Why this year’s RIBA awards feel like a turning point

I always believed in the architecture we were producing. What I never imagined was that someone like me, running a small practice, would one day be standing on stage receiving the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing at the Stirling Prize ceremony.

Neave Brown’s work has always been an inspiration, not simply for the buildings he designed, but for his belief that good housing should be for everyone. That architecture has a social responsibility and that the quality of someone’s home should not be determined by their income.

To have our work recognised with an award bearing his name is an extraordinary honour.

I do not look like a “traditional” architect. I do not sound like one, and I certainly do not think like one. Perhaps that is why this award means so much to me.

As I have reflected on the evening, something else has stayed with me. Looking across the winners of the Stirling Prize and the other special awards announced that night, I began to realise just how different the list looked.

I do not look like a ‘traditional’ architect. I do not sound like one, and I certainly do not think like one

Mary Duggan Architects and RUFF Architects won the Stirling Prize, Architectural Thread took home both the Stephen Lawrence Prize and the Conservation Award, while Takero Shimazaki Architects shared the Reinvention Award. And then there was our practice, Satish Jassal Architects, winning the Neave Brown Award for Housing for Rowan Court. 

What struck me was the range of people and practices being celebrated, including female-led practices, architects from a variety of backgrounds and smaller studios making their mark on the profession. These are not necessarily the faces, names or practices that many people would traditionally associate with the highest honours in British architecture.

It was also significant that both the Stirling Prize and the Neave Brown Award went to council-commissioned housing. At a time when delivering genuinely affordable homes remains one of our greatest challenges, it is heartening to see the profession recognising the architectural ambition and social value of public housing.

But beyond the individual winners, I kept returning to a wider question: what might this collection of practices tell us about the profession we are becoming?

Architecture has traditionally had a fairly established idea of what success looks like. Certain practices, backgrounds and voices have naturally become more prominent in shaping the conversation about what constitutes good architecture and the built environment.

I sense this is changing, particularly in the composition of judging panels. They are becoming more diverse, bringing new experiences, perspectives and values into the room. That matters.

Architecture is not an exact science. Judging what makes a building excellent involves interpretation, judgement and personal experience. Who sits on the jury inevitably influences what is valued, what is celebrated and, ultimately, what the profession aspires to become.

RIBA deserves recognition for its efforts to broaden representation within the profession, including through its awards and judging panels. This year’s winners suggest those efforts are bearing fruit, and that outstanding architecture is being produced by people who have taken other routes into the profession, bring other life experiences to their work and do not necessarily fit the established mould.

But it is not just architects and judging panels that are changing. Our clients are too. I am increasingly meeting people in positions of influence within local authorities, housing associations and development organisations who bring a much wider range of backgrounds and perspectives to their roles.

It is clients who create the opportunities for architecture to happen. They commission the buildings, set the ambitions and choose the architects who will deliver them. In housing especially, their decisions shape not just individual buildings but the quality of people’s homes and the character of whole neighbourhoods. As those decision-makers become more representative of the communities they serve, I hope we will see greater openness to new practices, ideas and approaches to design.

Good housing is not simply about delivering numbers

Architects have a responsibility here too. We need to listen, challenge established thinking and resist assuming that what worked for one community will work for another. Good housing is not simply about delivering numbers. It is about understanding people and creating well-designed, sustainable places that improve everyday life, and that matters all the more as we push to build more social housing.

A broader range of voices, from those commissioning homes to those designing and living in them, can only be good for architecture, housing and the built environment.

Of course, winning awards is one thing. The real measure of progress is whether recognition leads to more opportunities, more commissions and a wider range of voices helping to shape our built environment.

And I am optimistic that it will. I have to be.

The profession is changing, perhaps more slowly than some of us would like, but the direction is encouraging. What excites me most is not simply who is being recognised today, but what this might mean for the next generation of architects, and for the homes and communities they will help create.

Perhaps British architecture is beginning to look a little more like the society it serves.

And I hope that one day a list of winners like this will no longer feel remarkable. It will simply feel normal.