When the day comes that the RIBA Silver or Bronze Medal is awarded for a cleverly thought out, beautifully articulated and well-detailed scheme for affordable housing, we will have started to bridge the gap between education and practice to the enrichment of both.
It is extraordinary that the educators (and the practitioners in their thrall) on the one hand love to decry what Margaret Thatcher did to the local authority architects’ departments in the 1980s, and on the other then perpetuate the veneration of fatuous theoretical student schemes of almost no social value.
However, for this day to arrive we first have to contend with the belief of academics, such as the new head of the School of Architecture at the University of Central Lancashire (Boots May 31), that such a medal winner would be nothing but “efficient exploitable fodder” for practice.
Simon Gill
London SW6
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