Architects are underpaid. Architects are undervalued. Architects are a broken profession. Architects are not sufficiently ethnically, educationally or socially diverse.

All fair comment, all regularly raised, but all missing the point. While these are all problems in and of themselves, they are also symptoms of a narrative that has been carefully crafted over the past two hundred years or so to convince the world that architects are professionals.

Anyone who has occasionally read my columns over the last few years may have noted an increasing preoccupation with the history of architectural practice. This eventually resulted in me buying a lot of old books, reading a great deal, irritating some academics with many questions, and then writing a book on the history of architectural practice with Paul Crosby of the AA.

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