The Changing Fortunes of the Architectural Profession in Postwar Britain: Complexity, Technological Change, and the (Re)construction of Knowledge

Abstract

Professions are one means of organizing the delivery of goods and services. In this paper, the authors consider how the power and control of professional groups can change within specific fields of work due to a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. Their case study is the changing role of UK architects within the private residential sector over the post-war period. The architect was once the primary actor who brought together, organized, and integrated the workflow of a myriad of contractors, legal agencies, and planning authorities, but this is no longer the case. To understand how this occurred, and whether the architectural profession could regain a key position in the UK housing industry, the authors conduct a broad historical analysis of the factors at play within the UK architectural profession and the industry as a whole that have resulted in this shift in knowledge, roles and power.

In this chapter, we examine the ways in which changes in technology and associated knowledge have impacted the architectural profession’s role and power within the UK over the past half century, and look set to affect them once more in the near future.

One of the basic definitions of architecture is the provision of shelter and comfort for the human body. The nineteenth century German architect Gottfried Semper described the built architectural space as a surrogate skin. House design comprises four core dimensions: the financial, the social, the environmental, and the aesthetic. These dimensions are not wholly independent; their relationship is complex.

Construction projects are, in themselves, complex systems that involve a large number of people, products, and processes interacting in a nonlinear fashion (Azim et al., 2010; Xia & Chan, 2012). Small differences in initial conditions such as geography, available skills, and materials can result in very different outcomes, and positive and negative feedback loops contribute to emergent behavior and unpredictability in complex systems. Holdups or problems in delivery in one component part can have a tremendous impact on others (Brockmann & Kalle, 2012; Schalcher, 2015). Holdups can have major impacts on cost and even force a redesign. Complex construction projects require soft integration by a key actor, often supported by tools and techniques for managing the people, products, and processes of the project environment (Xia & Chan, 2012).

The professionalization of housebuilding is a relatively recent phenomenon, marking the end of a far longer period of vernacular building methods still responsible for over 90% of the world’s housing provision (Kazimee, 2009). Having one’s house, as opposed to any other building, designed for one by a professional is very much a construct of the modern world.

Research on professions dates back to Parsons (1951) and his delineation of professionals and bureaucrats. Professions, through their collegial organization and shared identity, represent an alternative approach to bureaucracy to achieve the same normative ends. Those offering current definitions of professions emphasize two aspects. One is the profession as a mode of governing and regulating the exchange of expert labor in the provision of a service (Freidson, 1994). Another is the profession as an underpinning knowledge base that usually involves a period of tertiary education, vocational training, and experience (Crompton, 1990). Professions are the structural, occupational, and institutional arrangements for dealing with work associated with the uncertainties of modern work lives in risk societies. Professionals are extensively engaged in dealing with risk managing risk assessment, through the use of expert knowledge, and enabling customers and clients to deal with uncertainty. In section “Literature on professions”, we provide a detailed discussion of each of these aspects of architectural professionalism in the UK.

In section “Rise and decline: the changing role of the architect in postwar Britain”, we examine how the professional standing of UK architects has been eroded by providing a broad historical analysis of the changes that occurred in residential building construction during the postwar era and how these have affected the architectural profession’s role and power. We distinguish between endogenous factors at play within the UK architectural profession and those exogenous factors that have played a role in knowledge, roles, and power shifting away from the architects and towards those within the construction industry who were formally under their control. With respect to the endogenous factors, we highlight historical divisions that have existed in the UK architectural profession. Notably, UK architects are represented by competing professional bodies—the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Architects’ Registration Board (ARB), both effectively set up to ensure the quality of work and professionalism of working practices provided, whilst establishing and protecting the fee scales that for many years ensured an architect’s income could not be eroded from either outside or inside the camp. But the existence of two bodies performing this role fractured power and weakened the UK profession’s ability to resist and/or reshape to their advantage threats posed by exogenous factors. These factors include technological change (such as the transition from the drawing board to computer-aided design) and the increased marketization of UK construction during the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a neoliberal political agenda. We show how some of these external factors were reinforcing, whilst others had a major impact on UK architects’ roles, knowledge structures, and power vis-à-vis building contractors and developers.

In section “New challenges: the re-emergence of the architect as system coordinator?”, we consider the architectural profession’s possible future role in the UK, and whether architects may once again take on an integrational role in the face of the increasing environmental, social, and political demands made of new residential housing. Here we consider parallels between the historical experiences of architects and those of other professional bodies who have similarly undergone a period of disruptive change due to digitization of their working practices.

