I find myself discussing the built environment with a wide variety of people – industry types, academics, business folk and everyday users of buildings. At some point I will inevitably be asked: “So you are an architect then?” At that point, the conversation is already destined for a particular outcome, because they have predetermined my apparent intent and interest. Despite replying: “I am, but…” and explaining why I am not what they perceive an architect to be, they have categorised me as “a typical architect”: someone who is either trying yet another way to explain or justify their role or to win a commission.
For many years I have tirelessly explained that, as an architect, I am not merely interested in designing or stylising a building. If only people knew what architects actually did!
Yet today I realise a stark reality: the perception of everyone outside the profession is in almost every instance correct. It is a product of the way in which the profession represents and conducts itself, despite proclamations to the contrary.
It is important to qualify what I mean by “the profession”. In doing so, I do not include the architects who are genuinely contributing to society and people’s lives.
The profession I refer to is the majority of willing members of the pseudo-intellectual religious cult that the RIBA inexorably perpetuates: the high priesthood of design-intelligentsia and the loyal wannabe worshippers it preaches to.
If you are not part of this elite you are a “lay-person”, apparently too stupid or ignorant to appreciate or understand good architecture. This is an attitude that obliges the lay-person to look up reverently to one’s architect, grateful for their wisdom and god-like skill. This is confirmed annually with the “architect oscars” and “medals of merit”. This is a ritualised celebration of architectural elitism: architecture as exclusive design-art, self-serving intellectual expression or engineering marvel.
Is this you, you might ask? Well, be honest. In your work, when looking at the RIBA Plan of Work, do you obsess about stage two, consider stages three onward to be a little boring and beneath you? Are you really aware of stages zero or seven? And if you are, do you care?
Worse still, there are many architects who have been so effectively brainwashed into thinking that they have some special skill that, when they are criticised by the industry or society, they feel genuinely insulted or offended, blaming procurement, legislation or their clients.
These architects often work incredibly long hours for very little reward. I used to be one of them, so I know what this feels like. However, although I can empathise with the chronic state of the profession’s delusion, I can no longer sympathise or be part of it.
I spent more than 15 years striving to bring change from within the profession. I served time as an elected RIBA national councillor, have worked alongside a handful of good councillors and under the leadership of a few good presidents. During that time, I helped develop the concept of client adviser and stage zero in the Plan of Work. Both of these are expressly focused on outcome, or what society and consumers actually need from buildings. Alas, I see little real change. The inertia is so great now that the profession just does the same thing, branded differently, reworking a tired rhetoric.
The profession must realise that, if it does not like the answers it keeps getting, rather than protest and seek different ways of answering the same questions, it is time to seek new questions. I see no sign of this yet, though the possibility remains. If momentum can be maintained across presidencies, the inertia of the hereditary hubris might slow enough for realisation to dawn.
This as we stand at the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, with the built environment set to be disrupted like never before. Consumers – those using buildings – stand to gain much, while existing incumbents of property, construction and design are going to have to drastically up their game if they are to survive, let alone thrive.
I have to stand by what I know to be true, by what matters to me and the part I play in society. If I remain a registered architect, what I can be will for the foreseeable future be compromised.
I now know I can do more good outside the profession than from within to meet the needs of built environment consumers, across all aspects of society, business and domestic.
Paul Fletcher is a strategic futurist and thought leader at Through
