GOOD AFTERNOON,

I should start with a disclaimer, as on the side of a fag packet, a caveat.

I have been a registered architect for thirty years and a member of my professional Institutes for just as long. I have for ten years, just to complete the trilogy, also been a member of RIAI. I have served on RIAS and RIBA Councils as well as President of RIAS in mid 2000s. Thus I appear to value those associations. I think I understand the nature of the profession of architecture. Although having served thirty years without learning my lesson suggests a certain kind of recidivism.

As I demit the chair of SCHOSA I want to reflect on Architecture, Education and the future. This is in large part informed by my years on SCHOSA Council listening to educators long at the coal face beside whom I am perhaps an amateur but my point has been to attempt to understand the holistic nature and inter-relationships inherent in the DEVELOPMENT of those responsible for the future of our built environment.

As I took this Chair I wrote in BD.....”Both the profession of Architecture and its uneasy bedfellow, Architectural Education now require a systemic shift, recognising the sea change required in problem solving in the Build Environment, part of which is brought about by global realignments in economies, energy-production and urbanisation. Architecture is no longer simply about designing buildings, places and spaces. It hasn’t been for some time. However, to quote Cedric Price: “Architecture is, what Architects do”. Central to this is an understanding of the holistic relationship design, craftsmanship, environment. The best practitioners get that. Thinking and Making. The practitioner can build learning outcomes where the difficult and the incomplete can co-exist with the structured, reflecting the realities in industry and business. The practice of architecture. This is not to argue for a prosaic, or god-forbid, a vocational approach, rather it is to focus on the essence of what architects do- what they require to do in the 21st Century, whilst acknowledging that for the foreseeable future in an under-funded education system the pro-bono work of architectural practitioners is essential to its progress.”

Nothing I would disagree with two years later as I stand down. But not quite enough.

In over a millennium of building, formal education in (mathematics, proportion, mechanics, physics) the subjects essential to its development is perhaps 600 years old. Formal architectural education perhaps two hundred years old, and the Professional Institutions of Architecture – children at only 150 years old.

I thought I might start with a quote to provoke debate in the context of a brief history of how we got here.

‘Him I consider Architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy and to realise by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble deeds of man by means of weights and the joining and massing of bodies.’

L.B.Alberti

This is surely more than Vitruvius’ Commodity Firmness and Delight. It affirms that it is not only about thinking and making or design and construction but also about the means by which that construction is implemented.

As with Brunelleschi’s Dome the conception of the method was everything. Alberti had a clear idea of architecture as a vocation for a gentleman with a liberal education and a special knowledge of mathematics and geometry; but his view of architecture as a profession was indistinct.

In De re aedificatoria, written about 1450, he expressed the modern or is it “modernist”, view of an architect as the complete designer, capable of planning cities and designing everything from palaces and churches to a humble farmhouse; but he had nothing to say about the training of an architect or about building practice except in the vaguest terms. A century later, Philibert Delorme (1510-70), was able to envisage a self-governing profession of specialists with accepted standards of training and clearly defined responsibilities and privileges. Yet this was a long way off.

The absence of a powerful building profession in Italy in the Renaissance and paradoxically the early prominence of architects are both related to the leading role taken by central Italy in architecture as well as the other arts. This tradition was founded on the belief that any artist could design a building since it was the conception of the work that mattered rather than the construction. This conviction derived from the custom of treating the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture as three branches of the same art of design.

Vasari noted this phenomenon and ascribed to the fact that artists were trained in disegno – “the father of our three arts” – a theory of artistic creativity, disegno was the foundation of the liberal status of the practice of art. Note this point.

This still was not an embryonic profession in its modern form, which is a creation of the nineteenth century. In the sixteenth century, and indeed until the Industrial Revolution, every piece of a building was made to order. This created problems of inter-craft communication. The architect came to rely on models and increasingly on drawings to communicate his designs to the builders.

The economic and political stability established under Whig rule found its aesthetic counterpart in the Palladian Revival, initiated around 1715 by two publications-

Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, Volume 1 and Giacomo Leoni’s translation of Palladio’s Quattro libri. The eighteenth century was a Golden Age of architectural publication. At the top were the handsome folios of Campbell, Burlington, Kent and Gibbs, followed by Isaac Ware’s Complete Body of Architecture.

A few leading architects had joined the Society of Artists when it was set up in 1761, but Sir William Chambers, after quarrelling with James Paine, was the prime mover behind the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Of far greater significance for the future was the Architects’ Club, established in 1791 by George Dance, James Wyatt, Henry Holland and S.P. Cockerell, later joined by Chambers, Adam and a dozen others. Eligibility was highly exclusive, being restricted to Royal Academicians, holders of the Academy’s Gold Medal, and members of distinguished foreign institutions. The last decades of the eighteenth century saw various attempts to distinguish between the designer as such and the other traditional roles embraced by architects since the sixteenth century. In Dr. Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary of 1755, “surveyor” and “architect” were virtually synonymous terms. The two roles continued to be associated, however, until the foundation of the Surveyors’ Institute in 1869, and even then the final break was not made until the 1930’s.

The same was true with engineering; despite the foundation of the Society of Civil Engineers in 1771, the Smeatonian Society of 1793, and ultimately the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818, the historic bond between the disciplines survived well into the nineteenth century.

