What architecture, public procurement and international management reveal about the limits of replication
I spent several years in China working at the point where international design met industrial production. It was rarely a clean handover.
A designer might be discussing proportion, finish or how a surface should feel. The factory was thinking about production times, tolerances, rework and cost. Neither side was wrong, yet a strong idea could lose something at every passage.
I often found myself translating between these two positions, trying to preserve the original intention while making it technically and economically possible.
That experience taught me that a good idea does not move unchanged from a drawing into production. Every step introduces new conditions. And as the project grows, its success depends increasingly on the system surrounding it.
I thought about this while reading about the winner of the 2026 OBEL Award.
The award went to the Balearic Social Housing Model, developed through IBAVI, the public housing institute of the Balearic Islands, between 2019 and 2023.
It was not awarded to one building or to a particular architectural language. What received recognition was the decision to reconsider the entire process through which public housing is commissioned, procured, designed, built and eventually inhabited.
We normally discuss housing through what we can see. We look at plans, façades, materials and environmental performance. By the time these become visible, however, many of the decisions that will determine the final result have already been made.
Someone has established the budget, selected the site, written the tender and divided the responsibilities. Someone has decided how costs will be measured, whether performance will be monitored after completion and who will retain ownership of the building over time.
These decisions may not appear architectural, but they establish the conditions within which architecture has to operate.
The Balearic programme began in response to a serious housing shortage and a very limited stock of public rental homes. The initial objective was to increase that stock by 50%. The programme eventually reached an increase of more than 70%, with approximately 1,300 homes completed, under construction or moving through the development process.
This happened while the organisation was dealing with the pandemic, rising material prices and the regulatory complexity of public procurement.
The response was not to identify one construction system and repeat it everywhere. IBAVI started by developing a Map of Resources: an assessment of the materials, industries, skills and climatic conditions available across the islands.
What interested me was the way these resources were evaluated. Environmental impact was one criterion, but so were availability, technical performance, cost and the possibility of using a solution at a meaningful scale.
This brings some necessary realism into the discussion about sustainability. A material is not sustainable simply because it is local or natural. It must be available in sufficient quantities, perform properly, remain economically viable and fit the productive capacity of the territory.
The administration also changed its own role. Instead of acting only as a client purchasing a finished service, it developed internal technical competence and coordinated experimentation across different projects. Architects, economists and legal specialists were involved from the beginning. Information about costs, materials and building performance was retained so that one project could inform the next.
This may be the most original part of the model.
We usually associate innovation with a new product, material or technology. Here, much of it happened inside the organisation commissioning the work. Public administration itself became part of the design process.
There is also an economic question that is often underestimated. The cheapest building to construct is not necessarily the least expensive building to own, maintain or inhabit.
A lower initial price can later reappear in energy bills, maintenance costs or buildings that deteriorate quickly. The apparent saving has not disappeared. It has simply been transferred to someone else.
The Balearic model tried to consider the cost of living in the building over time. Orientation, thermal inertia, natural ventilation and solar protection were used to reduce dependence on mechanical heating and cooling. None of these techniques is revolutionary by itself. Their value comes from being included in procurement, budgeting and long-term management rather than added as isolated environmental features.
The results are interesting enough to deserve attention. They also raise a question that the award cannot answer.
How much of this model is possible because of the scale at which it was developed?
The Balearic Islands are certainly not a simple environment. Tourism places enormous pressure on housing, land is limited and construction resources must be managed across different islands. A relatively small territory can still contain considerable economic and social complexity.
Its scale may nevertheless have helped shorten the distance between the housing agency, technical teams, municipalities, suppliers and completed projects.
Information can circulate more directly. An internal team can remain close to the projects. Relationships with designers and local industries can develop over time, while lessons from one building have a realistic chance of reaching the people responsible for the next one.
Would the same system work with tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of municipalities and several levels of government?
Moving from a few hundred homes to a national or metropolitan programme is not simply a question of multiplying quantities. The relationships within the system also change.
A local supplier may serve several projects successfully but struggle when demand grows beyond its capacity. A technical team that can follow ten developments closely cannot necessarily maintain the same control over one hundred. More institutions become involved, political priorities differ and local conditions are harder to understand from the centre.
There is a real possibility that, while expanding the model, everything that made it valuable will gradually be standardised out of it.
Complete local autonomy would create a different problem. Knowledge could remain fragmented, costs would become difficult to compare and the programme might lose any common direction.
Perhaps a larger system would need a more federated structure.
A central organisation could establish common objectives, financing mechanisms and methods for measuring cost, environmental performance and delivery time. It could collect information from completed projects and make that knowledge available to everyone involved.
Local teams would remain responsible for understanding the territory, mapping its resources and selecting suitable materials, suppliers and housing types.
The method would be shared, while the physical solutions could remain different.
It sounds sensible on paper. It is much harder to maintain in practice. Central standards can quickly become another administrative burden, while local freedom can produce inconsistent results. Organisations are also very good at collecting information without allowing it to influence the next decision.
This tension is familiar to anyone working in international business.
A company operating in several markets needs common financial discipline, positioning and quality standards. But a strategy developed at headquarters cannot simply be copied into every country.
Customers buy differently. Regulations, distribution structures and production capabilities vary. A technically successful solution in one market may require a different application method, commercial approach or service model somewhere else.
Too much central control reacts slowly to local conditions. Too much independence makes it difficult to maintain direction. In my experience, finding the boundary between the two is one of the hardest parts of managing international growth.
I do not know whether the Balearic Social Housing Model could survive a much larger and more complex environment. The award does not prove that it can.
But perhaps that is exactly why the project is worth discussing. It asks us to look beyond the finished buildings and consider the competence, governance and learning system that made them possible.
The most transferable part may not be a particular building or material. It may be the habit of understanding the context before selecting the solution.
I would be genuinely interested in hearing from people who have managed projects or organisations through a significant increase in scale.
Have you seen a successful model become weaker as it expanded? What was lost first: technical quality, economic discipline, local knowledge or clarity of responsibility?
And in a large organisation, which decisions should remain central and which ones genuinely need to stay local?