As usual – the prize is now in its sixth year – the main features are winners of the hand-drawn, digital and hybrid categories, plus shortlisted entries, all from across the world. But in addition, there is a virtual gallery exhibit showing best entries from the last five years, created by Make architects. Make’s founder, Ken Shuttleworth, is passionate about the art of drawing, and it was his inspiration that created these awards. There is a tour round the ‘gallery’ you can access via the museum’s website, which also features images and descriptions of the winning entries (https://www.soane.org/exhibitions/architecture-drawing-prize)

Standards were particularly high this year in all categories; by coincidence the three winners are large scale, which plays to the Soane’s exhibition spaces. All have been beautifully placed and displayed by curator Erin McKellar.

An online seminar featuring the winners talking about their work with some of this year’s judges can be found here.

Regulator flexes excessive muscles

The Architects’ Registration Board and its predecessor regulator body have never been backward in coming forward. Back in the 1980s architects were told they could not advertise their services and anybody who did so would be struck off. This impertinent extension of their authority was challenged legally, shown to be ultra vires, and abandoned.

In recent years, the ARB has ben proved on occasion to conduct disciplinary hearings which resemble kangaroo courts. While masquerading as important defenders of public interest, it keeps jolly quiet about the fact that complainants can obtain no financial redress whatsoever from or via the Board, even if it has determined that an architect has behaved incompetently or dishonestly. Clients need to go to court.

There is zero sense of irony on the part of a regulator, obsessed with minutiae perfectly capable of being handled by the courts, operating in a construction environment where complaints about incompetent work almost invariably concern the behaviour of builders. There is, of course, no regulator for them – nor do they have to carry indemnity insurance.

The abusive relationship between ARB and the architectural profession is akin to a bully husband who invents rules of behaviour, controls the purse strings, and insists that a proportion of the wife’s income, determined by the husband is handed over or else.

At one time architects elected their own representatives onto the regulator’s board. That constitution has long been abandoned, leaving architects in the unhappy position of pre-independence Americans who produced that magnificent slogan: ‘No taxation without representation’. These days the board is appointed after a secretive process which few understand.

Not surprisingly, and like all self-important, power-hungry bureaucracies, ARB has increased the compulsory levy it imposes on anyone wishing to call themself an architect, without any apparent control on what they can charge. The amount now is so large that it forces young/poor architects to think twice about whether they can afford to pay a mandatory tithe to the regulator as well as paying fees to that voluntary learned professional champion, the RIBA, which has promoted standards of competence and behaviour since 1834.

I have long believed that, sub-consciously, ARB has seen the RIBA as a rival to be supplanted. Recent events show that the regulator is now flexing its muscles in what starts to look like a fight to the death – over architectural education.

School validation has for some decades been jointly undertaken by ARB and the RIBA, not least because the RIBA invented formal architectural education in the UK, and its Parts I, II and III system is well established and understood. ARB has now decided to consult over changes which will remove the idea of Part I from the requirement to become an architect, and which will change the requirements for qualification previously agreed with the RIBA, which is now merely a consultee in this process.

The strangulated English used by the ARB in its announcements of all this includes some nonsense about creating an ‘outcome-based’ system, which suggests that the denizens of the Board’s Hallam Street headquarters (just round the corner from the RIBA) are suffering from Psychic News Syndrome: that is to say they think they can predict the future on the basis of their own activities.

In fact, as the RIBA has politely pointed out, the ARB proposals do not fundamentally change very much. Under Simon Allford’s presidency, and as implemented by his own practice AHMM, there are already multiple routes to qualification which could be extended in more radical ways than are currently proposed.

The interesting thing, for a regulator which does not comprise practising architects or architectural academics, is exactly how they have arrived at their proposed programmes. Who knows? It scarcely worries them as they dream about how much they can increase that annual levy on every architect. They don’t care about the huge increases in indemnity premiums, even though the ‘outcomes’ are likely to be a serious diminution of potential work and profitability, the latter a necessity for proper employment practices and client service.

It is a fading dream, but I still hope to see the day when the parasite ARB, which is eating away at the profession from the inside, is abolished.