Architecture

Architecture studies the design of building and space: floor plan, façade, circulation, daylight and the way form enables or constrains use. It works with design intent, spatial typology and the translation of a brief into a built configuration, and its account effectively closes at handover, not after.

FM inherits a building the day the design freezes and then has to operate it for decades. Without design knowledge, a complaint about a dark room, an illogical walking route or an unwashable façade reads as an operational problem; with that knowledge it is visible as a design decision passed downstream. That distinction determines whether a problem is solvable within operations or only at the next intervention.

• What design intent underlay this space, and does that intent still hold for current use?
• Is a complaint a construction defect, an operational defect, or a design decision that no longer fits?
• Which spatial configurations make later reconfiguration cheap, and which foreclose it?
• Where in the design sits the unstated assumption about maintenance, cleaning or security?

• Scholarship and research from architectural education and practice, including post-occupancy evaluation studies.
• RIBA Plan of Work and comparable process models for the design trajectory.
• NEN 2580 and international measurement standards (IPMS) for area and layout.

• FM should be consulted during design on operability, not only at handover.
• Post-occupancy evaluation closes the loop back to the architect, but rarely happens systematically in practice.
• A building that succeeds aesthetically can be expensive to operate; those two verdicts sit with different parties.

• Space and workplace management
• Technical management and upkeep

• Literacy in drawings and design documentation
• Translating user complaints into a root-cause category

• Demand organisation

  A demand organisation involved early in design can bring operating requirements to bear before the design freezes.

• NEN 2580 / IPMS — floor area measurement.
• Building regulations (jurisdiction-dependent).

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Architectural intent invoked to dismiss an operational problem, when the intent is precisely what explains the problem.
• Aesthetic judgement conflated with functional judgement at handover acceptance.

Post-occupancy evaluation remains methodologically weak: there is no shared, mandatory feedback loop from use data back to design practice, so the same design errors recur across projects without the discipline systematically learning from them.

• RIBA Plan of Work, process model for design and handover.
• Post-occupancy evaluation research from schools of architecture.