While the architecture profession has been in âcrisisâ since its very beginnings it seems clear that a new crossroads has been reached. A fundamental problem for architects is that what Kaye describes as the âbogey of dispensabilityâ (Kaye, 1960, p. 1968), the feeling that they arenât really necessary and that what they do do is of dubious worth.
It is perhaps this insecurity which causes architects to assert rather than evidence value, often in a manner which alienates others (Imrie and Street, 2011), contributing to the arrogant reputation of the profession. This chapter focuses on the professional identity of architects in Britain today â âthe relatively stable and enduring constellation of attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences in terms of which people define themselves in a professional roleâ (Ibarra, 1999, p. 764).
Media representations of architects veer from adulation to contempt, the latter exemplified by this piece by Michele Hanson in The Guardian in support of the Japanese decision to shelve their planned Olympic stadium to be designed by Zaha Hadid Architects.
âSimple powerful messages about architecture are the ones that get rememberedâ (Brittain-Catlin, 2014, p. 20), so how have architects come to be so reviled?
1.1 The image of the profession
Architect-bashing is a national sport. They are an easy target as they have neither powerful patronage nor public sympathy and are, in general, poor at fighting back. It is for this reason that Prince Charles has been able to be a long-term and vociferous critic of the mainstream profession (Prince of Wales, 1989) with almost complete impunity. Architects are very often used as the butt of jokes. Recently I saw the product designer Sebastian Conran speaking jovially about what he called the âthree Fs of architectureâ â âfinish, photograph and f. offâ, a response that elicited a hearty belly laugh from the large London audience, including some significant policy figures, but left us architects feeling distinctly uncomfortable (Conran, 2014).
In terms of career happiness a 2014 government poll had âarchitectsâ ranked at 97th (Easton, 2014). Satisfaction with the choice of architecture as a career is deteriorating (ACE, 2012), as is student satisfaction with architectural education (RIBA, 2015a). Architects in the UK regularly work unpaid overtime (RIBA, 2015b) and their average income is little more than that of a train driver. The median gross hourly pay for architects in the UK has remained roughly static at around ÂŁ17 from 2008 to 2016 (GLA Economics, 2017, p. 27). It is bizarre, given its poor prospects, that architecture remains an attractive choice of career for so many young people and their parents, despite the vast cost of five full-time years of study in a UK university. âThrough books, film, the Internet, and finally sheer willpower, the cultural idea and self-conception of the architect has enjoyed wild success, while architecture itself has failed both as a business model and as a tool for beneficial social changeâ (Ratti and Claudel, 2015, p. 22).
In 1934 Gotch made the wry observation that a âârich architectâ would strike most of us as a contradiction in termsâ (Gotch, 1934, p. 1), yet rich-looking (male) architects abound in television and films. Architecture has traditionally been âa gentlemanâs professionâ (Saint, 1983, p. 160), but âonly justâ (Summerson, 1973, p. 20). Architects have a status classification of 1.2 in the UK census, along with surveyors, airline pilots and doctors (AJ, 2001). At the same time architecture is well known to be the âsexiestâ profession for men; sexy here seemingly relating to the enduring âromantic myth of the asocial, creative architectâ (Jones, 2009, p. 2524), the dominating type characterized by Howard Roarke in Ayn Randâs famous novel and film The Fountainhead (1949) or the sensitive, but strong, architect using his drawing board to new ends in the film Indecent Proposal (1993) (ArchDaily, 2009).
Clothes play an important role in the construction of identity and the development of agency. For Georg Simmel social mobility takes place through adopting and impersonating the clothes of the elite (Simmel, 1957). A case in point might be the nineteenth-century fashion for bow ties among architects, worn to show they were artists and should not therefore be mistaken for the serving class (Shields, 1995) or indeed professionals. H.S. Goodhart-Rendel wrote in The Professions that: âIn those happy days artists behaved and dressed as a class apart, and professional men slept in their top hatsâ (1933). Nowadays fashion is more about the creation of identity than social mobility (Crane, 2001). Cordular Rauâs book Why Do Architects Wear Black? (2001) explores the professionâs obsession with this most negative of colours. The high priests and priestesses of architecture wear black, or its obverse extreme colour â Richard Rogers is famed for his red suits; ex-Mayor of Bristol and ex-President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) George Ferguson is famed for his red trousers and so on. Is the shunning of the traditional grey business suit the twenty-first-century equivalent of the bow tie?
