Atomik: Studio Conversations #10
Educating the profession
By Mike Oades - Director, Atomik
The Architects Registration Board is proposing radical changes to the profession that could lead to the scrapping of Parts 1, 2 and 3 which would be biggest shake up of architectural education for 50 years.?The RIBA President Simon Allford is concerned that this could undermine the quality of our ‘world class architectural education system’.
Whether the proposed reforms happen or not, change is inevitable for the architectural profession in the UK – and it is essential if the profession is to survive, prosper and continue to attract the best candidates. Before we go any further and for the avoidance of any doubt, I should say that I absolutely love what I do as an architect. It is a great profession, but I also see that in the 30 odd years since I started my journey as an architect it has become arguably less inclusive and vastly more expensive to access university education.?At the same time architectural education and practice have become more detached. Whilst in practice, fees and salaries have fallen in real terms, as we have diluted the breadth and depth of our services.
While the Arb and RIBA argue it out in the hinterlands of Fitzrovia there are other factors too that are having a profound effect on the profession in this country and beyond; the Building Safety Act, the Grenfell Inquiry, climate change, dissatisfaction with working hours, conditions and pay.?It all needs a lot of unpicking to find the right solutions to educating the next generation.
Education and Practice
First and foremost, we are practitioners, but we do have contact with academia, regularly teaching and visiting universities in the UK, Europe, Middle East and Central Asia. At Atomik we have also taken different routes to enter the profession. Sophie and I took a more traditional route, whilst Derek and Max entered the profession through apprenticeships after gaining more practical qualifications (their stories deserve an article of their own). As individuals and as a practice we have all worked internationally too. This experience has enabled us to reflect on how architecture is taught and practiced abroad and the ability to reflect on that experience at home.
Our feeling is that there is a widening gap between formal education and practice in the UK that is less prevalent elsewhere. When I started my training in the late 1980’s I think that our education tended to be much more technical, but we were seduced by the more conceptual work emanating from the AA and subsequently at the Bartlett and others at the time. This more philosophical approach to architectural education has since appeared to prevail over the more starchy and technical education, proliferated by a ‘Hapsburgian Chin’ of architectural educators (a recent Bartlett graduate’s observation - not mine) detached from professional practice.?Not all UK schools are like this, of course, and universities are also under pressure to employ more academically inclined teaching staff with PhD’s rather than practitioners with degrees, but as Indra Kagis McEwen argues in her book on architectural origins ‘Socrates Ancestor’, architecture needed to exist before philosophy.
There needs to be more of a balance in vocational education between practice and theory however. It is little surprise, therefore, that students appear to be dissatisfied with both their architectural education and architectural practice - they have been sold a pup with promises of a profession that has never existed.
领英推荐
It’s a wider profession
Our roles as architects are continually changing and it is a much wider profession now than ever before. The idea that one professional is able to provide every part of our professional service is a ship that is long departed.?Whilst there is a need for the general practitioner there are a whole raft of specialisms that fall under the architectural umbrella, from fa?ade consultants to project management, design managers, clients, sustainability consultants and visualisers – our professional bodies would do well to recognise architects in these roles.??It is clear that other organisations and disciplines really value what we do and what we bring to the table, which is a really positive recognition of our training and skills.?As architects we have a lot of agency within the built environment. The danger is that we give so much responsibility away that we start to devalue our core services – something else that we appear to be particularly good at.
Creating a more inclusive and representative profession
If we want to try and encourage the best students and candidates to join the profession there are a few things we need to do as an industry, possibly before we start shaking up architectural education.?We first need to change the culture of the profession – and perhaps the Arb and RIBA need to play a greater role in this too. It’s a tough world out there, made even harder by a culture of tendering dangerously low fees to win work without the genuine ability to properly resource the projects once commissioned – relying on unpaid overtime and low salaries to fill the gaps.?Combined with cost of studying why would anyone volunteer for this abuse.
In Belgium the function of an architect is protected and in Germany, the architectural profession is clinging onto its fee scales, while they are still statutory. I am not sure that these arrangements are right for us either, but changes to procurement rules around the commissioning of architects to fulfil a statutory role could be a way of ensuring that that the process doesn’t favour purely the lowest bidder, which (we all know), it usually comes down to - even if the bids are scored 70% on quality.
To Conclude
There are aspects of both the Arb proposals and the RIBA’s concerns that I can agree with. Making our ‘world-class’ training more affordable to access, whilst making the profession more relevant and attractive to join ought to be the real goal however. An obvious solution to this would be to make paid apprenticeships and part-time courses the foundation of this process and there are some more agile schools, such as the London School of Architecture, that are championing this approach.?A foundation course to introduce the breadth of opportunities that a career as a built environment professional could also provide students an opportunity to explore what interests and suits their abilities best, before focussing on the notion of a singular architectural role. I suspect that the debate on the reform of architectural education is only just starting, but my feeling is that we cannot fix education without fixing the flaws in practice as part of the process.