European guidelines on quality requirements and evaluation in architecture

The paper presents the results of a Europe wide survey on the guidelines that define qualitative requirements for architectural design. The goal was to outline the elements that each European Community country considers as pivotal to enhance the social, political and cultural value of its future architectural heritage and, on this basis, make points to propose strategies to develop a common European language. Starting from the surveys carried out by the European Forum for Architectural Policies (EFAP) on the European Community legislation impacts on the Member States, we compared the guidelines for quality in architecture published in the various countries since 1997. The analysis shows that, despite the efforts made by the European Union to align the various guidelines, the relevant documents remain highly heterogenous both in their structure and in their language. Furthermore, the requirements that each country puts as priority to outline the qualitative guidelines, are defined in a generic way without going into details useful to specify how they can be achieved. For this reason, in an attempt to find the criteria to define the requirements on which each project might be evaluated, the survey has been widened to examine some regulations of architectural competitions, always considered to be the preferred tool for selecting the best projects. However, our analysis shows that generally even there, no explicit criteria is set to enable a clear and understandable qualitative assessment of the projects. In this scenario, being impossible to identify unique and shared numeric reference parameters, the digital tools (BIM) increasingly popular in Europe and now mandatory in Italy according the new Public Procurement Code, play a fundamental but not unique role to identify specific criteria for achieving the requirements that define quality.