Lecture date: 2012-02-13
Architecture and Education Series organised by Mark Cousins
Final lecture in the series.
If architectural education is the answer, what was the question? This talk will review how architects and architecture operate in environments that are simultaneously global/general and local/specific, and where professional silos appear to be shrinking, expanding, stiffening and collapsing simultaneously.
Paul Finch is deputy chairman of the UK Design Council and chairman of Design Council CABE. He is Director of the World Architecture Festival; Inside: World Festival of Interiors annual events; and editorial director of Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. He was chair of the Olympic Design Review (2006–10). Among many honours he was awarded an OBE for services to architecture in 2002.
Lecture Transcription:
[Video is momentarily cut at some points]
Brett Steele introduces Paul Finch.
PAUL FINCH: I’m going to do a quick A to Z of certain architecture education issues, and then we’ll look at some slides dealing with London’s past and present, mainly AA alumnus or former AA teachers.
Let me start by answering this question: is architecture education is the answer, what was the question? let me give a journalist proposition: the question is how do we set about creating better futures, which we know will be different to the present, when all we have to go on is the past? My “A” is for the “architect” which is very much about the past, because the condition of architecture today is entirely dependent on the history of what happened at the end of 18th century. What happened in Britain is pretty much a simulacrum of what happened elsewhere, because it happened here first. At that time, organizations where all looking for what today we’d call single point responsibility, they didn’t trust the “Wren” figure, who is the genius designer who miraculously, not only can he understand geometry and mathematics and philosophy and physics, but also knew all about the organization of people hammering nails into wood and so on. At the end of the 18th century you get a rise of the main contractor, the family builder, usually specialist in joinery or some other subcontract activity, who suddenly claims they would organise the site and the construction and they know more about that than the designer. To cut the long story short, the emergence of architecture as a profession, and a discrete activity, and something reinforced by caste, class and education, is an economic response to the challenge of contractors to the hegemony of the master builder, in reality a master architect. By the 1830s, when the profession in this country institutionalized itself, and forms in 1834 what becomes eventually the RIBA. By that stage you see the emergence of these family contractors, as shown in the records of the ministry of defense, specially around gentleman’s clubs around Pall Mall and in St. James’. We have to understand that economic competition had a very profound part in the emergence of the architecture profession, because architects in response to the changing economic conditions had to establish their own unique role first, because the client shouldn’t trust tradesmen, and then because they, the new professions where subjects of economic competition. So the architects claim, reinforced by the professional codes, that the architect should never compete in price: you pay the same fee whoever you get. A system, incidentally, which lasted for about 160 years. However, trade, would always be appointed as the result of the most ruthless economic condition, encouraged and controlled by the architect. Not only did the architect encouraged that economic competition, but the architect was judge and jury in all the buildings throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, because they had quasi legal controls over the contract. So, if there was a dispute, it was the architect who resolved the dispute, not a judge, nor an arbitrator. The architects what is such a position, that if the client was god, the architect was the archangel Gabriel, while everyone else in the world were lower angels. This then becomes reinforced because of the inevitable education consequences of professionalization, which restricts the entry into the profession by examination. That’s a different story, which I don’t want to go into, because, in theory, the AA shouldn’t be started by students, it should have been started by their bosses.
However, by the end of the 19th century what we have is a situation where, to become an architect you have to pass examinations, often, for middle class families who are essentially bossing about working class tradesman on building sites. This is a caricature, but it’s not so far from the truth, the position that we ha
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