Literature on Professions

There exists an extensive literature on tensions between professionals and organizations in health care and law. Architecture, by contrast, is relatively neglected within this literature (Cohen, Wilkinson, Arnold, & Finn, 2005). By examining the UK architectural profession’s post-war experience, one gains an interesting insight into how a professional group’s status, role, and power can change quickly in the face of exogenous changes in politics, technology, and industry structure. We shall show how certain endogenous factors within the UK profession itself made it vulnerable to these external changes.

Professionalism has been a dominant alternative to both the market and to public bureaucracy for the organization of work and the delivery of services (McClelland, 1990). To cite professionalism is to stress autonomy and the self-regulation of work by practitioners, with professionals best placed to act in the best interests of their clients. A core component of occupational professionalism is the creation of customized solutions to clients’ problems (Larson, 1977; Empson, 2008). This is dependent on specialist knowledge and skills rooted in a theoretical foundation of a particular knowledge subfield (Abel, 1988; Freidson, 1994; MacDonald, 1995). Professionals have extensive individual autonomy in decision-making, determining themselves how best to apply their specialist knowledge to the development and delivery of customized services (Derber, 1982; Freidson, 1994; Faulconbridge & Muzio, 2008).

Here it is useful to link with Harry Collins’ work on expertise in science and medicine (Collins & Pinch, 1998, 2005; Collins & Evans, 2007). Collins and Evans (2007) demarcate specialist tacit knowledge held by active practitioners from ubiquitous tacit knowledge held by the general lay public. Specialist tacit knowledge comprises two categories: interactional expertise and contributory expertise. Importantly, Collins and Evans (ibid) categorize only these two as expertise.

Those with contributory expertise are actively contributing to the knowledge field—e.g., through scientific/medical research and publication. Achieving this level of proficiency requires training (apprenticeship), access to specialist social networks containing other contributory experts (meeting at conferences, workshops etc.), and access to resources (grants etc.) to fund new research. People with interactional expertise have also received training (apprenticeship) and may also access specialist social networks containing contributory experts, but they do not engage in active research at the knowledge frontier.

The lay public hold varying degrees of knowledge below that of expertise. Popular understanding is acquired through specialist TV programs or magazines, with someone else translating current knowledge into layman’s terms. Those holding primary source knowledge are able to read the original source material—scientific/medical journals, official reports etc.—and understand the general message and implications even if they do not understand the statistical methods or equations.

Another key theme in Collin’s work is that of scientific instrumentation—particularly for the measurement of gravitation waves. Machines are not designed in a neutral manner, but are built based on a specific set of precepts and assumptions their builders hold about what is and what is not to be measured, and why. This is a key source of power for those who have contributory expertise in a science and medicine. In section “Rise and decline: the changing role of the architect in postwar Britain”, we show how the advent of new forms of IT—the parallel equivalent of scientific machines—was one of the key factors that led to large contractors replacing architects as the key organizer in the UK.

Other core components of professionalism are professional values, moral commitment, and self-regulation. Governance flows through collegial relationships and working arrangements. To speak of professional values is to emphasize a shared identity based on competencies (produced by education, training, and apprenticeship socialization) and legal responsibility (sometimes guaranteed by licensing). Professional relations are characterized as cooperative and mutually supportive, and relations of trust characterize practitioner-client and practitioner-employer interactions.

Abel (1988) distinguishes between two dimensions of self-regulation: the production of producers (e.g., architects) and production by producers (e.g., buildings). Both dimensions can be administered by the state or by professional associations, or by a combination of both. Regulation of training—the production of producers—involves (i) a defining of the content of education and training requirements; (ii) exerting influence over the organizations that educate and train professionals; (iii) evaluating candidates after initial training—for example, in the UK, a chartered architect currently undertakes a three-part training program over a minimum of 7 years, two of which are in practice. Part 1 is a 3-year full-time university undergraduate degree (a BA or BSc in Architecture), followed by 1 year in an architect’s practice (Stage 1). Part 2 is a 2-year full-time university degree (B.Arch, Diploma, or M.Arch award), followed by a further year in practice (Stage 2). Part 3 is the Advanced Diploma in Professional Practice in Architecture, which RIBA administers at one of its validated course providers. Only after passing the Part 3 examination can someone register as an architect and for RIBA membership. By setting the final Part 4 exam, RIBA has significant regulatory control over the training of new architects, shaping the content of the university-delivered Parts 1 and 2.

