Draft:Sebastian Macmillan

Sebastian Macmillan (born 1952) trained and practised as an architect, and completed a PhD, before going on to a career focused on research and innovation initiatives concerned with the design, construction and management of the built environment. As an independent consultant and later an academic he undertook, supported, and managed research in consultancy and in academia. He has written numerous best practice guides, academic papers, booklets and conference papers, together with five books. These have addressed variously: the tangible and intangible benefits of a well-designed built environment and the promotion of evidence-based design; new design tools, technological innovations and managerial practices to minimise energy use and environmental impacts of buildings; and improvements in the project process of design and construction such as interdisciplinary collaboration and effective teamwork. From 2006 to 2017 he led a masters course at the University of Cambridge, and in 2016-17 he was a visiting professor at Turin Polytechnic.

Early life

Macmillan studied Architecture at the University of Liverpool and subsequently completed a doctorate at the Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art (RCA), which was headed by Professor L. Bruce Archer and pioneered design research. His thesis was entitled Designers’ values and the evaluation of designs, and he went on to publish two papers based on it in the journal Design Studies.

In 1982 at a conference on Design Policy Macmillan was introduced by James Powell, an academic at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now the University of Portsmouth) and then chairman of the Design Research Society, to Ian Cooper, also an architect with a PhD and based at the Martin Centre, the research wing of the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. Cooper, Powell and Macmillan organised a conference at Portsmouth Polytechnic under the title Designing for Building Utilisation. They also published a paper about information and designers.

Research Consultancy

Subsequently Cooper and Macmillan formed a partnership, Eclipse Research Consultants,[2] initially to write a handbook - Exploiting Sunshine in House Design - as part of the International Energy Agency's Solar Heating and Cooling Programme: Task VIII - Passive and Hybrid Solar Low Energy Buildings. Both partners in Eclipse completed a number of projects for the UK government’s Energy Efficiency Best Practice programme (EEBPp) including writing various case studies and good practice guides. Among those undertaken by Macmillan was the EEBPp national benchmarking guide to energy use in hotels, Consequently Macmillan was commissioned by the International Hotels Environment Initiative (IHEI) – an international network of hotel executives pooling their experience to promote environmental good practice – to edit their guide to environmental management in hotels. The IHEI was a programme of the Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum headed by HRH The Prince of Wales (now Charles III) and the guide includes a Foreword written by Charles which endorses and commends it. Eclipse went on to undertake a wide variety of strategic and applied research studies largely for public sector organisations, producing outputs that included technical and non-specialist reports, audits and assessments, best practice guides and case studies, workshop and seminar presentations, and posters and promotional material.[3]

Academic career

In 1996 Macmillan took up, part-time, the post of Senior Research Associate (SRA) at the Martin Centre. He won funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and published a number of academic papers about mapping the design process and collaborative design. Drawing on the research findings, he devised and wrote a best practice guide on effective teamwork for Constructing Excellence. He worked with the team who were running the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment masters course, and jointly edited the course textbook. The book includes chapters by leading industry thinkers who contributed to the course, such as Richard Saxon, Peter Rogers, Michael Dickson, Ian Ritchie, Sam Price, and Sir Jack Zunz, together with notable academics like David Gann and Dean Hawkes. The book was adopted as a course text by equivalent international courses, such as Hong Kong University’s Master of Science in Integrated Project Delivery (subsequently Master of Science in Digital Management of Built-Assets) , Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Interdisciplinary Design in Practice and MIT’s Masters on Integrated Design and Management

Macmillan edited the Department of Architecture's 1996 Research Assessment Exercise submission and served on the industry sub-panel of the main Unit of Assessment panel for Built Environment, the submission gaining grade 5 (the top grade, there being no 5* then). For the 2001 RAE he compiled, assembled and wrote the entire submission from the Cambridge Department of Architecture, and was a member of the Unit of Assessment 33 Built Environment panel. He later wrote an academic paper examining the controversial results of the 2001 RAE under the title 'Architectural Research and its Enemies', and later a paper about the radical changes to architectural education arising from expectations that teaching staff be research active.

Research management of EPSRC projects

From 1999 to 2001, Macmillan was seconded from his consultancy to EPSRC as Sector Programme Manager for construction within the Innovative Manufacturing Initiative, managing the portfolio and overseeing calls for proposals and recommendations for funding. Between 2004 and 2008, he was the Project Manager for Carbon Reduction in Buildings (CaRB), a three-year £4m project undertaken by a five-university consortium comprising UCL, Heriot-Watt, and the universities of Newcastle, Manchester, and Reading, and with funding from EPSRC and the Carbon Trust.

Design as a generator of value: collating the evidence

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Construction Research and Innovation Strategy Panel (CRISP) formed a number of time-limited Task Groups around specific topics, with the remit of each to identify the construction industry’s research needs. Macmillan wrote a position paper for the Design task group, emphasising the contribution of design to quality and value, and Giles Oliver wrote the Design task group report.

