Two steps forward, one step back
Chris Williamson, the new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has made a stand, possibly more profound and challenging than any previous incumbent. See statement here.
Williamson is the co-founder of Weston Williamson, an architectural practice founded in 1985. It now has offices in London, Manchester, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Riyadh, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, employing over 250 architects, urban designers and planners worldwide. The practice has received numerous awards and commissions for buildings as diverse as the new Paddington Elisabeth Line station, and the British Embassy refurbishment in Paris.
This week (11 December 2025) Williamson resigned from the Architects Registration Board (ARB), meaning that, the president of the RIBA – the official professional body for architects – granted a Royal Charter almost 200 years ago – will no longer be an architect, as determined by the regulatory framework in this country. The move reveals the barmy-ness of architectural recognition and practices in the UK.
The ARB is the formal body that regulates the use of the title “Architect” (but does not regulate its function, meaning that anyone can do the work of an architect provided they do not call themselves an architect). The RIBA is effectively a private members’ club, an optional extra, that offers architects the bonus elevated status of “Chartered Architects”; but one MUST first be registered with the ARB in order to advertise one’s services as an architect in the first place.
The ARB came into existence under an act of Parliament in 1997, which provides the framework for Architects statutory duties, codes of conduct, and legal responsibilities, etc. Over the years, and especially after the Grenfell tragedy, the UK government made significant recommendations that the ARB – as regulator – review the competency of the profession, its training, its education and its performance. Whereas, the ARB was, until fairly recently, a reasonably useful but insignificant office that predominantly maintained the register of architects’ names and addresses, it suddenly turned into a behemoth of self-importance. It moved to huge offices, employed more faceless bureaucrats, starting sending out pointless emails, and charging ever more money for the privelege. Effectively it turned into an self-regulating industry, charging its members ever-increasing and obligatory membership fees, meddling in politics, interfering in education, mandating behaviour, and forcing changes in the industry. Many of these changes had been legitimated by shoddy, piecemeal “research” questionnaires that offer the so-called, self-defining “evidence” that it required to continue its bureaucratic haranguing of the sector. This is something I have written about here.
Of course, we need to repeal the Architects Act. Of course we have to rid ourselves of this unecessary burden on practice. But replacing it with another regulatory quango as Chris Williamson suggests is not the way forward. The invention of a “Built Environment Council” is simply jumping from one self-important frying pan into the fire.
Insisting that only architects can submit planning & building control applications, which seems to be the key idea behind the move, i.e that this move will defend what architects do, and not fetishise the word used to do it (“architect”) is ridiculous. An incestuous battle between the bureaucratic institutions of the RIBA versus the ARB is of no concern to many architects nor the construction industry more widely.
By inventing new layers of regulatory oversight to form a self-protecting shield around the profession, is no way to build public confidence in a profession whose main problem is that it talks down to the public and cannot defend its relevance. Special pleading in order to keep architects on a protected pedestal – or more mundanely, to keep architects in a privileged position to maintain their workload in a world threatened by less-qualified designers or AI robots – is not good enough.
Architects need to prove themselves worthy. First tackle the condescension architects have for growth, development, public accountability; first tackle the blasé approach that Architecture Departments have for knowledge, engagement, and criticism; and maybe that would be a good start to the new “abolish-the-ARB” era.
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