Thinking Space

As an architect, you often get caught in the situation of architecting for future vs now. Though temptation and sponsors’ pressure is always on resolving the immediate need but be mindful of the future scenarios.

I am not suggesting an all upfront architecture but building flexibility to adapt to new requirements, at least at the foundation level.

Between 1750 and 1810, London doubled in size from 750,000 to 1.5 million people. There were no sewers in those days, every house had a cesspit. And most of them were overflowing. Into the alleys, into the streets, then back into the houses. A quick fix was to divert all that raw sewage into the drains. The drains that carried the rainwater into the Thames. The Thames, where the water companies pumped the drinking water from. And two massive cholera outbreaks killed tens of thousands of people.

But it wasn’t until the ‘Big Stink’ of 1858 that the authorities took much notice. The Thames flows right past Parliament, and the stench of raw sewage was so overpowering that the enormous hanging curtains in the House of Commons had to be soaked in chloride of lime. But even that couldn’t cover the ‘Big Stink’.

So Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, designed and built the first system of enclosed sewers. A massive, entirely brick-built project. Over a thousand miles of street sewers, which would empty into eighty miles of main sewers, all of it underground. And take all that human waste away from London.

While designing the sewers Bazalgette took into account everyone living in London. He made the diameter of the sewers more than enough to handle everyone’s waste. Then he did something unthinkable to most people. He doubled it. Bazalgette said, ‘We’re only going to be doing this once. We’d better allow for the unforeseen.’ If only everyone had that much nous.

To allow for the unforeseen. What no one could possibly have foreseen when Bazalgette built those sewers was what would happen a hundred years in the future. In the 1960s, councils all over London would be building massive high-rise blocks of flats. Huge multi-storey dwellings everywhere, emptying their waste into those hundred-year-old Victorian sewers.

Check to see if you are not under specking the architecture.