In the course of digging around various online building archives for something else I came across a fascinating document by the RIBA’s now defunct think tank ‘Building Futures’ from 2011 entitled ‘The Future for Architects’. This was produced at the height of the last recession - a time at which I was finishing Part I and ultimately failing to get a job in the UK; leading to a year and a bit in a Shanghai architectural practice instead. The report highlighted the difficulties UK practice was facing at the time and pointed towards the route the profession would have to move along to survive until 2025. Nearly 10 years later I was interested to see which predictions seemed like they might be holding water.

It was fascinating to look back at the challenges the profession were facing at the time, to note the in parts hopeful yet often pessimistic outlook; and equally fascinating to see the worries the profession had; some apparently unrealised - the existential threat of outsourcing of architectural services to “large Asian nations”; others startlingly familiar “in the face of a continuing erosion of traditional architectural skills to other players, the profession seems peculiarly vulnerable to a nostalgic backward glance at a bygone age in which the architect was the undisputed boss”.

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