The Royal Institute of British Architects has been going through hard times in recent decades: elections for its president are often held uncontested - there is no more than one person willing to take this post. RIBA members accuse its elected and appointed leaders of being disconnected from reality, in fact, of being useless. The institute should represent the interests of architects, but in reality this is often limited to an official reaction to certain events or actions of the authorities that directly affect the profession (which is called lobbying).
In 2020, a particularly indicative situation developed, which even got into the national press, which is usually not very interested in RIBA's affairs, in addition to its awards. In March, when the architects were acutely worried about the Covid crisis along with the entire society, President Alan Jones temporarily resigned from his duties - without giving any reason. Only later it turned out that he had an affair with an African-British woman who turned to RIBA for help against discrimination in the architectural profession, who eventually indulged in actions close to blackmail (among other things, Jones is married). He tried to hide the seriousness of the situation, but then nevertheless confessed to his wife and to RIBA. An independent investigation was carried out by a law firm, as required by British law: RIBA is a charitable organization, and therefore reports especially strictly. As a result, in June, the president apologized and returned to his duties, and this whole story - against the backdrop of a pandemic - made people talk about the institute's inability to respond to the challenges of the time.
This internal crisis did unprecedented: the subsequent elections for the President of RIBA for the period from September 2021 to September 2023 attracted as many as five candidates. Among them was Simon Alford, co-founder of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), the leading English bureau, who, as expected, won. In the 21st century, not very well-known and honored architects usually become presidents of the institute, it is not for nothing that critic Catherine Slassor harshly called them "provincial types", so the participation of a major figure in the elections also came as a surprise and predetermined Alford's victory. However, only 13.2% of the Institute's members voted, so this revival was still very relative.
With this in mind, the publication by RIBA of a radical new strategy “The Way Forward” (pdf available here) generated mixed feelings. According to this plan, architects must comply with a single educational standard, consisting of a number of "competencies", educational "themes and values". A scheme for the development of a professional from the position of a working student even to a diploma of the "part 1" level (the existing RIBA scheme assumes three stages of training, three "parts") to the position of a partner or director, a total of five status options, each with its own mandatory requirements. The goal is to improve the quality of university programs and increase the volume of continuing education (now a member of the institute has to report 35 hours of study per year, however, according to complaints from architects, RIBA has long given these seminars at the mercy of manufacturers and suppliers of materials).
The emphasis is on technical disciplines in universities and on the subject of life and health safety for professionals, with particular attention to fire safety. The reasons are obvious: the ongoing investigation of the Grenfell tower tragedy, as well as the story of the collapse of the wall in the Edinburgh primary school (it and 16 similar ones, built with violations, had to be closed) showed a frequent and very dangerous incompetence of architects and other designers. The second topic is the growing climate crisis, which also requires special knowledge from architects. In response to the fire at the Grenfell Tower, the government drafted a Building Safety Bill, which includes measures to control the competence of architects. This has also been the impetus for the RIBA strategy.
The Way Forward invites HEIs (part 1 and 2 programs) to focus on engineering and technology, end-user protection, social architecture goals, climate literacy, research and business skills. Approximately the same topics will be on exams for practitioners, and “Safety of Life and Health” will become the subject of such a mandatory test already in 2022. The institute promises to provide its members with free online seminars as part of continuing education, and the exams will also be free (for reference: full RIBA membership starts from £ 200).
RIBA's strategy has met with widespread criticism. Architects in the comments on the websites of leading specialized weeklies, Building Design and Architects ’Journal, note that the institute has taken on a different task. He must protect and represent architects, not control them - for which he has no tools. Even membership in it is purely voluntary, about 60% of RIBA are licensed architects in the UK, moreover, some bureaus do well without individual or corporate membership, for example, Thomas Heatherwick's studio. The oversight and punishment of architects is handled by a licensing organization, ARB (Architects Registration Board, created by Parliament in 1997).
ARB, by the way, also announced reforms and is not in the best condition: in the summer, the executive director and chairman left it without explanation. Now the council has announced that it will conduct a survey of all licensed architects (there are 42,500 of them) on the registration criteria (without it, one cannot be called an architect). The last time such a survey was conducted ten years ago, which is much better than the situation with RIBA, which has not been involved in modernization since 1958, when architects were required to have a diploma of specialized higher education.
It is to ARB, not RIBA, that the above-mentioned Building Safety Bill entrusts the conduct of an initial examination and regular verification of the knowledge of architects. In general, the Architects' Registration Council makes it necessary to reckon with itself. Fines and the stripping of architects' registration - temporary or permanent - regularly appear in the professional media. The reason is a variety of misconduct, up to a xenophobic publication on Facebook, although this, it would seem, is the jurisdiction of the police and the court (the ARB recently deprived of the registration of the traditional architect Peter Kellow on this basis as having compromised the profession), but more often it is a deception of the customer, poor quality the project or illegal use of the "title" of the architect (for the latter there is a significant fine). It is also easy to lose registration without paying the annual fee on time (the fee for 2020 was £ 111 for existing registration).
Critics of the new RIBA strategy also point out that not only 40% of licensed architects (who are not members of the institute) will not obey it, but also all kinds of planners and designers who are not under the authority of RIBA (and ARB!). That is, in reality, it is necessary to protect the function, and not the "name" of the profession.
But the main thing that these two institutions completely overlook, which is relevant not only for the UK, but also for Russia, Singapore, Peru or South Africa, is that the main blame for the fire-hazardous cladding or unstable structure in most cases lies with overly economical customers. and unscrupulous contractors, and not on the authors of the project, even if the technical knowledge of the graduates of architectural universities in recent decades has really become less.
