Preface
To the social historian the record of the professions in the twentieth century has been one of continuous and indeed accelerating success. My own experience as president of the Royal Institute of British Architects for two years in the mid-1990s felt very different. From this particular perspective, whatever collective successes the architectural profession may or may not have achieved over the last few decades seemed totally unimportant to individual members. Why was this? Could it be because, as so many architects made a point of telling me, they felt bitter personal disappointment that the expectations stimulated by a long and arduous training had never been fulfilled? How can this contradiction be explained? Is the sense of individual failure and alleged collective success peculiar to architects? Are the criteria for individual and professional success inherently different? Is there, indeed, any relation between the two?
The difficulties so many individual architects face have made them demand that their professional institute should be doing much more for them—generating new work, advertising architectural services to an ever-widening public, making a compact with the government, neutralizing or, even better, annihilating the competition. Underlying this question are deeper and more general ones: what should a professional body be trying to do for its members? What is a profession actually for?
As we approach what promises to be a golden age of professionalism—an information-rich period in which access to specialized knowledge will be valued more highly than ever before— answers to these questions are critically important, and not just for architects. The papers in this collection were written hurriedly over three decades and to mark many occasions. Despite this scattered provenance, the contribution they make to this debate is oddly consistent. This is the argument, repeated and developed in many ways, that it is not so much the possession of knowledge that justifies the existence of the professions but rather the degree of success with which professionals have found better ways to develop their own particular kinds of knowledge. Professionalism flourishes to the extent that professionals work openly together in the context of action to augment and develop the bodies of knowledge peculiar to their own disciplines. Conversely, if professionals squirrel knowledge away for themselves or fail to share what they know, in order to gain some temporary and illusory advantage for themselves as individuals or as groups, then professionalism decays. Free access to knowledge, transparency in its application, sharing, developing and handing on knowledge in an open-ended way—these are the essential means of making professionalism work. It is these qualities, only fully comprehensible in the course of continuously having to exercise fine judgement in generally quite stressful circumstances, that keep professionals straight, intellectually as well as ethically. And for the architect—as I combatively argued in the pages of Building Design in 1992—that knowledge is based on design and unites, in the context of action “past and future, science and art, demand and supply, decision making and reflection. Consequently the husbanding of that body of knowledge, its continual improvement, and its passing on through education to future generations are the essential functions of the architectural profession— our raison d’etre, our responsibility, our collective destiny.”
The classical hallmarks of professionalism—restricted entry, standardized and visible qualifications, fixed fees, the publishing and policing of codes of conduct —are more concerned with keeping things as they are than with developing an intellectual programme. It is, unfortunately, still true that many, if not most, professionals continue to define professionalism defensively, in terms of “keeping standards up”, usually through procedures that tend to promote exclusivity and encourage boundary maintenance. The consumers of professional services tend to see things in a reciprocal but very different way— and, certainly, without the same warm self-regard. Clients stand outside the professional barricades looking in. How they interpret professional behaviour and professional institutions is less as a struggle against the forces of evil than a conspiracy against the public interest.
BACKWARD GLANCE
The papers collected in the three parts of this book are a record of the growth of an idea about the nature of professionalism and also a record of major shifts in British society that fundamentally changed the position of the professions within that society. The realization of the development of knowledge as both the basis and guarantee of professionalism came to me gradually—which justifies, I hope, the perhaps over-emphasis on my own professional field in this selection of essays, and legitimizes the reprinting in part of three pieces previously collected in a 1992 work of mine, The Changing Workplace, looking at the impact of ideas on the design of the workplace. The gradual unfolding of this idea of professionalism is reflected both in the tripartite structure of this book and in the selection of entries—which, with a single exception, record my witness to events chronologically and contemporaneously: this is what I felt and saw at the time.