This unparalleled expansion of professional functions and the introduction of novel building types such as railway stations, specialised hospitals, offices and factories, as well as a host of technical innovations in heating, lighting and drainage, all served to accentuate the broadening gulf between the growing professional organisation and the increasingly inadequate training available.

In France the technological training established with the Ecole Polytechnique in 1795 had been counterbalanced only two years later by the foundation of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Yet English architectural education, well into the nineteenth century, still depended largely upon the irregular standards of articled pupilage, augmented by lectures at the Royal Academy and travel abroad.

In marked contrast to the official basis of the French system, the world of the enlightened gentleman-architect was, in a sense, perpetuated in privately established and governed bodies such as the Royal Academy and the RIBA.

The working of the pupilage system at its best is revealed by a detailed study made of Sir John Soane’s office between the 1780’s and the 1830’s. During this time some thirty pupils in all underwent their training in surveying, measuring, costing, superintendence and draftsmanship for twelve hours daily over a period of five to seven years. Premiums or fees paid on entry to the office ranged from £50 in Soane’s early career to sums between 100 and 175 guineas according to his increasing eminence after 1788, when he was appointed Architect to the Bank of England.

When in 1841 T.L. Donaldson, first Secretary of the RIBA, was appointed Professor of Architecture, he gave two courses of lectures for part-time students.

On “Architecture as a Science” and “Architecture as an Art” – a symbolic division which was to flaw Victorian architecture throughout the century, producing such confrontations as between George Gilbert Scott’s hotel and P.W. Barlow’s engine shed at St. Pancras Station.

Another Quote;

“Creativity is craftsmanship. It involves a circular process that draws you from an idea to a drawing, from a drawing to an experiment, from an experiment to construction and from construction back to an idea again.

For me, this cycle is fundamental to creative work. Truly creative work is a circular process. Teamwork is essential if creative projects are to come about. Teamwork requires the ability to listen and engage in dialogue. Into the creative cycle – think, draw, spend time at the site, and go back to thinking again. If this can be defined as creation, then there is no real contradiction between art and science, modernity and tradition, and freedom and obligation.”
Renzo Pianos view as expressed in a radio interview is reinforced by Joseph Rykwert.

“there is no theory without practice, and no practice without theory. Making is the continual improvement of a theoretical position. Theory is based on experience and history but requires an essential ingredient of external criticism.”

In 1842 certain junior architects, excluded from the RIBA as not being in practice for the requisite number of years, formed themselves into the Association of Architectural Draftsmen, becoming the Architectural Association in 1847. From the start the tone of the AA was as iconoclastic as it was democratic and its regular papers, reported sympathetically in The Builder, provided an essential forum for free-ranging discussion outside the inhibiting atmosphere of the RIBA.

By the end of the nineteenth century still only 10% of architects belonged to an organisation which The Times had dismissed in 1870 as “a highly respectable trades union”, and those who remained outside the RIBA included such eminent figures as Philip Webb, William Butterfield, and Norman Shaw.

The deciding factor for most of these architects who objected to the compulsory examinations, established by the RIBA through its revised Charter in 1887, lay in the Romantic belief in artistic autonomy.

However, it was the need to establish organised training in accord with the modern era, rather than the debate over artistic capacity or professional status, which finally resolved the issue. During the last decade of the 19th century rapid progress was made in the long-neglected field of architectural education. By 1887 the RIBA had systematised its examination into three parts – Preliminary, Intermediate and Final – INTERESTINGLY - the first two being voluntary and the third an obligatory qualification for Associateship.

By 1900 the battle for a closed profession was largely over – some 15,000 architects by then being members of the RIBA – although a reluctance to legislate over the ability to design continued until 1931 and 1938 when two Architects Registration Acts were passed.

In 1948 Robert Matthews and Leslie Martin, and others, recognised major problems, not only in the massive rebuilding required after the war when 3 million homes and 20 million square feet of office space was destroyed in Grtr London alone; but also in delivering the nascent NHS and Education Reforms and with Holford set about rethinking the profession and its education. Thus by 1965 we had created a significantly larger profession than existed before 1939, with almost 70% of registered architects employed in public service via Local Authorities and PSA, NHS etc. In the decade up to ’65, Universities also invested significant amounts of public money in new build programmes, largely using private practices through competition where Leslie Martin was also powerful.

By the late 1970’s there were still >50% of the profession in Local Government Architects’ Departments. By 1980’s, with Thatcher dismantling Local Government powers, this had dropped to <30% in Scotland at least. Part of a total of 30,000 architects in the UK . The last ten years may have seen growth in design and construction of education building and other public works, it has not led to growth in public architecture departments. The great eras of public buildings long since dead.

In 1971 Alex Gordon became President of RIBA with the mantra; Long Life, Loose Fit, Low Energy. As a mission statement LL:LF:LE has never been bettered and certainly not by any subsequent RIBA policy document. The idea of building for permanence–optimising materials performance, yet being flexible enough to accommodate change and adaptability over a lifetime, whilst minimising energy consumption is surely the ultimate holistic objective for any architecture. Why then has such a desirable situation taken forty years to even approach fruition in the wider built environment? Schools of Architecture have been following this line in education for years.