus and covers the period from early concept design to planning submission (RIBA Stages 1-3). The research methodology is Situational Analysis (Clarke et al 2018), and data collection methods include observation of project meetings, stakeholder interviews and review of key project documents.

Constructive conflict can motivate clients and building users to make the cultural reasoning behind spatial practices explicit (Chandra and Loosemoore 2011) and drive design development. The focus of this research is on the arguments that stakeholders use to frame the project, persuade their colleagues and the design team that the information they present is relevant, credible and actionable, and make a case for their preferred design solutions.  

The aim of this study is to contribute to an understanding of briefing and design as a situated practice involving rhetorical skill and ‘relational labour’ (Baym 2015) and to propose sensitising concepts for use during the briefing and design process for complex architectural projects.

Biography

Emma is a registered architect. She has worked on a range of live projects including schools, specialist housing and mixed use buildings for the third sector, local government and private practice. Her MSc dissertation, 'Brief as virtual building: how configurational is a construction brief?', investigated standard briefs produced by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, National Health Service Estates and the Department for Education and Skills. Her research interests include architectural briefing and design, post-occupancy evaluation and the social agency of the built environment.

Publications and other work

• Gribble, E. 2021. Reflections on the use of sensitising concepts in a Grounded
  Theory study. In: PSAROUDAKIS, I., MÜLLER, T. & SALVINI, A. (eds.) Dealing with Grounded Theory: Discussing, Learning, and Practice. Pisa: Pisa University Press

Image: Aerial photograph: Bluesky International Ltd dated 29.06.2019 [edited]