What is an architect?

“We need to commit to architecture!” cried Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) at the Venice biennale this year when he chaired a discussion with Reinier de Graaf of Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) about the latter’s latest book ‘Architect, verb - the new language of building’.

De Graaf’s book looks at a profession which he says “is progressively expected to comply to standards imposed by others, a besieged profession forced to adopt ever more extreme positions of virtue.” By which he means things like sustainability, wellbeing, liveability, placemaking, beauty and innovation, things that Patrik said he felt “snowed under by”. Not that the architect should ignore them “which architect in their right mind would not wish people to be happy, want to design unliveable buildings, or oppose a sense of wellbeing,” says Graaf. He suggests that by ridding the profession of “unsolicited baggage”, it might one day re-emerge as an independent and critical discipline.
Does the Building Safety Act rank as unsolicited baggage, I wonder. What Graaf makes of the role of principal designer to “plan, manage and monitor design work to ensure compliance with building regulations – and maintain a ‘golden thread’ of data on design decisions for fire and structural safety.”
On the other hand, Adrian Dobson, director of professional services at the RIBA, has written that this could be seen as an ‘opportunity’ for practices. So, if partners from two of the most successful architectural practices in the world see the increasing bureaucratisation of the profession as a constraint, and the RIBA sees it as an opportunity, where does the true profession lie?
To help me clarify the situation I organised a discussion at Temple Bar with past RIBA President Ben Derbyshire and Eleanor Jolliffe, author of ‘Architect – the evolving story of a profession’, on the topic of whether the architect should be viewed as a creative genius or as master builder.
Ben’s short answer was that they should be both. Is that really possible in today’s practice? Unless you’re able to walk away from a job, pragmatic demands can outweigh pure design. These include the ‘positions of virtue’ as well as increasing pressures for public consultation. The late Jan Kaplicky founder of Future Systems and Stilring Prize winner used to insist that public consultation was wrong and unnecessary. “If you’re about to have an operation on your brain, the surgeon doesn’t ask you what he should do!”
Ellie’s was very useful in tracking the relationship the of architect to craft and building. In medieval times Master Builders arose from the rank of stone masons, stone being the most prestigious building material of the time.  Apprenticeship and on-site training with the Masons Guild was the path to becoming a Master. During the Renaissance the role moved away from the ill-educated and often illiterate mason to becoming an art form for the educated and wealthy.
The intellectualisation of the profession spurred by the Renaissance increased the emphasis on completing a design before construction started, shifting the work of architecture further away from the building site.
In 19th century in Britain the profession was formalised with the founding of the RIBA. The general contractor took over the architects’ construction management role; as a consequence architects’ drawings and specifications became more prescriptive. Detailed design became a dictatorial rather than a collaborative process.
In the mid 20th century the Oxford Conference of 1958 produced a report on the future of architectural education which recommended that architecture should be taught in universities or comparable institutions. This turned architecture from a vocational to an intellectual education with architects as the intellectual and theoretical branch of construction. A new member of the team – the architectural technologist – was to provide the more mundane matters of detailing and process that did not require the same level of academic rigour as the architect. The technologist move the architect even further from the coal face of construction, but it was the rise and rise of design build that finally disengaged the architect from the process  - at least on larger projects.
This divide was to reach its nadir in the revelations of the architects’ role in the enquiry into the Grenfell fire.
What is the role of the architect in a period when the development of new buildings becomes less common than retrofit and re-use? Danish architect Anders Lendager designed the Resource Rows housing scheme in Copenhagen – described as the world's first circular economy building. To deliver his projects, Lendager has set up several building materials companies re-making plastic, bricks, wood, and windows. He talks of a new aesthetic that celebrates upcycling and how the narratives of rescued materials connect with the occupiers and believes that architects should be master builders, not “colour pickers."