The regulation of services produced by professionals—production by producers—covers the production, distribution, and consumption of services. Those creating these regulations have sought to guarantee quality and preserve public interests, prevent malpractice and conflicts of interest, and mediate between different interests within the profession (Quack & Schüβler, 2015). With respect to ethics and moral values, the clients’ interests supposedly out-rank the profit motive in professional codes of conduct, for example, in medicine the Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm” (primum non nocere).

Key instruments of service self-regulation include (i) setting professional and ethical standards; (ii) restricting organizational forms to individual practices or partnerships on the grounds that incorporation increases liability problems and invites conflict of interests; and (iii) limiting competition between members of the profession by placing restrictions on, for example, geographical areas of practice, mandatory fee scales, and bans or limits on advertising (Morgan & Quack, 2005; Garoupa, 2011).

Utilizing the UK architects’ case, we shall demonstrate that the boundary between professional and state regulation is not fixed; rather, actors from state and professional groups consistently negotiate and re-negotiate governance.

Professions, like other occupations, are subject to deskilling pressures (Suddaby & Muzio, 2015). In the next section we show how large contract builders displaced UK architects as the system coordinator within the residential new build sector during the 1980s. Large contract builders used a highly standardized Design and Build business model, with which they exploited new IT to set up and manage a network of contractual arrangements to control both costs and profits. They thus eroded the architectural profession’s control over expert knowledge and commodified design work, reducing architects to “just another contractor.” With the displacement of architects there was a change in ethos, as architects had tended to prioritize aesthetics and social goals for housing over cost control (and profits).

Adherents of a particular strand of research within the professionalism literature posit the existence of hybrid professionalism, that is, a hybrid of organizational and occupational professionalism (e.g., Skelcher & Smith, 2015). Rather than simply accepting the existence of two, fixed, idealized typologies of professionalism, researchers have sought to identify the ways in which professionalism is acted upon, and itself changes and evolves over time (e.g., Evetts, 2011; Tonkens, Bröer, van Sambeek, & van Hassel, 2013; Witman, Smid, Meurs, & Willems, 2011). They identify professionals making use of managerial pressures and technologies to further their own interests. These professionals are also adept at adjusting their work and their working relationships to external factors, such as market growth in public systems, enterprise, and economic contracting.

Noordegraaf (2016) has sought to move beyond this hybrid model. He proposes that professionals are entering a new era of organizing professionalism, defined as one in which “organizing becomes a normal part of professional work, rather than an uneasy hybrid” (Noordegraaf, 2016, p. 187). This is due to a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) austerity, changing organizational structures, changes in the nature of the professional workforce, and new technology. Noordegraaf’s work is vital because he goes beyond the dichotomies of professional/managerial, and professional/organizational logics to a broader analysis of the forces of change for professionals within organizations.

Developing the notion of organizing professionalism, we here consider whether the architectural profession should reestablish itself in the system coordinator role by, firstly, reshaping itself by absorbing and subsuming the rhetoric of the market customer, developing and using performance metrics to control costs—both previously the cornerstones of the large contractor’s managerialism—and, secondly, taking on the pressing needs of environmental and social pressures that the large building contractor is less motivated to meet.

Rise and Decline: The Changing Role of the Architect in Postwar Britain

One can divide residential construction into three distinct submarkets: top-end bespoke housing, private household new build (speculative), and social housing. The architect was once the system coordinator across all UK residential construction. However, during the 1980s, commercial developer firms began to take over the coordinator role, most significantly within the speculative new build subsector.

The importance of this change can be understood with reference to Figure 6.1. From the 1970s onwards, the speculative market significantly grew as a percentage of all residential building in the UK. Today, the six largest construction firms—Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley, Bellway, and Redrow—account for over two thirds of residential construction. Yet although the speculative

Fig. 6.1

UK housebuilding rates since the Second World War. Reprinted from A right to build (p. 10), by A. Parvin, D. Saxby, C. Cerulli, and T. Schneider, 2011, Sheffield: The University of Sheffield, Architecture 00:/. Copyright 2011 by University of Sheffield School of Architecture and Architecture 00:/. Reprinted with permission

housing market makes up in the largest percentage in terms of volume, it employs the smallest number of architects. This is because commercial developer firms use a pattern book business model, from which they repeatedly apply a limited set of highly standardized house plans. By standardizing this fixed set of house designs and using common components across projects, commercial developers are able to create and profit from economies of scale.

