Becoming a fully qualified architect takes time. It’s a protected job title, like being a doctor or lawyer, and the training required is suitably onerous. There are a number of stages from undergraduate to full qualification that take place over at least 7 years:
- Undergraduate Degree (minimum 3 years)
First, aspiring architects must complete a RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) validated undergraduate course.
- Relevant Practical Experience (minimum 1 year)
Following completion of their undergraduate degree, they must complete a year of experience in industry, monitored by both their employer and previous university.
- Postgraduate Degree (minimum 2 years full-time)
Next, there are another 2 years of full-time university study, for either an MArch, a Diploma or a BArch.
- Relevant Practical Experience (minimum 1 year)
Nearly there now, but there’s still another year of practical experience under the supervision of a fully qualified architect to get through. Once this has been completed, it’s just a 3 day Part 3 qualification exam and then you can call yourself an architect.
Architects are Important
The 7 years of training is fully justified when you consider the wide-ranging and demanding responsibilities of being an architect. Out of all professions in the construction industry, it would be hard to argue with someone who said that architects have the most influence on the built environment. This is backed up by the names that spring to mind when thinking about building design; from Christopher Wren to Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Perhaps they’re no less important in reality, but the layman would be much harder pressed to name an influential structural engineer or quantity surveyor.
It could also be argued that architects working on smaller scale projects, which presumably makes up the majority, have an even harder job than their high-flying counterparts. Whereas those working on multi-million pound schemes will be backed up by large teams of specialists, from fire consultants to project managers, small clients often rely on their architect to do the whole lot. Detailed building services design and structural engineering will almost always be covered by others, but full project management, planning applications and everything in between often falls to the architect. This means they have to be as expert in cladding design as they are familiar with the project timetable, and you can start to see why the years of training are necessary.
Sustainability is Important Too
And yet…we’re repeatedly told that possibly the biggest challenge facing the current and next generation of architects is tackling climate change through zero carbon buildings. You would hope that this goal would take up a significant proportion of an architect’s 7 years of training, but based on anecdotal experience this doesn’t seem to be the case. There are optional, and presumably some compulsory, modules of study focusing on sustainability and the basic principles of energy efficient design, but the system still appears to churn out a large number of architects who don’t know their U-value from their U-bend*.
Specialist sustainability consultants can help fill this skills gap and are consequently becoming increasingly sought after. Afterall, we probably wouldn’t expect the person who works on the appearance of a new car to design the engine as well. However, when it comes to buildings a sustainability engineer can only work with what they’re given. Engineers are often presented with well-developed designs to model and comment on; a huge amount of value can still be added, but in some cases the damage has already been done by the architect. Poor form factors, insufficient wall thicknesses and too much glazing can all be changed in theory, but not if they’ve already been approved by clients or planners.
What are the Solutions?
One way to avoid this problem is to involve sustainability and building services engineers at the same time as the architect begins work, thus allowing the whole team to shape concept designs before the introduction of various constraints or expectations. This occasionally happens, but it’s rare, perhaps as architects wish to protect their ownership of design.
The other solution is to improve architect education, allowing them to make sensible and well-informed decisions on sustainability before the specialists get involved. There would be no need to have a deep understanding of the inner workings of an air source heat pump, but knowledge of the most important principles of energy efficient design could factor more heavily in architectural training.
Zero-carbon design needs to shape the built-environment over the next thirty years, so it’s crucial that the architectural education curriculum reflects this. Two or three years of compulsory full-time study out of the seven years of training would be justifiable, but even a Passivhaus Designer course only takes three weeks.
*Some architects are extremely knowledgeable on matters of sustainability, producing brilliant, ground-breaking work. However, they appear to be in a self-taught minority.