The person who signs the contract is almost never the person who lives with the result. A housing association changes its asset team every few years. A university changes its estates director more often than that.
Design for the handover
So we design for the second client: whoever inherits the building in year twenty with a maintenance budget and no institutional memory of why anything was done.
In practice this means three commitments. Systems that can be understood without a manual. Components that can be replaced without moving people out. And a drawing set that is legible to someone who was not in the room.
The façade test
At Noorderhof we separated the frame from the envelope precisely for this reason. The concrete is designed for a century; the panels for forty years, replaceable from outside, one bay at a time.
That decision cost slightly more at tender. It removes an entire decant programme from the building’s mid-life — the single most expensive event in a housing block’s history.
Legibility is a deliverable
We now issue a short building manual with every project: how it is meant to be used, what was deliberate, what is expendable. It is eight pages. It has changed more outcomes than any detail we have drawn.
Written by
Tobias Renne
Partner, Design
Tobias runs the design table. He is the reason a Rawform building usually has one idea in it rather than four, and the reason that idea survives value engineering.
