Scotland’s award-winning architect Malcolm Fraser offers a critique of the failings of the government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) for public buildings. Earlier this year several schools in Edinburgh had to be closed when major structural faults were discovered. Walls had –or had threatened to –collapse because header-ties used to hold the walls together had not been used.
How could such a basic error occur and who was complicit in what could have been a catastrophic and life-threatening error of quality control? In this provocation Malcolm Fraser –who sat on the Scottish government’s Design Review panel –looks at the other failingsof slapdash, cheap-to-build cookie-cutter schools and hospitals sighted away from the communities they’re supposed to serve. Why are sturdy Victorian buildings abandoned rather than repaired or refurbished? In this PFI world is education and health being sacrificed for financial profits?
How did things come to this pretty pass and who is to blame? And, more importantly, what can be done about this rotten system. In Scotland’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design this is a timely publication that lifts the lid on who has most to gain from major public projects and why the problem has to be solved, and how.
Malcolm Fraser said:‘The Edinburgh Schools debacle has reinforced the urgent need to reconsider how we commission and procure the improvements to Scotland’s public infrastructure we so urgently require. Fraser critiques the financial, civic and architectural omnishambles that PFI and its variants represent, sees the breakdown as being due to private finance supplanting civic responsibility and sets out ways to recover the necessary leadership.’
About Malcolm Fraser
Malcolm is an Edinburgh boy, who studied architecture at the University of Edinburgh then worked as a community architect in its big Wester Hailes social housing scheme; with architect and theorist Christopher Alexander in Berkeley, California; on conservation work in Edinburgh; and with poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay at his garden, Little Sparta, in the Scottish Borders.
He founded his first practice, Malcolm Fraser Architects, in 1993. The practice first made its name developing bars, restaurants and nightclubs, graduating to lottery-funded arts projects (driven from the idea stage by Malcolm himself), many of which redefined the townscape and urban realm of Edinburgh’s Old Town, such as the Scottish Poetry Library,Scottish Storytelling Centre,DanceBaseand Dovecot Studios.