Strange Case of the Missing Assistant: Choices made by the United Kingdom architectural profession affecting Education, Registration and Practice since the founding of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1834

Roger Emmerson

doi:10.12795/astragalo.2025.i39.04

Authors

Roger Emmerson Independent architectural writer

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12795/astragalo.2025.i39.04

Keywords:

education, registration, practice, UK, conflicts

Abstract

This essay has its origin in issues related to the alleged failure in 2018 of the Royal Incorporated of Architects in Scotland (RIAS), a chapter of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), to comply with the requirements of its Royal Charter. This engendered a wider inquiry into the operations and legislation affecting architecture, enacted by and on the RIBA since its founding in 1834, in the promulgation and regulation of the interrelated processes of architectural education, registration and practice in the United Kingdom (UK). Pivotal moments in the late nineteenth-century debate on the "professional or artist-architect", the enactment of the Registration Acts of the 1930s, the 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Education, the Monopolies legislation of the 1970s, the 1997 Registration Act, and the 2003 European Union Directive amended in 2015 are all put to the test by the contemporaneous structures and procedures of the office and the architects work. Texts on and by architects relating to education, registration and practice, as well as the various reports made by the RIBA, the UK Architects Registration Council (ARCUK) and subsequently the Architects Registration Board (ARB), are referenced and their impact on the architectural profession is assessed. The essay will seek to demonstrate that decisions made and directions chosen at those pivotal points and the lack of understanding of the links between them have left endemic structural flaws in education, registration and practice in the UK unresolved.

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Author Biography

Roger Emmerson, Independent architectural writer

Roger Emmerson was born in Edinburgh and attended Leith Academy. He studied architecture under Sir Robert Matthew at the University of Edinburgh and under Professor Isi Metzstein at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating from there in 1982. He has worked throughout the United Kingdom from offices in London, Newcastle upon Tyne and, mostly, Edinburgh, running his own practice, ARCHImedia, from 1987-99 while concurrently teaching architectural design at Edinburgh College of Art. He was also visiting lecturer at universities in Venice, Lisbon, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berkeley and has delivered papers on Scottish architecture at international conferences in Edinburgh, London, Venice, Berkeley, Jerusalem and Piešťany (Slovakia). Since 2000 he worked extensively in the fields of architectural conservation, housing, education and the hospitality industry, retiring from architectural practice, although not architecture, in 2016. He is the published author of four books and numerous articles, essays and reviews on Scottish architecture and architects.

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