Architects are also known for being unintelligible. Porterâs dictionary style book Archispeak: An Illustrated Guide to Architectural Terms (Porter, 2004) condones the use of âarchispeakâ for âhelping students understand the nuances of this specialised languageâ and presumably learning to speak it themselves (Porter, 2004, preface). Craig Dykers of the Norwegian practice SnĂžhetta refers to the use of âtacitermsâ in architecture âuncommunicative but eager to be specific. It is easy to lop off loose bits of a concept to form a categorical some-such that sounds good to the ear while the meaning is lostâ (Dykers, 2015). Such loose use of language may beguile students but generally fails to impress those beyond the profession. While archispeak might be important for the construction of group identity, it is also exclusionary (Richards, 2006).
Acceptance by peers seems to be more important to architects than public approval (Chaplin and Holding, 1998). It is possible that architects suffer from âgroupthinkâ, which happens when âmembersâ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of actionâ. The result is a âdeterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement that results from in-group pressuresâ (Janis, 1972, p. 9). Attoe argued that the multiple conflicting âinner voicesâ working inside an architect can contribute to a sort of creative paralysis. âKnowing that I shall fail, that decisions are ultimately unjustifiable, I avoid decisionsâ (Attoe, 1978, p. 132). It may be that architects end up hiding their âtrue faceâ (Pels, 2000, p. 137) as they donât actually know what it is. The Farrell report talks about âmaking the public better informedâ (Farrell, 2014, p. 87), but is it actually architects who need to be better informed?
In 2012 94% of architects were white (Fulcher, 2012). The number of women registered with the ARB (the Architects Registration Board) has only just passed the 25% mark (Marrs, 2017), despite huge growth in the number of female students. The speed with which women have been accepted into the profession does not compare favourably with that of medicine and law (de Graft-Johnson et al., 2007, p. 162). Interestingly there are more women architects working in London than elsewhere (GLA Economics, 2017, p. 23). Those women who have managed to make it into the profession are generally in low-status roles. The gender pay gap across the UK was 9.9% in 2016 (GLA Economics, 2017, p. 28) and a shocking 40% across Europe in 2014 (ACE, 2014), a recent Architectsâ Journal survey suggesting a pay differential of some ÂŁ50,000 at the top of the profession (Mark, 2017). Regardless of practice size, the percentage of women falls steadily by seniority, averaging 41% of architectural assistants but only 13% of Partners or Directors (RIBA, 2014, p. 1). Sociologists Fowler and Wilson have observed that there âare few grounds for [the] belief that women are on the verge of âmaking itâ in architectureâ any time soon (Fowler and Wilson, 2004, p. 116). Many of the professions are experiencing a reduction of status in relation to their feminization (Bolton and Muzio, 2008), yet architecture seems to be experiencing a reduction in status even without being feminized. A lack of diversity in the profession continues to be a serious problem for its reception in the outside world (CABE, 2005; de Graft-Johnson et al., 2007, p. 179) and is a subject that will bubble to the surface repeatedly in this text. It is, however, important not to assume that things are the same across the globe, particularly on site.
1.2 Who needs an architect?
The architecture profession has developed in parallel with a growing interest in DIY and self-build. Indeed the DIY market in Britain expanded by 77% over the period 1990 to 2000 (Verdictonline, 2007), rendering architects seemingly more dispensable. The magazine Popular Handicrafts began to include articles on DIY in 1951, followed by the introduction of two new publications, The Handyman and Do-It-Yourself, in 1957 (Design Council, 1977; Powell, 1996). As people have grown more time-poor, DIY has started to decline (Powell, 2009), offering an opportunity for architects to step in to assist. However, the wide variety of material on the web, on the shelves of the newsagent WHSmith and in our libraries pertaining to the issue of home extensions does little to further the cause of the RIBA professional. Design is oddly absent from books such as the Loft Conversion Projects Guide (Construction Projects Association, 2010), suggesting that it is a non-issue. Paul Hymers, in his best-selling book Home Conversion, describes âa good designerâ solely as âone who possesses the necessary skills of draughtsmanship and is familiar not only with the details of construction, but also with the problems and regulations relating to the workâ (Hymers, 2003, p. 16). Time and time again the architect is depicted as a dispensable figure. The perception from the homeowners that I talked w...