The first set of papers describe the development in the 1960s and 1970s of my own professional knowledge base: learning how to use office design for the benefit of international corporations and their employees. What is striking, in retrospect, is how quick those commercial corporations were to exploit for their own purposes research and programming methods, many which had been originally developed in the planned economy of the British Welfare State, where user research, brief writing, planning and design were, in theory at least, highly integrated for the benefit of all. This was the period in which I and my colleagues at DEGW were learning not only how to conduct design-based research in the context of practice but also, more importantly, discovering that research-based design was certain to become increasingly important to knowledge-based enterprises. The essays reflect a residual belief in the importance of design to a society based on centralized planning. For architects, this belief was not only ideological but financial, since at the beginning of the 1970s over half of the profession was employed directly or indirectly by government. Although at that time I was largely working for international corporate organizations, there is little of what I wrote that would not have been equally applicable had I been working for the state. Indeed, the underlying assumptions in DEGW’s work were formed in that era of centralist planning: all architectural problems can be solved by better user research and better programming.
The essays in Part Two reflect the violent swing in the 1980s towards a totally different basis for government policy—that planning was unnecessary because market forces could always be relied upon, if not to pick up the pieces, at least to make sure that the fittest survived. While this new policy was fundamentally against the interests of all professions—no group should have a special place in society— architects were particularly vulnerable. Unlike doctors, they had not negotiated in the 1940s a politically unbreakable contract with the government. Unlike lawyers, they were not smart enough to make vast amounts of money both from victims and survivors of the new policy. Unlike accountants, they were not able to take advantage of the globalization of business. Instead, architects were numbered among the chief victims and did not have the collective wit to understand that many things they had idealistically taken for granted as the basis of their professional self-esteem were being washed away. The most successful architects in this period—and there was plenty of talent— began to rely increasingly on their own individual design skill rather than on collective action as members of a united profession. A handful of supremely talented, and spectacularly unclubbable, individuals became part of the growing star system. Others in the commercial sector were too busy to look over their shoulder until the mid-1980s property boom began to collapse in 1989, revealing the full weakness of their individual positions. Many, including the unhappy people I referred to earlier, simply could not understand why no one seemed willing to use their hard-won skills any more.
This group of papers shows a growing confidence in making generalizations on the practice of architecture based on the experience gained as DEGW developed, in the Thatcherite 1980s, into a large, specialized firm with a network of European offices. By this stage, DEGW’s very particular and original attitude to the relationship between consulting and design had matured. We had wide experience of the changing nature of architectural practice in several countries. It did not seem likely to us that sophisticated clients would tolerate for much longer the individualistic, craft-based and unreflective kind of service that most of our fellow professionals at that time seemed increasingly content to deliver. Something altogether more imaginative, responsive and predictive was required.
The papers from the 1980s record what sometimes seemed at the time to be a deeply unfashionable position. It was obvious that the old regime of centralized planning would never return. The over-simplifications, even scientism, that had propped up the modern movement in architecture had been exposed. Nevertheless, it was clear to us in DEGW that architecture needed a more sophisticated intellectual basis, one that would not deny the importance of design invention—far from it—nor of cultural relativism but which would be robust enough to allow the majority of non-star architects to resist what was so clearly destroying their work: severe short-term pressure from under-informed clients to build ever more cheaply. Research about what design was for, and what value design could add, seemed to be the obvious answer. The course we in DEGW chose, as will be apparent from these papers, was to affirm the relation of design to user research, including user feedback, so that the benefits of design invention could be demonstrated to clients and users, in the hope of eventually allowing architects to regain the influence so many of them had lost on the processes of procuring and constructing buildings.
The final papers—Part Three, written in the 1990s—are very much the product of my presidential period at the RIBA. To come to terms with a scale of problem that I had not been able to comprehend before, I was driven to think not just about how architectural services could be reconstituted to meet the needs of the changing clients whom I had learned to understand but to explain in the most practical and fundamental terms how the whole range of professional architectural services could be justified throughout the whole of the society that had been irreversibly, if not totally, shaped by Margaret Thatcher’s government. The task faced was no less than to help practising architects discover, define and overcome the limits of the efficacy of the market economy.
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