Protectionism

BD this week are running a story on architects' desire to protect their function which has been an ongoing theme in the debate on the profession ever since the title was protected by the Architects (Registration) Act of 1938.

I find this idea very strange, not only because protectionism is being frowned upon by everyone at this moment of global financial woe, but because it is far from clear what function it is that architects want to protect.

Whenever I talk to architects about this, their reasonings are vague and unclear. Some diligently and blindly follow the ARB line that "the consumer should be protected". However, they are unclear of who that consumer is. If it's the client, then we're talking about the wealthy and powerful who of course have rights, but are not the unsuspecting and downtrodden of society. If it's the end user, then fair enough. Some architects even build upon this argument that it's their responsibility to make the building stand up, which seems dumb. That's the engineers' and manufacturers' responsibility and what their respective training, PII and collateral warrenties are for. The ARB line is, in fact, backwards and registration is there to protect the architect from the rest of society - in other words, to maintain the monopoly.

Another argument is that architects have 7 years training and so are the best people to design and build buildings. Let's look at this in more detail:

5 years of the 7 is in school. Roughly 90% of a student's time is spent on design problems and around 65% (depending on the school of course) of their final grade goes on assessment of this design work. One of the 7 years is simply a "year out" in industry, which equates to anybody starting a career and learning the ropes in anything. The final year is another career starter year while enrolled on a part-time professional practice course. The course I did lasted 8 days. So the architect's education is heavily weighted towards design. But is this the function that the architects want to protect? As Andrew Saint argued in The Image of the Architect (Yale University Press, 1983, p.61),

"It did not take long to discover that the only broad line of defence within the Soanean formulation, the only element in architecture to which some other professional group did not have a prior or better claim, was 'art'. Yet ironically, those most concerned with professional dignity and exclusiveness were in practice those least taken up with matters of art, and vice versa."

The design of the built environment matters greatly (especially to architects). The "design-led" architects can probably be entrusted to design buildings, but there are many others working in the "commercial" sector who probably cannot. Yes, they are qualified, but no, they don't particularly care or are not particularly good at it. And if we are to say that the architect's function to be protected is the design of buildings, then surely we should protect the other design industries similarly, like jewellery design, automotive design, and furniture design. After all, the designers in those areas have studied equally hard in order to master their trades and crafts. So no more furniture for Zaha, jewellery for Gehry or cars and buses for Foster. At least, without them becoming suitably qualified. There is also urban design, of course, which architects often claim to be able to do, but largely have no idea about, having only ever really considered individual buildings rather than the space between them. Architectural courses barely touch upon urban design and an architect will probably not be able to quote any theory beyond Kevin Lynch's half century old "The Image of the City". This is another related but quite separate profession, and as important as - if not more important than - architecture itself and it deserves its own qualifications and accreditation.

Design as the function of architects is a bit of a red herring. It's what architectural culture is all about - what gets published and discussed, but it does not form the majority of the architect's role. Looking at the official RIBA plan of work (pdf file) and we see that design - at a push - constitutes the first 5 of the 11 stages. "Appraisal" and "Design Brief" are important stages, but are often considered "winning the job" and are not design per se. "Concept" and "Design Development" are the meat and bones of design. "Technical Design" can be done by architects, but it is not something they are trained to do particularly well and besides, there is a whole architectural technician profession that really has first grabs on this stage. They are trained to do it and on the whole do it much better than architects.

RIBA scrapped the indicative fee scale for architects in 2003 (the recommended fee scale was scrapped in 1992 and the obligatory fee scale scrapped in 1982), but previously it was recommended that 55% of the final fee covered these first 5 stages. So this all indicates that design (if we are being generous) comprises about half of an architect's role. However, the reality is of course very different. In a recent lecture at London Met University, Alex Ely of Mae Architects (a well regarded "design led" practice) admitted that less than 15% of his time was spent on design. In my personal experience, that is an over estimate. So is design really what architects do and the function that should be protected? It is certainly the controlled and controllable aspect of an autonomous art.

This is the "art" side of the eternal "art versus profession" debate. Let's consider the "profession" side (it won't take long). The remainder of the architect's responsibilities is to get the building built. The "Soanean formulation" that Saint cited above is this:

"The business of the architect is to make the designs and estimates, to direct the works, and to measure and value the different parts; he is the intermediate agent between the employer, whose honour and interest he is to study, and the mechanic, whose rights he is to defend. His situation implies great trust; he is responsible for the mistakes, negligences, and ignorances of those he employs; and above all, he is to take care that the workmen's bills do not exceed his own estimates."
(John Soane, Plans, Elevations and Sections of Buildings, 1788, p.7)

And this was what the founders of the RIBA took as the original ideal functions of an architect, dividing architecture as a service from speculative contracting and building and later, from surveying.

So the other half (in theory, much more in practice) of an architect's role is supervision of the building on site, and dealing with all the contractual stuff. The architect has a great deal of the client's money at stake here, and so it is impossible to underestimate the scale of this responsibility. It is what the Professional Indemnity Insurance is for and what the architect is likely to get sued over. However, it's a role that is learned on the job and something that other professions are equally able to do (if not more so) and probably more interested in doing. I'm talking about the professional Project Manager, a role that has appeared since the last recession and the rise of the Quantity Surveyor. It's largely a messy, administrative "contingent" job. Is this the function that architects want protecting? I doubt it.

There is an argument that only architects should be able to apply for planning permission on buildings over a certain size, as they do, I believe, in France and Italy. However, the architect then simply becomes a stamp and you will without doubt be left with people simply paying for the architect to stamp their own drawings.

So the protection of function, beyond Sunand Prasad's claims that it is unworkable and probably illegal, is quite simply the desperate cries of a dying profession, deluded and confused as to what its role in society really is.

What about protection of "title" that the 1938 act brought in? Similarly deluded, I would argue. It simply legally assigns an English word to a select group of people, which is as irksome as it is unworkable. Nobody outside the architectural profession understands this protection. Nobody - even architectural students - understands the difference between the ARB and the RIBA. It's not an education thing because you can't simply take an English word and ascribe it a new meaning and expect everyone to fall in line - life doesn't work like that.

What should happen is that the ARB should be abolished, along with protection of title and the RIBA should be the standard to which all architects aspire. You wouldn't be able to join the RIBA without the accredited qualifications and this would divide the "real" architects from the also-rans. It would also give the RIBA a real meaning and reason for existing, which it scarcely has at the moment. If architects are so precious about the size of their education and how valuable it is to society, then let this speak for itself in a self-regulated profession. Let this education compete in the real world and demonstrate its worth.

It is not surprising that architects want their monopoly protected. This is what professions are for. As I've mentioned before, George Bernard Shaw is quoted as saying that "All professions are conspiracies against the laity". Professions are a product of both sixteenth-century history and twentieth-century sociology and essentially about defining a knowledge base, abstracting it, claiming ownership of it and then servicing access to it (for a fee). The RIBA itself was founded in 1834 "for facilitating the acquirement of architectural knowledge, for the promotion of the different branches of science connected with it, and for establishing an uniformity and respectability of practice in the profession".

So architects need to get it straight between themselves what this knowledge is that they are claiming.
The big problem is that the great contribution architects can make to the design of the built environment is value based. The best ones fight for quality against the profit-mongers and for the more ethical aspects of building, such as sustainability and community. This affects both the bottom line and the quality of life and is a laudible ambition that I cannot praise the best architects highly enough for. If there were some way this could be bottled up, marketed and sold to society, then I would be the first to grant it a state-controlled monopoly. Until then, I say let the architectural profession compete and live or die on what it holds dear as its knowledge.