Alexander the Great

A building can be the highest in the world, the smallest on the planet or have the most environmentally friendly design possible.

It can have the coolest café doing a great espresso and have the funkiest-looking breakout areas ever seen.

But it could still fall woefully short of being fit for purpose. In other words, facilities management is not about the building.

It’s about the people who occupy a building and how they use all their assets to organise and manage themselves to further the core business goals.

The emphasis is not on facilities, but on management, says Keith Alexander, a long-time academic, director and founder of the independent Salford-based Centre for Facilities Management, and winner of this year’s BIFM Award for Overall Industry Impact.

A fundamental question for all organisations is how to — wait for it — organise themselves. It seems intuitive and yet a company’s organisational structure is often hijacked by the building it occupies. Management will adapt to the building, rather than the other way around.

He is also a supporter of sustainability in building design: “Being a family man with grandchildren gives a different perspective on the future, including sustainability.” The real question is, do organisations get the buildings they need in order to progress their business?

Furthermore, are organisations aware of what they need in a building in the first place? That is where facilities management comes into its own, says Alexander, who also denies he is an iconoclast.

During his student days as a student of architecture at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, he was absorbed by Le Corbusier (d.1965), Ludwig Mies (d.1969) and Frank Lloyd Wright (d.1959). Alexander is simply taking the ideas of the modern masters of architecture and fitting them into a 21st-century context.

Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier pioneered modern high-rise design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions 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.

“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 two-year 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 more about management.

Also at that time, Alexander set up EuroFM, a networking organisation membership group, of which the CFM was a member. He chaired EuroFM until 2000 and recently returned to chair the research group.

The CFM eventually moved from Strathclyde’s business school when funding from the university dried up. It resettled at the University of Salford in 2000.

Salford offered some of the UK’s best research facilities and monies. But the CFM landed in the Built Environment School, which made for some “uncomfortable” times, says Alexander, given that the CFM forsook the notion that the construction process was paramount in FM.

The FM issue

Office design has come a long way since the 1960-70s. Apart from buildings having better environmental performance, there is much more emphasis on employee efficiency through a more pleasant place to work.

These include coffee areas, break-out areas, better lighting and good-quality catering.

Some would argue it’s gone too far towards a comfy workplace. “Others would argue it hasn’t gone far enough,” says Alexander. “Some of the key ideas and issues have not been understood and acted upon. Indeed, there is a good argument that we have gone from dark satanic mills to light satanic mills, if call centres are considered.”

Nonetheless, a trend has been established and the office of 2040 is here, if only in nascent form.

“Offices will have developed as mixed-use facilities and offer a much more social environment,” says Alexander. The idea is based around “loosely coupled settings”, as put forward by Franklin Becker, a professor in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis in Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology.

Becker suggests that alternative work settings to the traditional ‘first place’ of work, aka the office, are more effective than home-based telecommuting — so-called ‘second places’ of work. Working at home can result in social isolation, increased work-family conflict and also hamper career development.

“I now ‘work’ in a number of ‘third places’ in Manchester, including the Virgin Money Lounges, set up after Virgin took over Northern Rock banks, and in Manchester University’s John Rylands Library, a Victorian gothic structure opened in 1900.”

It’s not that Alexander is against good design and best-practice management of old and new buildings. The problem is they are designed as icons first and management tools second. “FM has always been pulled back by construction and property ideas,” he says.

For example, building information modelling (BIM), is firmly in the government’s sights and has been taken up enthusiastically by building services engineers and many FMs.

BIM involves the generation and management of digital representations of a building. The model is the result of information collected by all organisations and people involved in the process of designing a structure, operating it and demolishing it.

Basically, BIM is a shared-knowledge resource to improve the design of new buildings and operate them more efficiently. Input is needed from FMs, architects, construction professionals, designers and building services engineers.

BIM, Alexander believes, is a “technical-rational approach” to design and construction. The end result is what buildings do to people and not vice versa.

For the common man

Alexander is afraid the human element will get lost: “FIM, or Facilities Information Modelling, would be much more appropriate. We should be modelling an organisation, not a building.” The starting point for talking about FM is an understanding of the organisation and the people, what they want to achieve and how they want to reach their goals.

Alexander doesn’t consider himself an iconoclast who is against iconic buildings. Superlatives to describe a building are fine, as far as they go. He simply, and passionately, believes there is a better way to design them.

“FM is not just, or even, about the built environment professions. Communication with users, managers and senior managers in organisations is much more significant.”

As any good apostle would, Alexander has laid out his beliefs in a new book, Managing Organizational Ecologies, co-authored with Ilfryn Price at Sheffield Hallam University and published by Routledge.

Alexander left full-time academia about three years ago, but the passion is still there, as he hopes the book will prove. “Let’s give it one more good shot to see if we can change the way people view facilities management.”