Blog archive October 2026
24.10.26 / 01 / architect or not
At the end of the year I will resign from the UK register of architects. It used to be an affordable subscription, I maintained it while I was doing other things or none. Now it is pricy, and worse, one has to record a series of learnings for the year, some on defined topics, in order to re-register.
Continuing Professional Development, as it is known, has long been a semi-formal requirement. It's a legacy of the building failures of the 70s, resulting from architects who had trained in the 30s and coasted on their knowledge, not understanding how much post-war construction methods and materials had changed. The effect of the Grenfell Tower disaster with all its gross incompetence was to make CPD compulsory, like constantly being examined.
Personally I have always found my job to be a learning curve, often steep, right to the end. In 24 and 25 I did a lot of learning, catching up in depth on the major legislative changes of the last few years - I was going to do this anyway. But it's hard to do CPD properly when you're not in practice - lack of access to resources, lack of practical experience of new things. This year I haven't bothered. Given my experience it's hard to find significant new things to learn all the time - I could teach!
According to the Architects Registration Board (ARB), if I am not on the register I am not allowed to call myself an architect in 'business and practice contexts'. I can still call myself an architect in a 'social context' - what really does that mean? The Architects Registration Act 1997 permits certain other professions to use the word 'architect' - naval architect, landscape architect, and - ahem - golf course architect. But IT systems architect is illegal! And so is interior architect. This leaves a certain impression of the people who drew up this act in the mid-90s. They spent a lot of time on golf courses and had their secretaries print out their emails for them to read - if they had email at the time. To not allow IT architect is a remarkable failure of foresight. Good luck if ARB want to bring a court case to stop it - 70% of the job offers on Linkedin for 'architect' are in IT. In the 90s 'interior architect' was barely recognised as a separate discipline and the definition is still hazy, sitting between interior design (an established profession) and architecture. Many architects will feel that interior architect is just a kind of architect.
So what am I going to call myself? I always thought I would be an architect, whatever else, as a basic fact - as one might be an artist or musician regardless of current circumstance. And yet I have often preferred to call myself a designer, to indicate a wider field of operation and methodologies. I never wanted to be purely an architect - I always wanted to work between disciplines and cross-fertilise them. Professionally this hasn't done me any good - to be a successful architect one has to have a singleness of focus. For me it's the intersectional areas that are the most interesting.
So maybe it should be 'designer'. It's just that feeling of not wanting to lose 'architect'. Charles Eames, who left architecture behind for design in the widest sense, said that he still preferred to think of himself as an architect, because it implied a certain discipline.
