In the early hours of June 14, 2017, a fire engulfed Grenfell Tower, a high-rise residential building in West London. Most Londoners remember where we were that day as events unfolded. The catastrophe led to the deaths of 72 people and caused severe trauma for the survivors, the community, and the nation. The Grenfell tragedy exposed a series of systemic failures in building regulations, safety protocols, and emergency response strategies in the United Kingdom. The fire prompted an extensive investigation, known as the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, that recently released a series of findings that detail the causes of the incident, assign accountability, and assess broader implications.
Many of the factors that led to the disaster have been known to the public for years. At the time of the fire, shiny aluminium cladding had been newly installed over the building’s plain brick facade, in part to improve insulation and in part to provide wealthy neighbors with a more aesthetically pleasing view. The cladding proved to be incendiary, spreading flames originating from an electrical fire with devastating speed, preventing escape, and denying access to emergency responders. The “stay put” policy in the UK, by which high-rise residents are advised to await evacuation in their homes, compounded the issue. But it has become clear that there is far more to the tragedy than the cladding or the evacuation procedures.
The Inquiry underscores that the Grenfell fire did not occur in a vacuum: it was the result of years of policy failures, austerity measures, and disregard for tenant safety and tenant protest. The report is thorough, and its findings will continue to make a deep mark on history. It should be a wake-up call to the entire architecture profession, the construction industry, government regulators, and those responsible for educating the next generations of professionals in these fields.
Indeed, professionals with the courage to confront the implications of this report should recognize it as a source of shame and grief. As a structural engineer who has campaigned to improve the architect’s role in design and who works with architects on a daily basis, I am not surprised by the Grenfell Inquiry’s findings, but that hardly diminishes the moral anguish those findings provoke. The Inquiry lays bare the fragmentation of the discipline and the diminished agency of architects. In response, the profession needs to shake off its powerlessness and take control.
The Inquiry underscores that the Grenfell fire did not occur in a vacuum: it was the result of years of policy failures, austerity measures, and disregard for tenant safety and tenant protest.
Yet, this process is far from complete, if we can even say it has begun in earnest. The Grenfell Inquiry took seven years to deliver the final report, and the initial reaction of the UK government raises new questions for all individuals and institutions to consider. Change is happening far too slowly at many levels, including in the education of designers upstream and the retrofitting of many other towers for safety downstream. How many design courses introduce such cases early in the curriculum? What is the level of competency of professionals in general? Who will fund the repair of similar unsafe building? When?
Professor Luke Bisby of the University of Edinburgh, in a section of his report titled “The Path to Grenfell,” pointed to many years of “missed opportunities” that could have reduced the risks when giving his damning opinion of the deep roots of one cause. “Performance based’ systems introduced in the 1980s as part of a deregulation package delivered by [Margaret] Thatcher,” Bisby notes, made the regulatory system more permissive without a mechanism to ensure those dispensing fire safety advice had the requisite competences adding, “I mean the system was created specifically to enable people to circumvent the rules.” To try to understand Grenfell we must not deny that safety often comes second or third to financial targets and other criteria in the housing of the most vulnerable.
Grenfell Tower comprised primarily council housing for lower-income residents, including many recent immigrants. As a global symbol, it embodies safety issues that stem from housing inequality. In underserved neighborhoods of Los Angeles, New York, Mumbai, or São Paulo, marginalized communities are left to live in deteriorating, unsafe homes. Deregulation and budget cuts are a universal pattern that have left billions vulnerable to a host of risks in addition to fire.
In parallel to the Inquiry, the government appointed chemical engineer Dame Judith Hackitt to examine the fire regulatory system. The Hackitt Review focuses on high-rise safety, examining why the Grenfell catastrophe happened and whether similar buildings are at risk. Dame Hackitt found a “broken system” with weak, easily “gamed” regulations that allowed violators to pay very low penalties. The Hackitt Review also highlighted the need for a more robust and transparent system for building safety. As Dame Hackitt writes, “there is a need for a radical rethink of the whole system and how it works. This is most definitely not just a question of the specification of cladding systems, but of an industry that has not reflected and learned for itself, nor looked to other sectors.”
