The 9th Edge Debate: 16th March 2000

Designing Tomorrow's Designers

Leonie Milliner, Director of Education, RIBA

The proposition for the debate 'designing tomorrow's designers,’ provokes three immediate responses. Firstly, how can we quantify the process of design? Secondly, how can we predict what tomorrow’ design needs will be? And thirdly, how can we guarantee that we can successfully produce designers capable of responding to those needs? The answer is that we cannot.

Professional institutions are perceived as gatekeepers to an area of professional activity over which that profession has a monopoly. (Although most professional bodies, including architecture, will assert that their members do not have the advantage of a truly monopolistic position within the construction industry.) Access to, and manoeuvre within that monopoly is maintained by the professional bodies through a series of codified cultural and social practices, some of which are explicit, some of which are unseen. These codes formalise a process of exclusion; either you are in the club, or you are not. My proposition, in a response to the questions posed above, is that to envision a process of designing tomorrow's designers, one has to understand this process of exclusion and the leverage that professional bodies maintain over their entry qualifications and field of operation.

Although architects are fortunate to have protection of title, they do not have state protection of function or protected fee scales. However, the architectural profession does have two characteristics that do conform to a traditional definition a professional body; the authority to proscribe the formal qualifications required to enter the profession and a set of self-regulating codes to safeguard professional conduct. The regulations and codes that operate in architectural education determine the profile and membership of the profession, legitimate it's activities and regulate it's practices and offers the profession a powerful lever over education and the future of the profession. To address the statement posed above requires professional bodies to examine both the focus and direction of these codified desires and the mechanism for their implementation within the profession.

Some time ago I came across the work of the 60s anthropologist Mary Douglas, and an interesting quote that I think has a particular resonance for the work of professional bodies.

Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.’

What fascinates me in my work at the RIBA is how a membership body, with responsibility for the production and reproduction of the architect, can represent positions that are beyond a normative view of either architectural education or practice. In other words, how we can understand and manipulate the codes that define our professional boundaries to embrace the 'dirt' of the excluded, those ideas, people, styles and practices that may be considered 'dangerous' to the mainstream. As the advertising industry recognises, to remain at the forefront of a design led industry; the mainstream must continually valorise practices on the margin. For a 'dangerous' practice to be assimilated into the architectural profession, it must navigate a complex system of committees and sub committees, in which the regulations governing professional life are controlled and contested, and an oblique set of unclassifiable codes of taste and cultivation in which one is identified by the language one uses and clothes one wears, before it can be admitted.

"Intelligence, in any absolute sense, is not a major factor in the production of distinguished architecture. Arrogance, coupled with a sense of competition and a pleasure in the fashionable and exotic, are much more important. Alan Balfour"

By proscribing long formal university training with tightly controlled professional entry qualifications, the architectural profession seeks to influence not only what areas of knowledge a graduate is inculcated with, but also how that abstract knowledge is applied through experience.

Architectural education, the key transmitter of the 'culture' of architecture, not only imparts objectified rational knowledge in the form of facts, figures, theories and ideas, it also transmits less obvious social practices in the form of the confessional design tutorials, public critiques, and intense studio culture. Anecdotally, these informal practices exclude many that should be pioneering the new mainstream - women, ethnic minorities, those from low social economic backgrounds, as well as ideas and approaches to architecture and construction.

RIBAs statistics demonstrate this policy of exclusivity. Despite rising admissions and an increasing number of recognised first degree courses in the UK, the number of students passing RIBA Part III has steadily declined in the past fifteen years, to remain static at about 700 students a year. Of the 2125 students who entered RIBA Part I in 1990, 704 passed RIBA Part III in 1997, a notional drop out rate of 61%. The percentage of female students is only rising by 1 point each year, and recent finance surveys demonstrate that they originate from a comparably higher social economic class than their male peers do. The Institute could be accused of profligacy by other construction industry professions who are suffering from a devastating decline in applications. Architecture as a subject continues to capture the imagination and recruitment onto first-degree courses has, so far, been maintained. But as I shall examine in a moment, the profession cannot be complacent and must continue to invest heavily in the promotion of architecture as a career, as well provide meaningful career routes for those architecture students who do not wish to continue in the profession.

But there is another problem. The activities of the 4,700 'almost' architects who passed their RIBA Part II in the past decade but failed to progress to pass RIBA Part III are just as influential on the culture of the architecture as those who made it into the club. It would also seem that, for many students completing RIBA Part II, chartered status is perceived as either an irrelevant or impossible ambition. Many activities that constitute architectural expression - such as writing, researching, and teaching, acting as a client or exhibition curator - sit uncomfortably outside the architectural profession when they could so easily enrich the mainstream. This is compounded by the low numbers of women and ethnic minorities in education and as members of the RIBA. Whilst in comparable professions, such as law and medicine, women are making good progress in achieving the numerical critical mass needed to effect change, in the architectural profession the numbers of women filtering through to chartered status is astonishingly small - from 147 in 1989 to 176 in 1998.

The recruitment, retention and participation of ethnic minority students and those from low social- economic backgrounds in architectural education are unknown. As Wigglesworth noted in her paper, 'Practice - the significant other' (Wigglesworth, 1996), the absence of the excluded in the profession - as corporate members of the RIBA, as Council members, as President, on building sites and in drawing offices - has allowed the phallocentric nature of our profession to remain unchallenged for too long.

So many assumptions about the way architecture should be practised, in a conventional sense, are learnt in education: the long hours in the studio are replicated in the office; the importance of the lone designer, lauded in the classroom, is manifest in the profession; the lack of equality reinforces a common perception of the profession - one with a liberal and broad public image but with little space or time for women or those from the ethnic minorities, either physically or symbolically. If the profession and the construction industry are to change the culture of its workplace, that change must begin in the classroom.

Although recruitment into architectural courses fell by only 1% in 1998, the architectural profession cannot be complacent. Long working hours and poor pay simply do not equate with the £10,000 debt that most architecture students leave higher education with today. Perhaps the most persistent danger is the most obvious. The RIBA's student representative on RIBA Council, Nick Hayhurst, recently completed a survey of student finances, with shocking results. Not only did he find that 12% of respondents were paid below the minimum wage in their year out, but also that first year architecture students predicted their debt on completing their studies to be over £24,000. For an Institute that is investing heavily in trying to enough young people from ethnic minorities and deprived backgrounds to study architecture, this is a structural problem. Not only will students need to be persuaded that culturally and socially they can succeed as architects, but also that the economic rates of return are appropriate to the investment necessary to join the club. His quote epitomises this new age of reasonableness;

Let me just remind you, this isn't 1968, this is not about radical gestures that won't be implemented - this is about fair measures that must be implemented.