Architect says excluding architects can raise cities’ long-term costs

Choosing cheaper construction can lead to poorly planned urban spaces and higher costs in the future, architect Margit Mutso writes in a cultural commentary published by ERR.

The question “How much does it cost?” is at the centre of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, which opened on September 9. Its competitions, exhibitions, symposium and discussions examine what is cheap or expensive in architecture, and how to value benefits that do not fit into a construction budget.

Tallinn Mayor Peeter Raudsepp entered the debate three months before the event, saying that hiring architects for municipal buildings and other projects was too costly and that standard solutions should be used instead. He was responding to city projects that had cost more than expected. “At home, we are not dependent on architects or at their mercy,” he said.

Mutso argues that architecture covers everything from national and city planning to small elements in public spaces. Architects help shape the system, she writes, and the first 10 percent of their work determines 70 percent of the value of the final result. Yet that part of the work is often the very part clients do not want to pay for.

She asks what it costs to leave architects out of the building process. Her examples include housing built on undeveloped land outside cities, where residents later find the cost of commuting and mortgage payments too high; urban land made unsuitable for homes by traffic pollution and noise; and unshaded streets where asphalt temperatures can reach 70 degrees Celsius in summer.

Mutso also points to empty office towers that are difficult to repurpose, schools that discourage learning and creativity, childcare centres with materials that release toxins, and care-home rooms that wheelchair users cannot leave because of a threshold. She questions the short lifespan of cheap retail space and the placement of an opera house where it could overshadow historic landmark buildings and put a world heritage city’s status at risk.

Architect and physicist Kaja Pae has argued in a commentary for Delfi that public investments could be assessed by the amount of value they create for society. Citing a background study for Estonia’s national spatial plan, Pae says an initial estimate suggests that compact, carefully considered spatial development could save Estonian society up to 300 million euros a year.