UK architects have retained their position as system coordinator to a greater extent within social housing, but this subsector declined markedly after the 1970s. A number of political and economic factors fueled this decline in volume, and we will discuss them below. Today, the delivery of new social housing is largely tied to new speculative build developments over a certain size, although the precise requirement varies with local and central government policy. Social housing is thus dictated by the new builds and, in turn, is affected by economic cycles. Social housing tends to involve a more complex set of social and environmental requirements than speculative housing. In this subsector, small architectural businesses often work with, or for, housing associations. Small- and medium-sized architect practices, plus a number of individual sole traders, continue to control the top-end bespoke submarket.

We will now consider the exogenous and endogenous factors that led to this change in knowledge, power, and control of architects as a professional body (see Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

The exogenous and endogenous threats to the architectural profession. Source: Design by authors

One of the key endogenous factors is the lack of a single professional association for architects in the UK. There exist two membership associations: the more recognized but voluntary RIBA and the mandatory ARB. Each attempts to control architectural standards and prescriptions for practice through codes of conduct (Cohen et al., 2005). We will show how the balkanization of the professional representation adversely affected the ability of the architectural profession, as a whole, to resist external forces of globalization, deregulation, and the rise of large construction firms who were better able to use IT to develop managerialist approaches to cost control integration and coordination.

The end of the Second World War was, in many respects, a reset point for the UK (Artis, 1996). Structural realignments ranging from economic theory to the creation of the modern UK welfare state flourished. In house building, new possibilities opened up thanks to new materials and construction methods that had their origins in wartime production, and newly redundant armaments factories and a (de-mobbed) semi-skilled industrial workforce offered plenty of capacity. An aging Victorian housing stock, exacerbated by bombing in many major UK cities, created a need for new housing on a previously unknown scale. However, there were also significant financial restrictions, and very high levels of national debt accumulated through wartime financing. Any one of these factors, in isolation, would have represented a challenge for an established architectural profession, yet a new, inexperienced tranche of young architects and town planners confronted a completely transformative palette of factors to deal with, urged on by a nation with utopian aspirations.

It was perhaps this combination of necessity and the nation’s desire for a bright future that allowed such a generational social experiment to unfold over the following decades. Some important antecedents facilitated this. With its 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, the government enabled councils to provide domestic dwellings. The new council homes provided electricity, running water, bathrooms, indoor toilets, and front/rear gardens. This was not the first high-quality council housing, however. Liverpool led the way, under a Conservative-led council, in constructing the first council housing in Europe in 1869.

The development of improved social housing in the UK coincided with the new consumerism of the 1950s. The postwar boom saw the growth of car ownership, changing the dynamics of urban and suburban living. The home, too, underwent massive changes. The 1951 Festival of Britain introduced the concept of open-plan living, with fitted kitchens containing new electrical appliances such as washing machines, refrigerators and fridges, and electrical food appliances such as blenders and toasters. Here the suburban living of the 1950s US provided a lens for future UK consumerism throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

It was the architect who was expected to deliver this utopian vision for housing, and who was subsequently held accountable for a failure to deliver. The pace of rebuilding in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily through social housing (Fig. 6.1), allowed little time for debate, prototyping, or reflection. It was nevertheless to prove something of a golden age for the UK architectural profession, in terms of its position and the quantity of work available for architects. Richard Crossman (Minister for Housing and Local Government under Harold Wilson) recorded a cabinet committee in June 1966 discussing 500,000 housing starts, split equally between the public and private sector (Derbyshire, 2014). It was an era which gave rise to movements in social architecture, like Team 10, CIAM, and the search for a utopia of the present. There was an excitement, at that time, amongst architects who were given freedom to experiment in an atmosphere of lax controls and an unshakeable belief in all things modern. Young UK architects included Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, who designed the Golden Lane Estate in 1952 (the tallest residential building in Britain at the time of its construction) and later the Barbican complex in London, and Alison and Peter Smithson, who designed the Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, London, in the late 1960s.

There was a postwar consensus on what needed to be improved—hygiene in the form of running water, sanitation, and clean air; comfort in the form of central heating; and more space, both inside and out. These were aspirations from the Edwardian age, transmitted to the middle class by newly built suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. Now project developers were to fulfill these aspirations for the inner-city working class and lower middle class by replacing back-to-back terraced housing and tenement blocks (Mowat, 1955).

