Package Deal

Definition

The package deal names the contract form in which the contractor designs as well as builds the development — "under which the contractor designed as well as built the development" (p. 202) — the organisational innovation that made the 1960s high-flat boom possible amid building-industry shortage. Its logic: circumventing shortages "not only of labour but also of professional staff such as quantity surveyors and architects" (p. 202), and (as package-deal competition, using different firms' own designs for quasi-competitive tendering against a general brief) transferring 'design' to the contractor while the authority retained negotiation: "a rigid segregation of the functions of contractor and client, which assigned 'design' to the former, and left the latter free to concentrate on the negotiating and monitoring of contracts" (p. 206). Its scale: by 1964, 46% of all new public housing in England and Wales (excluding LCC and direct-labour contracts) was on negotiated or package-deal contracts; 55% in 1966–8 at the boom's height (p. 202).

The concept is Glendinning & Muthesius's structural counter to the conspiracy narratives: contractors "succeeded not because they bullied or bribed weak councils into adopting policies against their best interests, but because they gave politically strong councils what they required: high blocks, built reliably, quickly and in large numbers" (p. 193). Its cultural registration is the double sense of 'design' the form produced: "the conventions of architectural polemic… should not conceal the fact that the two kinds of 'designing' stood in historical succession, and were in that sense complementary" (p. 203) — the LCC's one-off virtuosity and the contractor's repeatable plan-type (Wimpey's no-fines 1001, Crudens's Bowie blocks, Bison's Wall-Frame) as successive phases of the same mass-housing project. Its collapse: when the boom stopped (1968–70), the 'systems' investment became "little more than an expensive gift to the housebuilding drives of the largest local authorities" (p. 209).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Glendinning & Muthesius ingest; the contractual-theory literature (Banwell Committee, Dainton, Latham) and the direct-labour register await fuller sources.

Key Thinkers

• Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius — the concept's historians: the contracting economy of the boom, the two-senses-of-design thesis, and the defeat-of-designers frame (1994).
• Lewis Cross (not paged — see log) — the form's master-practitioner: Glasgow's package-deal competition, "You are the designers!" (p. 3).
• Alan Maudsley (not paged — see log) — Birmingham's counterpart: "keep the number of dwelling types down… and reward a contractor's efficiency with negotiated continuity" (p. 253).
• George Bowie (not paged — see log) — Crudens's chief architect: the contractor's plan-type as a designed artefact ("You're the designers!" as Cross's reply to the question "What about the layout, Mr Cross?").

Related Concepts

• housing-crusade — the demand side: output politics as the form's cause ("the urgent political pressure of large urban authorities… attracted large contractors to leap aboard," p. 200).
• public-housing — the system the contract form served: municipal housebuilding's industrial phase.
• design-vs-production — the conflict the form embodied and won.
• production-stream — the wiki's designer-side production concept (Satterfield & Swackhamer): systems and tools, not objects — the package deal as its municipal ancestor.
• prefab-interior — the industrialised building the package deals carried: Bison, Camus, Larsen-Nielsen, Skarne.
• spatial-agency — the agency question the form raises: who is the author of a contractor-designed block?

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Tower Block (Glendinning & Muthesius 1994) — the concept's founding source: the definition and statistics (ch. 24, pp. 202–203); the counter-conspiracy thesis (p. 193); the Cross/Gibson Glasgow practice (ch. 25); the Maudsley Birmingham practice (ch. 26); the West Ham warning (designer control weakening an authority's negotiating position, p. 209); and the collapse of the systems investment (p. 209).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• The book claims contractors "gave politically strong councils what they required." Does this dissolve the wiki's private-practice-vs-municipal-architecture frame, or relocate it (the 'design' the contractor sold was the authority's brief)?
• "There never was a standard block!" (p. 203) — the package deal's flexibility is the opposite of the system-building myth. Does this rescue industrialised housing from the rigidity charge, or only relocate the rigidity (21 components per flat)?
• The concept is a contracting history of authorship: the contractor's architect ("The architecture, bit by bit, became cosmetics") is the mirror image of the wiki's occupant-as-designer — both displace the named author. Is there one 'death of the author' story spanning clients, contractors and users?
• What happened to the form after 1970? Design-and-build's later career (PFI, modern methods of construction) suggests the package deal is the recurring form of housing production under time pressure — is the wiki's production-stream its design-culture version?