Architects are underpaid and marginalised. Here are my suggestions on how to turn the profession around and make it fit for the future.

1. Reform education – and don’t stop

After centuries of evolution as a skilled trade, the 1958 Oxford Conference decided that architectural education would henceforth be an intellectual pursuit carried out within a university environment. But architecture is not an academic discipline. To give it credibility within the universities, the professional academics who came to dominate teaching had to detach architecture from its origins within construction. The results have been catastrophic, contributing to reduced access for the less well-off; the ceding of expertise and leadership to others, and setting architects on their path towards marginalisation.

Decades of complacency have left most of the schools of architecture hopelessly adrift from the needs of students and the profession. We may not need to break the links with universities entirely, but we do need to rethink them, radically.

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