The Construction Industry Council (CIC) had commissioned the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) to develop what later became the Design Quality Indicator (DQI) tool. Presentations about the CRISP Design Task group and the DQI were made at a conference on Design Quality – the Evidence, held at the RIBA in September 2000. Macmillan won funding from the Department for Trade and Industry under its 2002 Partners in Innovation programme to research 'the valuation of intangibles', and went on to edit a book under the title 'Designing Better Buildings – quality and value in the built environment' which was launched at the RIBA in December 2003. The book included chapters based on the CRISP work by Macmillan and Giles Oliver, and by other leading industry figures such as Richard Feilden and Matthew Carmona, together with three perspectives on the thinking behind the DQI tool by Sunand Prasad, Michael Dickson and David Gann. Other chapters drew from the RIBA conference, and the book included a reprint of the paper that introduced the 1:5:200 ratio. It was reviewed by Liz Bailey in the Architects’ Journal and by Sebastian Loew in Urban Design Quarterly who said: “This book deals with very important issues and comes out at the right time, when spending needs to be justified and best value is measured in increasingly sophisticated ways. If good quality design is to be achieved more widely, the benefits need to be measurable in convincing ways, and the various contributors show how to achieve this.”

CRISP recommendations, funding bodies, and industry research needs

CRISP commissioned Macmillan to collate recommendations for research and innovation made by CRISP Task Groups and to map them onto the remit of five funding bodies: EPSRC, the Construction Innovation and Research Management (CIRM) Division of the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), the Highways Agency, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Environment Agency. Each of the resulting Action Plans was presented to the relevant funder by CRISP. A year later he was commissioned to evaluate the outcome, and identify and group research needs that were still awaiting implementation. One cluster was concerned with how the industry can add value to customers and society by shaping and delivering a sustainable environment and contributing to a high quality of life. In response CRISP formed the Value Task Group, chaired by Richard Saxon. Saxon went on to write Be Valuable and Macmillan published an academic paper on the Added Value of Good Design. The paper includes an extensive review of the literature on Evidence-based design.

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) followed this up by appointing Macmillan to write The Value Handbook published in 2006. Among other citations, The Value Handbook was quoted by Sunand Prasad, past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in the second of five programmes in the Radio 3 series ‘The Essay’ on Architecture: The Fourth R – 2. The Value Proposition. The programmes were broadcast on consecutive evenings in October 2010.

RIBA Research Committee

Macmillan joined the RIBA Research Committee in the early 1990s. After the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, the RIBA became more aware of the significance of research activity to academia, and appointed a Director of Research. Macmillan chaired the Research Committee from 2006 until 2012. A key activity was raising the profile of architectural research by organising annual RIBA research symposia on various topics: Reflections on Practice, 2007; Space at Home, 2008; Changing Practices, 2009; Does Beauty Matter?, 2010; and The Shrinking World, 2011.

Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment masters programme

In 2006 Macmillan was invited to take over as Course Director for the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment masters programme at the University of Cambridge, then being offered by the Departments of Engineering and Architecture acting jointly. He ran it for 11 years until his retirement in 2017, when the course moved to the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). The course had its origins in the ideas of Ove Arup who wrote extensively about his passion for 'total design' and the need for improved and more effective collaboration between engineers and architects, his experiences over intellectual property in the case of Sydney Opera House being formative). Arup's RIBA Royal Gold Medal address and his Key Speech are summaries of many of his ideas. Following his death one of the first acts of The Ove Arup Foundation was to sponsor a seminar on Education for the Built Environment, attended by senior figures from the construction professions and academia. It led to the Foundation sponsoring the establishment of the IDBE masters programme, with the first cohort of students starting in 1994. Its early years coincided with the publication of major reviews of the construction industry, the first Constructing the Team by the committee chaired by Sir Michael Latham (which commended the establishment of the course, page 73), and the second Rethinking Construction by the committee led by Sir John Egan (industrialist). Many of the ideas in both reports were entirely compatible with the objectives of the course, and in its early years IDBE helped to deliver the ‘rethinking construction’ agenda to professionals taking the course. Subsequently Macmillan broadened the syllabus to encompass sustainable urban development. Among other initiatives, Macmillan participated in a European Commission TEMPUS project concerned with Architecture and Sustainable Urban Development, whose aim was to create an international network between six European universities (in Milan, Cambridge, Zaragossa, Lyon Athens and Varna, and five Ukrainian universities (in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kyiv, Lviv and Odessa), and to support the establishment of graduate courses in sustainable urban development in the Ukrainian partner establishments drawing on expertise shared among the partners. The project ran from 2012 to 2015. Macmillan participated in a number of meetings in Ukraine, and lectured and ran workshops there. On 19 November 2015, he gave the keynote presentation on ‘Architecture and its place in the academy’ at a Symposium on the Theory and Practice of Academic Education: architecture and urban design, held at the National University Polytechnic of Lviv, celebrating 20 years of academic co-operation between the National University and Vienna University of Technology[4]. On 10 November 2016, he was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Prydniprovska State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Ukraine, in recognition of outstanding academic and scientific achievements.

Visiting Professor, Turin Polytechnic

Macmillan was appointed as a Visiting Professor at Turin Polytechnic in 2016-17. In 2019, he led a workshop for polytechnic professors about using English as a medium for instruction.

Other publications

Macmillan has produced various publications, both individually and with other authors, for organisations such as: Constructing Excellence; Sport England; the Specialist Engineering Alliance (SEA);CABE; and the Department of Health.

Personal life

Macmillan is married to Jenny Macmillan, daughter of Robert Macmillan, and lives in Cambridge. He was born Sebastian Lera, on 16 January 1952, adopting his wife's surname in mid-career.