The origins of facilities

Citation

Duffy, F. (2007), "The origins of facilities", Facilities, Vol. 25 No. 11/12. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.2007.06925kaf.001

The origins of facilities

A reminder that I helped to found Facilities as long as 25 years ago and was Editor in Chief for eight years came to me as much as a shock as a cause for congratulations to the current editorial team. 1982 was also the year in which my practice, DEGW, initiated the ORBIT study, one of the earliest examinations of the impact of what is now called distributed intelligence on the design and management of office buildings. It was a very exciting time and, of course, the two initiatives were closely connected. Today’s readers may be able to read in the history of Facilities some clues to the emergence of facilities management as a profession.

Around 1980 the computer escaped from the computer room, dragging cables, various environmental impacts and complex user interfaces into the general office. Boffins in white coats in the basement had lost their monopoly on the computer. Access to information technology was open to everyone and would over the next quarter of a century change life styles and working habits. The task of managing the organisational and physical consequences of this spectacular break out was the stimulus common both to the founding of Facilities and to the elevation of facilities management to a strategic level in decision making in business.

The process of professionalisation had begun somewhat earlier in North America. An early manifestation was the initiative taken by the progressive office furniture manufacturer, Herman Miller, which founded the Facilities Management Institute (FMI) in the late 1970s. FMI established the precedent of holding conferences, running training courses and publishing research specifically for corporate customers responsible for procuring and managing office space. The legacy of FMI was the American Institute of Facilities Management (IFMA) established by facilities managers who naturally enough wanted independence from all sponsoring suppliers, however enlightened. British Facilities Managers subsequently followed the American model by establishing the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM). In this process Facilities certainly played a part.

However, the genesis of Facilities itself is interesting in its own right as an indicator of several trends in office design and management, three of which I shall mention briefly:

1. 1.

   The UK throughout much of the twentieth century had been relatively backward in managing office space, as in many other managerial matters, compared with the US. What distinguished American offices from the last decades of the nineteenth century was an understanding of and ability to manage the office supply chain – from investors, developers, real estate brokers through architects and specialised engineering practices and eventually to corporate tenants and their advisors and suppliers such as space planners, interior designers, furniture and equipment suppliers. A much clearer division of labour was established between the providers of the long term office “shell and services” and those responsible for shorter term fitting out of tenants’ interiors, “scenery and sets”, to use the terms I used to explain this concept to an incredulous British architectural profession when I returned to the UK from the US in 1971. Incidentally at that time, probably for etymological reasons, not many property managers in the UK could stomach “facilities” as the descriptor of their particular part of this supply chain. In fact, not only the practice of facilities management but the concepts that lie behind the practice had to be articulated and explained.

2. 2.

   Somewhat earlier another influence had come from quite another direction – from the reconstructed Germany of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was the semi scientific concept of burolandschaft (office landscaping) – the notion that, since offices were essentially networks of communications, both desk layouts and the shape of entire office buildings could be derived from a thorough analysis of such patterns of interaction. Office landscaping was invented by the Schnelle brothers, management consultants with a genius for promulgating their ideas. Their quarterly newsletter, Kommunikation, with its didactic, theoretical, elevated tone, very different to American pragmatism, had a profound impact on me and eventually on Facilities.

3. 3.

   Perhaps the most important influence on the early Facilities, however, was both very British and very architectural – the Architectural Press, the publishers of the weekly Architect’s Journal (AJ) and the monthly Architectural Review. Through the Fifties and Sixties the Architectural Press was the world leader in publishing technical information for architects on every aspect of their work. In the AJ every week appeared data sheets, technical information and case studies, all scrupulously presented and indexed in the novel A4 format and all of the highest quality. Data sheets were designed to be extracted and filed within a comprehensive data retrieval system so that every subscribing architect could have access to the developing knowledge base of the profession. At that time half the profession worked with an idealism that has largely been forgotten for one or other arm of government on the construction programmes that the Welfare State demanded. The AJ was the inspiration for Facilities, not least because my DEGW colleagues and I, helped by colleagues from several other practices, laboured for well over a year to create the AJ series which was eventually published in book form in 1976 as Planning Office Space – a rare excursion for the AJ, I now realise, into design for the private sector and a unique acknowledgement of the potential importance of facilities management.

In 1982 John Worthington and I persuaded Leslie Fairweather, then editor of the AJ, that a potential market existed for providing an equivalent quality of practical, technical information to serve the emerging profession of facilities management. We argued that facilities management was to architecture as software was to hardware in the world of the computer – an essential means of ensuring that clients’ intentions, expressed in building briefs, should be reviewed, monitored and updated throughout the entire lifetime of each building. The Architectural Press owned and funded Facilities for three years during which, after one or two false starts, we hit upon the monthly format of a 24-page mixture of news and technical items with longer information packed articles. Income, entirely from subscriptions, was never enough.

The brilliant editorial team was led by Les Hutton and consisted of Jane Bell, Joanna Eley and Natasha Owen, helped enormously by a wide international network of correspondents from a variety of disciplines including, of course, many facilities managers. For the Architectural Press the venture was far from a commercial success and may even have contributed to their disastrous takeover three years later by Robert Maxwell. For the next five years DEGW continued the monthly publication of Facilities until the present publisher successfully introduced a wider, more scholarly agenda.

Was all the hard work worthwhile? Had our timing been better or had we been prescient enough to anticipate the power of the web, the internet and data mining, Facilities would have developed in a very different way. What we did do, a little prematurely perhaps, was to demonstrate to facilities managers that professional status is an ideal that comes at a price – the capacity to develop in the context of practice a shared body of knowledge more coherent and more effective than any rivals can offer.

Frank Duffy