Mark Chalmers

Several years ago, the motoring writer James Ruppert coined a phrase which neatly encapsulates how to own and run a car cheaply and efficiently.  Bangernomics.  Tradition has it that old cars have high running costs: they burn more fuel and oil than they should; they rot; they break down.  However, new cars suffer from savage depreciation.  Either way, cheap motoring is a fallacy.

By contrast, the theory of Bangernomics attempts to both the capital and running costs of cars: you buy old vehicles which are in reasonable condition, but worth next to nothing.  You run them for a few months, then when they break down or fail their M.o.T., you scrap them then repeat the process. 

An old Rover or Audi might cost £350 from the small ad’s – but even if it only lasts for six months, the previous owner has paid for all its road tax, servicing and depreciation costs, providing you with cheap motoring and a cash rebate when you drive it (push it) into the scrappie’s yard.  In many cases, the car will be perfectly reliable in the meantime, and more than adequate as your “daily driver.” 

More applicable than ever during the recent climate of austerity and crunchy credit, Bangernomics is a transferrable concept – so lets try to apply it to buildings, shall we?

By the time they’re committed up to their oxters in a building contract, clients are resigned to spiralling costs and a lack of ultimate control.  Building things has always been perceived as expensive: but did anyone point out an alternative?  This is the crux, because it exposes a conflict of interest between the client and his hired gun, the architect. 

Architects like to build things, because that earns them fees.  They don’t mind converting old things, because that can earn them more fees than building new things.  Yet what would happen if the feasibility study suggested that the client’s existing building was perfectly suitable – that all he needed to do was re-organise the demountables and the furniture? 

Or buy the building next door and move in straight away (perhaps re-painting the front door on the way in)?  That would earn the architect nothing, except a token sum and the eternal gratitude of the client, who has saved a small fortune.

Your business banking manager never warned you about this eventuality, nor did the lecturers at architecture school.  Yet if you exercised “professionalism” (whatever *that* means in these straitened times), you’d be obliged to offer this option to your client.  You can guess just how many consultants have actually done so – and that illustrates why the Victorian concept of the professional person may be obsolete. 

As with the architect’s quasi-judicial role when considering a claim for extensions of time (if she allows them, the architect often admits her own guilt in delaying the contractor), this concept of an impartial person of integrity, with no ulterior self-interest, is a fallacy.  In reality, the only way to save the client money is to align the professionals’ interests with his own.

Now that fear has taken charge of the financial markets again (24th August 2015 … China Crisis?), as it did on Black Monday in 1987, and during the Wall Street Crash, the grim arithmetic of economic recession has been recalled.  The result is an admonitory tale of capitalism’s downside.  Ten years ago, the property market took off, detached itself from the real economy like Gulliver’s flying island of “Laputa”, and buildings ended up over-valued by 30 or 40%, or sometimes more.  The underlying land doubled or tripled in value. 

Things have turned around now, though, and as a result, clients are forced to question the “givens”, such as the maxim that land values will always continue to increase because land is the only thing they aren’t making any more of; rentals will always move northwards … and U-values will always improve.

Since energy conservation had become an over-riding factor in design, it could be made simple.  The aims of economics and sustainability coincide, just as they do in Bangernomics.  The most sustainable way to develop property for a client is to re-use and adapt the existing, not to build a new building from scratch.  If everything else is equal, refurbishment usually works out cheaper than newbuild.

Extending the amortisation period of a building, just like running a car into the ground, saves money by spreading the cost over a longer period.  It also maximises the use of its embodied energy.  The latter idea may win you sexy eco points; but the client’s accountant will get turned on by the former.  Do as little as you need to: save yourself money and energy.  In fact, taking this to its logical conclusion, we could talk ourselves out of work.

For example, a few years ago we had a client who took a pragmatic view.  The company owns a large 1940’s era range of north-lit workshops.  They were built as a wartime munitions factory for making artillery shells – which afterwards was taken on by Consolidated Pneumatic Tools, who made equipment for the quarrying and mining industries. 

Under a series of sawtooth roofs, held up by delicate fabricated steel trusses, the spaces have ample natural light and are high enough to house pillar and gantry cranes.  When the roof began to leak, the refurbishment costs quoted were epic.  A bulldoze-and-rebuild-from-new option was studied, but the price for that turned out to be even steeper. 

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the building – and a new portal frame shed would be less generous, and far darker, needing artificial light during the daytime.  Accordingly, the plan was to apply a magical coating to seal the failed asphalt joints, then make local repairs to the rooflights.  Five years on, that seems to have worked fine.

Work with what you find.  Re-use it, minimise your outlay.  Bangernomics.