There was no established public consensus on modern architecture. Young architects had presumptions about what the public needed or wanted from new housing, and it was this—as much as a lack of financial and human resources as demand increased—that was at the root of the shortfalls which led to the demise of an entire era of domestic modern architecture in the UK. For instance, UK architects had a keen desire to replicate the work of Le Corbusier, exemplified by his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, and thereby ignored how the realities of life in Glasgow (to use an extreme example) and the very different climate of Scotland’s western Lowlands differed from the South of France.

These architects also overlooked the social needs of communities, who were often dispersed, and even when kept together and rehoused in the same locality, isolated by the physical barriers of vertical living of tower blocks. Robin Hood Gardens was one group of architects’ early reaction against Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Here was social housing in long concrete blocks linked by broad aerial walkways—“streets in the sky.” They were responding to the loss of community felt by those with nowhere to informally meet with neighbors. Yet this merely exposed the limits to what could be recreated, even in theory, in this new high-density, high-rise living.

This era of prolific social housebuilding ended suddenly and dramatically. The symbolic turning point was the partial collapse of Ronan Point on May 16th, 1968, just two months after opening. This 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, was, in hindsight, a poorly constructed, socially inadequate, and aesthetically redundant edifice. Four people were killed and seventeen were injured when an entire corner of the building collapsed due to a gas explosion that critically weakened a loadbearing wall. The dramatic nature of this failure sparked a loss of public confidence in high-rise residential buildings in the UK, and major changes in UK building regulations followed. Ronan Point was the last residential tower block to be built in an era of prolific housebuilding that has yet to be matched in the UK. The general public, the government, and the construction industry as a whole all participated in a far-reaching reassessment of the architectural profession’s ability to shape the already fading vision of a utopian, modernist future.

Other exogenous changes also impacted the architectural profession’s changing fortunes. One such change was a realignment in UK politics and the rise of the corporatist state during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This altered the relationship between the state and the professions, including architects and surveyors in the construction industry. The corporatist state received impetus from Thatcherism but had begun under the previous (Labour) Callaghan government, precipitated by the 1976 Financial Crisis, during which the UK government was forced to borrow $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Under the terms of the IMF’s loan agreement, the Callaghan Labour government had introduced the first monetarist policy to end Keynesian fiscal management (Artis, Cobahm, & Wickham-Jones, 1992). This directly affected housing construction, which successive Conservative and Labour governments had used as a critical tool in countercyclical macroeconomic management.

Turning to the academic literature on professions, and professional power and independence, the regulative bargain lies at the core of the relationship between the state and professions. In the neoliberal corporatist state, the relationship is reconfigured, with professions being used as a channel for state action, especially via controls (MacDonald, 1995, p. 115).

The corporatist UK state is suspicious of monopoly, promoting competition between practitioners as a means of increasing consumer awareness and power, and encouraging variety in services and practitioners. In terms of the architectural profession, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC, 1977b) report led to the end of fixed-fee scales and the removal of the ban on advertising by architects, with the RIBA amending its rules accordingly in 1982. This attacked an important ethos and practice of all professional groups: not undercutting one’s fellow professional. Professional bodies would have disciplined, or even struck off, members for competing on fees. An earlier MMC report on surveyors (MMC, 1977a) had also recommended terminating fixed fees amongst surveyors. Since this change, the majority of commissions for professional services in the construction and property industries in the UK have been on a competitive fee tendered basis.

The loss of the architect’s fee scale, along with the removal of advertising ban, can be viewed as the first step towards the democratization of the profession by opening the door to free market competition. There were, however, some important downsides to this. The abolition of fixed fees in the UK triggered a steady decline in fee levels. During the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, architects’ fees fell to unprecedentedly low levels (Hoxley, 1998). The authors of the 1977 MMC architect’s report had foreseen this: “We do not … exclude the possibility that fee-cutting in a recession might be deep and widespread” (MMC, 1977b, para. 231). With this came an inevitable drop in quality, with architects unable to deliver the same level of service at a much reduced fee.

The architectural profession’s ability to resist this exogenous challenge from the state was hampered by the representational split between the RIBA and the ARB. This is highly unusual (Cohen et al., 2005; MacDonald, 1995). Professional associations conduct much of the collective work of professional groups, on behalf of their members. This work ranges from oversight of training and education (qualification of members), to defining and monitoring standards of practice, to resolving legal matters and governance over its membership. The RIBA fought the termination of fixed fees but was unable to pull together agreement from the entirety of the profession. The Thatcher government exploited the divisions and the RIBA capitulated, changing its rules in 1982.

