FM FEATURE KEITH ALEXANDER DAVID ARMINAS
“There is a good argument that we have gone from dark satanic mills to light satanic mills, if call centres are considered” for people in crowded cities. His projects included the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Mies’ designs included the Seagram Building in Manhattan while Lloyd Wright was noted for his buildings being in harmony with their surroundings, in particular his 1935 Fallingwater house near Pittsburgh – now a US national historic landmark.
Strong foundations In Britain, the idea that workers in factories and office occupiers deserved a better deal was put into practice most notably in the Port Sunlight model village on the Wirral, Merseyside. Port Sunlight was built by Lever Brothers, starting in 1888, for workers in the company soap factory. The village, whose name comes from Lever Brothers’ most popular brand of cleaning agent ‘Sunlight’, became a model of decent, modern industrial housing for working people. Port Sunlight now has 900 Grade II listed buildings, and was declared a Conservation Area in 1978. Alexander kept that philosophy even after graduation when he worked for New Town Development Corporation in Northampton, and Antrim & Ballymena, designing and supervising construction. Projects included a major shopping centre in Northampton and an industrial estate in Ballymena. He then set up his own practice working on domestic projects, and also bomb damage work in Northern Ireland at the height of the ‘troubles’. Among his other buildings is the Ecumenical Centre as part of Weston Favell Shopping Centre in Northampton. By the late 1970s, he had started research with the Building Performance Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde and teaching at the Northern Ireland Polytechnic, now the University of Ulster in Belfast. 24 | 6 DECEMBER 2012 | FM WORLD
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“My research laid the foundations for a career-long interest in how people and organisations use buildings,” says Alexander. “An opportunity arose for a three-year secondment to the Strathclyde’s Department of Architecture and Building Science – which became a 23-year association.” After four years, an opportunity arose for a twoyear secondment to the School of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. This was to spend two years in Singapore developing architectural education and practice. His Damascene conversion happened just before he left Singapore in 1984. “I read one
article by Frank Duffy in the Architects’ Journal, introducing the new field of facilities management and its importance for the way we design and manage commercial office environments,” he says. “I immediately saw the relationship with Frank’s work and my research interests in ‘building performance’. There’s an important distinction between ‘performance of the building’ itself and ‘building performance’, a user-centric investigation into how a building works for people and organisations.” On arrival back in the UK, he worked in the emerging field of FM. He made connections to space design consultancy DEGW (now called Strategy Plus) in Glasgow
and London, and focused attention on briefing and post-occupancy evaluation work, which brought him into closer contact with facilities management people. In 1986, Alexander saw an opportunity to build an FM syllabus into an existing MSc in Building Science at Strathclyde. Only a year later, Strathclyde set up what Alexander believes was one of the first dedicated MScs in Facilities Management courses, certainly in Europe. To help develop his ideas on FM, he created the Centre for Facilities Management in 1990 and based it at Strathclyde. The 20 founding firms believed that FM was not about the construction and asset-running processes, but
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