To be sure, some major reforms have been implemented, including a ban on combustible cladding on buildings over 18 meters in height. The Building Safety Act of 2022 introduced further measures, including the establishment of a new Building Safety Regulator responsible for overseeing the safety of high-rise buildings and ensuring that developers and contractors comply with stricter fire safety standards. This led to widespread changes in regulations—approximately 175 changes—as well as the introduction of an assigned “duty holder,” an entity responsible for a project from concept to construction and even post occupancy, with a mandate to oversee fire safety at each step. Architects have been encouraged to take a leadership position, including as duty holders, in advocating higher safety standards and practices, thereby fostering a culture of accountability within the industry.
This goes beyond fire: we struggle as an industry to adequately address hazard and risk across all fronts.
This apportioning of blame and accountability to the architect’s studio has sent a shudder through the profession, where widespread understanding of fire safety principles is undoubtedly lacking. Next time, the tragedy could be the collapse of a mass timber building, designed to conform to fire safety protocols never intended for an exposed timber structure but applied anyway.
The areas of greatest risk appear to sit at the intersection of different design disciplines, where no one person is fully able to coordinate the whole. The level of technical knowledge required to establish a holistic fire safety strategy would appear to preclude the architect as lead. Even the fire engineer will often not fully consider the detailing of the building fabric and structure. So, then, who can oversee a holistic process? This remains an open question, but it seems clear we should seek knowledge beyond the narrow definition of our individual design professions. We all need to be part of the discussion. We need to make space for this in our training.
We live in a complex world, which becomes ever more complex daily. Can we be expected to maintain expertise across all fronts? No, but we should be expected to seek to identify the limits of our knowledge and address these deficiencies where possible rather than pass the buck. It has been said that the most difficult thing is to know what we do not know. A humbler approach to the potential for ignorance would be prudent.
This goes beyond fire: we struggle as an industry to adequately address hazard and risk across all fronts, especially in relation to the risk management of the automotive or aviation industries. We might say this is a more general human failure, not one owned by architects or designers. We tend to prioritize what is in recent memory; we struggle to scan the horizon for the hazards just out of sight and are even less inclined to dedicate resource to prevention when the hazard seems distant. We soon forget what has come before, unless forced to confront it. How quick we have been to defund pandemic response planning?
The more subtle the hazard the less likely we are to respond. A fire is immediate and obvious in its consequence. The need to act once confronted with such an event is strong, though it still takes time. The tragedy at Grenfell happened in 2017; significant changes to the building safety regime in the UK began to take effect in 2023. The climate emergency by contrast can seem slow, almost invisible. The effects are more subtle and integrated with other forces, difficult to see clearly, distant. A single death is a tragedy, 72 deaths is a catastrophe at a scale we can still comprehend. The millions of deaths that are likely to be the result of gradual climate change—these run the risk of being a mere statistic.
What to do as designers? The Grenfell Inquiry provides some direction, but the quandary goes deeper. Yes, we need to recognize the value of design and ensure time and money is dedicated to it across all projects. But then we must also ensure our design efforts are prioritized appropriately. We need to embrace again the realities of building safely. We need to design for positive societal benefit and a minimum of negative external effects. We need to design for longevity and to avoid unnecessary waste. We need to shun the allure of the hero image alone, taken the day after completion, devoid of people and life. We need to do this from the earliest stages of education.
The technicalities of design are not something to shoehorn in afterwards. Designers like to solve problems; if they cannot see a problem (or they don’t like the one in front of them) they are inclined to invent one. Solutions to these fabrications are for nothing, though, if the world is not fit for people. The real problems that we must urgently solve have been staring us in the face for a while now. We all need to give them the attention they deserve.