The balkanization of professional representation also adversely affected UK architects’ ability to control other exogenous forces—globalization, technological change, and the rise of large construction firms who made better use of IT to develop managerialist approaches to cost control integration and coordination.

In the early 1980s, the public began to question the architect’s role as social designer. The Prince of Wales delivered his “Carbuncle” attack on modern architecture in 1984. Later, Wates and Knevitt’s Community Architecture, published in Wates and Knevitt (1987) suggested that modern architecture was remote and austere, and that postwar housing estates were linked to the social breakdown, social unrest, and riots witnessed on UK streets during the early 1980s. Wates and Knevitt (1987) called for a new community architecture: one that was more participatory for those who were to live in urban cities, to ensure more stable and self-sufficient communities. The divided UK architectural professional associations seemed unable to respond to, let alone manage, this public debate on the future of architecture, and the role of architects within it (Till, 1998).

As it transpired, there was no realignment around new notions of the social and community. Rather, there was a fundamental shift away from the social to a new, financially driven model of construction during the 1980s. It was a shift that has shaped the evolution of the UK housing industry to the present day.

Those applying this new, financially driven model of managerial control, with its focus on profits and cost control, highlighted architects’ inability to prioritize cost over their own aesthetic or social considerations. Architects had long held a reputation for being reluctant to prioritize the client’s budget over their own aesthetic sensibilities, and the industry how had an alternative route to take.

New types of computer IT facilitated the move to managerialist control by large building contractors. The art of designing, itself, became a computerized process, as early computer-aided design (CAD) systems were brought over from manufacturing. This opened up the field to those prepared to learn new IT tools and take advantage of the abilities that they offered. Design modifications no longer needed to be shuttled back and forth to an architect. They could be made at any stage in the design process and even on site by someone trained to use the IT system.

New forms of computer IT also facilitated the development of large contractor-led Design and Build programs during the 1980s. Decision-makers within this new, managerialist type of system focused profit, not aesthetic or social design. They achieved control and coordination through a web of contracts with a myriad of individual suppliers and contractors, specifying tasks and completion dates in detail to enable building work to be completed on time and at cost. Using the Design and Build system, the large building contractor took the position of system coordinator, with the architect becoming a subcontracted designer. In place of the architect’s network of personal contacts and experience, forged through previous work with local contractors and suppliers, those using Design and Build utilized collateral warranties as protection against delivery failures on the more stringent contractual agreements demanded by a new breed of developer-client. They extended contracted relationships beyond the local to national and even international provision, providing opportunities for further cost cutting.

New Challenges: The Re-emergence of the Architect as System Coordinator?

In this section, we consider the architect’s future in the UK residential housing sector. In particular, we discuss whether architects could re-emerge as the system coordinator, and the requirements for UK architects to act as a professional group in order to ensure this.

As noted, housing design comprises four core dimensions: the financial, the social, the environmental, and the aesthetic. The speculative housing model’s success lies in having a limited set of highly standardized house designs, held within a pattern book, which can be replicated nationally. Project actors can make only minor change to these designs, if required to satisfy local planning authorities. Those utilizing Design and Build as a procurement route have been very successful in meeting the agenda of those developers wanting to gain control of the whole build process with in-house designers and tight financial controls. In this model however, aesthetics, social benefit, and environmental dimensions are demoted and made subservient to the financial dimension, with enforcement by planners and other legislative bodies often their main or only driver. Consequently, the housing industry as a whole has struggled to keep these issues on the agenda in a market where the self-regulating contractor is dominant.

Whilst the speculative housing model has been highly successful for those large contractors who have honed its development over the past 40 years, there is growing public and political dissatisfaction with quality and choice, and also with the affordability of the housing large contractors are willing to supply.

Politicians and the media have both recently highlighted the issue of quality. For example, in July 2019, the Welsh government’s Minister for Housing Julie James complained about substandard developments and accused the private house-building industry of creating the “slums of the future” (Servini, 2019). In the same month, an hour-long Channel 4 TV documentary investigated complaints customers had raised against Persimmon, the UK’s second largest builder, of sub-standard construction, poor customer care, and excessive profits (All 4, 2019).

