In Conversation With: Future Architects Front
- Charlotte Gregory
- Apr 21, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 9
In June of 2021 I was very fortunate to have a meeting with Charlie Edmonds, founder of FAF (Future Architects Front) . We covered a number of key points in dissecting the structural problems within the Architectural profession and where we can go from here.
KEY POINTS:
Profession Gatekeeping - a lack of diversity & intersectionality, especially at the top
The effect of a "Race To The Bottom" mentality on professionals & trainees
Gaps between education & practice and their effects on upcoming architectural trainees and workers
Lack of Union representation & awareness about Unions
RIBA’s opacity & passivity, and how this holds the profession back from improving & uniting
On Intersectionality & Gatekeeping:
There are many barriers in the Architectural profession to having a more diverse workforce all the way through. These issues start all the way at the beginning, with the first great hurdle beings even getting onto an Architecture degree in the first place. Factors such as course length, course and material expenses, and disproportionate private school education in the industry giving those with connections a "leg up" makes breaking into even studying Architecture a challenge for women, ethnic minorities, and students from lower-income backgrounds.
These structural gatekeeping mechanisms mean that more from these demographics drop out of the profession between starting & qualifying, compared to their more privileged counterparts.
Being able to visualise oneself with role models is a key motivation for many people of all professions to get where they are, and a lot of professions are now actively seeking more diverse role models to promote this. Compare this with the active preservation of the Status Quo by those at the top - at best, professionals who are complicit in this preservation, at worst, engaging in direct and discriminatory gatekeeping.
Architecture and the "Race to the Bottom"
Generally, there are swathes of the industry that are dependent on as-yet-unqualified assistants and working overtime, so much so that small and medium practices may have structures that would potentially collapse without the use of overtime as they are more susceptible to undercutting from larger practices with more demand and larger-scale projects giving them more consistent work.
We asked: Is overtime legitimately the only survival method?
The above is a common excuse from many directors, as a way to keep fees low. An investigation by the Architects Journal in March 2021 (Jessel, 2021) discovered:
48% of Part 1 architectural assistants working at RIBA-chartered practices are paid less than the Real Living Wage
15% of Part 2 architectural assistants working at RIBA-chartered practices are paid less than the Real Living Wage
88% of full-time Part 1 and Part 2 architectural assistants at RIBA-chartered practices said they are never paid overtime
1 in 5 work over 10hrs overtime per week - equalling hundreds of millions of pounds in unpaid labour
Additionally, there is the Working Time Directive: most practices get workers to sign out of WTD in their contract, creating a legal loophole to allow for extra unpaid overtime.
FAF had a talk with Sarah Wigglesworth as part of the 2021 London Festival of Architecture (02 June 2021). In this discussion, Wigglesworth said she saw the same systemic issues when she qualified. The profession has been stagnant since we lost the free market payscale during Thatcher years, something I intend to do further research on.
We cannot separate the Architectural profession from its wider economic context. Councils don’t tend to employ architects any more - in years gone by most councils had in-house architects. Nowadays, this gets filled in by developers & planning departments now, with architect positions outsourced to consulting roles. The modern process builds dependence on private sector work, with most architectural projects focused on the private sector now, practices most often associate with the public sector through design competitions, which can be both expensive and high-risk for practices to undertake.
Education Versus Practice: Bridging the Gap
In my own experience and many of my cohort, there are many miscommunications between education & practice - gaping holes in knowledge between the two, with no concentrated effort to reconcile on either side of the gap.
There is also a work imbalance between directors & "replaceable" employees, especially Part 1 and Part 2 Architectural Assistants. Part 3 AAs are often considered too much cost for practices to benefit from, I have heard stories of Part 2’s being kept on longer and not being able to progress to Part 3 because of added cost of funding their accreditation by the practice, as well as first-hand accounts of practices offering to pay for their employees further education and accreditation, with the proviso of a minimum amount of time, for example 5 years after accreditation, spent working for the practice to recuperate costs.
The qualification process is also inconsistent, with a huge jump between what students are expected to acheive in their education and what the same students as professionals are expected to provide in practice that freshly graduated students are ill-equipped for. Teaching across courses is not standardised, with some universities focusing on the technical aspect while others focus on the creative and artistic side of architecture. Both of these aspects have merit, but without an equal focus on real-world processes and implications, students graduate without concrete understanding of what exactly to expect from their roles as Architectural Assistants and how to progress from there.
Union Awareness and Representation
The architectural profession only has 1 union in the UK. UVW-SAW was only founded in 2019, and has a very small membership so far, although this is steadily growing.
SAW explicitly and deliberately refers to members of the architectural profession as Architectural Workers, which covers more than just the accredited architects and encompasses multiple facets of the industry.
This is a marked difference to how the majority of the profession sees itself:
architects see themselves as professionals but not workers, creating a conflict between them and the concept of labour itself. SAW's use of "architectural worker" creates a more encompassing field of work without excluding non-accredited people working in the architectural profession.
This difference is likely one of the barriers to architectural unification, as the title of Architect is protected, whereas the actual Function is not. On the whole, the profession worries about non-Architects filling their niche with greater autonomy - such as developers and planners, which in regards to public sector work one can argue they already have.
At the time of the interview, there was no visible interest from RIBA on protecting the function of Architect, which brought us onto our next point.
RIBA: Opacity, Passivity, and Bureaucracy
According to the FAF in June 2021, RIBA has fallen into redundancy. In the modern world, it shows no clear purpose, and is slow to respond to change & slow to change in turn. To clarify this point, most people in RIBA aren’t malicious, the system is just incompetent for its requirements and changing this system is glacial at best. The RIBA's influence and purpose should be to lobby the government on behalf of the profession. FAF considers it more of a Guild for Directors…
RIBA can have a use but needs aggressive external pressure at the moment for that to happen. One example of this external pressure actually coming to fruition is the 2022 election drive of the current RIBA President, Muyiwa Oki, who, supported by grassroots campaigning from FAF and UVW-SAW, became the first Black president of the RIBA, and the youngest to hold the position. There was an overwhelming turnout of young voters who do not normally participate in the election thanks to these campaigns, and Oki's election shows a clear move towards focusing on the points outlined above.
My thanks to Charlie Edmonds of the FAF for his time back in 2021, and for his continued commitment to ensuring the architectural workers of the future have fairer conditions and a more inclusive workforce. FAF can be found at https://fafront.co/ on Instagram at @fa.front and on YouTube.
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