With respect to supply, the UK now has a chronic housing shortage, resulting in house prices that have outstripped wages for all but a few; most stand in line for housing that at best can be described as adequate. Going forward, it is becoming increasingly difficult for smaller private contractors to develop competitively priced, innovative house designs that will meet the necessary tougher environmental regulations. Because the financial returns are much lower on pre-existing brown field sites, the smaller private contractors also struggle to deliver the large-scale renewal of inner-city housing in the UK, which is in urgent need of high-quality but affordable new housing.

Clearly, the UK needs a new model in which the four dimensions of housing design are brought into a more balanced alignment. What is less clear is whether the architect is the person best placed to be the system coordinator within that new model. Some subsectors within the housing market arguably offer a better fit for the architect’s broader skillsets than others, with the bespoke housing market most allowing the flights of fancy for which the profession is recognized. Increasingly, however, architectural students are entering the profession driven more by a social or environmental calling than by viewing it as an opportunity for self-expression (Coutts, 2016). For this generation, the third sector inhabited by housing associations and council-funded housing programs possibly offers the best prospects for professional satisfaction. One can expect a better balance between the four requirements of the financial, social, environmental, and aesthetic in this sector, which therefore requires more oversight to marry these often conflicting factors. If the profession is to stage a comeback within the UK, then its members must do so by taking on that coordinating role, and it is in this sector that the opportunities are greatest, despite its diminished role within the greater housing industry.

Turning to the academic literature on professions, the architectural profession could succeed in the UK if it were to move towards Noordegraaf’s model of organizing professionalism, taking on and embodying within its practices financial cost control and balancing this with its strengths in the social, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions. This requires a change in the nature of the professional workforce, and the leveraging of new technological opportunities. Examples of the latter include IT systems that facilitate standardization of components (rather than of entire buildings), enabling flexibility in design and cost control. In other words, it is a shift that requires the profession’s members to not just subsume the rhetoric of the market-costs customer, but to develop cost-performance metrics and other metrics that have, until now, remained the preserve of managerialism under the large contractor.

Applying Building Information Modelling (BIM) throws up an interesting possibility. We have discussed how large builders utilized new IT to take over the coordination role from architects during the 1980s. Researchers of professions have previously highlighted the link between the emergence of new computer technologies, the commodification of work, and deskilling as professions lose control over expert knowledge (e.g., Haug, 1972; Johnson, 1972; Jones & Moore, 1993). BIM thus offers an opportunity for another actor to become the system coordinator. Why is this? In one sense, BIM is the continuation of the process of digitization. It requires disparate actors—structural and mechanical engineers, town planners, and interior designers as well as large housing contractors—to coalesce through a common interface to enable a seamless flow of information to pass back and forth. In so doing, BIM would replace the myriad of incompatible IT platforms that currently exist. Researchers recognize the benefits to all parties, as well as the costs of not successfully coordinating the shift to a common IT platform. In their Farrell and Saloner (1988) paper on the coordination of a common standard, Farrell and Saloner highlight the need for an actor, or else a strong committee, to ensure that all actors switch to a common platform simultaneously.

Much is riding on BIM’s successful adoption across the industry beyond its current low-level acceptance enforced through public works programs. Much of this is central to the next generation of architects’ motivations: Without BIM, it is difficult to coordinate the early decision-making needed to promote the benefits of modern methods of construction, not least of off-site manufacturing, thereby strengthening the hand of the status quo. The industry cannot calculate the principles of sustainability, and in particular Whole Life Costing and the EPDs (Environmental Product Declarations), that this depends upon to make the financial case that will change minds without the functionality of BIM. BIM, in essence, represents the missing piece in the jigsaw that is preventing the industry from seeing the benefits of the bigger picture.

“Master Coordinator” would be an appropriate name for the actor who oversees the entire design and construction process through BIM. To what extent can architects—rather than developers, contractors, or any other active participants—lay claim to this role? This is for the architectural profession to clearly articulate. There is evidence that architects themselves believe they are best positioned for this new coordination role. The 2012 survey by BuildingDesign (Morrell, 2012) found that 80% of respondents, who were predominantly architects and architect technicians, believed that architects should be responsible for BIM coordination on construction projects.

Architects may be the best-placed party given that they have a greater overview of all four core dimensions within house design—financial, social, environmental, and aesthetic. The architect is doubtlessly best situated to see and understand the wider implications of decisions made throughout the design, if not also the construction, process.

As previously discussed, the profession’s Achilles heel has been financial control within projects. Are there any signs of this improvement here? Most architects would admit to being driven primarily by either a social or environmental conscience, with a desire to placate their own aesthetic sensibilities also high on their agendas. Few would profess to being “in it for the money.” Does this relative lack of personal financial motivation suggest that the problem of architects “staying within budget” persists?

One move recently undertaken to redress this imbalance has been the introduction of apprenticeship schemes, whereby universities offer their courses as part-time placements for students in practice over a 4-year period. The aim is to incorporate a more financially minded approach to the educational process during those formative years when architectural students learn how to tackle design problems. Another equally influential addition to the design process, this time aimed at the procurement end of the build program, has been the introduction of the Value Toolkit as a way of broadening the industry’s definition of value to include societal and environmental benefits alongside the more commonly used short-term financial benefits that currently define the tendering process. Together, these two interventions strengthen the hand of those architects looking to reinstate an overseeing role that can help generate the more collaborative working environment being called for.

However, the other issue UK architects must address is the division in representation and loss of influence that has arisen from having more than one professional body representing its key membership group. This does not happen in medicine or in law in the UK. As well as adversely affecting internal governance procedures, having two professional bodies diminishes the UK profession’s negotiating power with developers, contractors, and, possibly most importantly, with government. But this is set to continue, with both bodies responding to these new challenges. ARB is currently consulting with its members over broadening routes into architecture and has doubled its fees to fund a transformation in education and training over the next 5 years. The RIBA has set its 2030 Climate Challenge to encourage the architectural profession to lead a collaborative shift towards sustainable design throughout the construction industry. These measures exemplify the long-term, informed, and balanced guidance that the construction industry, and housing in particular, requires—and a reconstructed architectural profession still seems to offer the best hope of objectively delivering this guidance.

Summary and Reflections

We have laid out the various endogenous and exogenous factors that led the UK architectural profession to lose its position as system coordinator and considered whether the profession could re-establish itself in the near future.

Reflecting upon the literature on professions, we have used this particular example to highlight the importance of new technologies—particularly IT—in providing opportunities for other actors to contest a professional group’s position as system coordinator. The advent of new IT replaced pre-existing methods of drawing and the control of the design process itself. Creators of new IT design software facilitated the development of Design and Build, in which the large contractor is the key system coordinator. With greater automation, actors could for the first time easily standardize their plans, and even non-architects could make minor amendments to these standardized plans.

It is interesting to contrast this experience with that of other occupational groups. Product designers have further developed their position as a system integrator (Windrum, Frenken, & Green, 2017). This occupational group has successfully established itself as the technology interpreter and practical translator (Lawson, 2005), and integrated design, engineering, and marketing functions within the new product development process (Moenaert & Souder, 1990; Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). Indeed, by moving towards design thinking (Brown, 2008) one places the designer at the center of all aspects of the business and makes them the key actor who drives innovation (Verganti, 2009), as a means of structuring strategic product development and design’s role in articulating creativity and innovation.

It would be interesting in future research to consider, through comparative studies, how IT has affected knowledge and control in different occupational groups who have undergone similar periods of disruptive change. For example, professional photographers are another group of highly skilled service workers who have seen digital cameras and digital imaging software open up (democratize) the process of high-quality image making and image distribution to a wider public. Yet professional photographers’ specialist knowledge of composition, lighting, and color, as well as their technical expertise, has enabled this group to maintain their independence and control within their field.

An important connection here may exist between the digitization of working practices and the redesign of service creation and delivery—more commonly referred to as process innovation. For example, the introduction of customer self-service, first in grocery and subsequently in many other services, uses the manpower of customers to significantly reduce the number of paid employees required to deliver a service. It involves a purposeful reconfiguring of the role(s) of the customer and taking advantage of new opportunities afforded by new IT (Windrum, 2023). It would be interesting to extend this line of research to consider examples such as Design and Build, and BIM, as one component within process innovations that involve purposive reconfiguration of different providers’ roles.

Finally, we utilize this case study to draw attention to the roles played by RIBA and ARB: the professional bodies representing architects in the UK. Whilst these professional bodies have maintained control over architects’ training and education, we have shown that the division of professional membership between the two bodies constitutes a significant weakness in the face of technological change and the increased marketization of UK construction during the 1970s and 1980s. It remains to be seen whether this situation will change and, through a more unified body, UK architects will be able to regain control over the agenda.