Architects, assemble! How the London School of Architecture hopes to transform training in the capital

London leads the world in training for most creative industries, so why does it lag behind when it comes to architecture? The London School of Architecture hopes to change all that
Staff meeting: (left to right) London School of Architecture teachers Elsie Owusu, Nigel Coates, Will Hunter, Clive Sall and Deborah Saunt photographed at The OXO Tower Restaurant, @OXO_Tower (Picture: Matt Writtle)
Robert Bevan18 March 2015

Slapped wrists for any of you who describe yourselves as a software or web architect because the profession of “architect” is one of the few protected by law. While anyone can design a building (or an IT system), you must slog through seven years of training before you can use the job title without, in theory, being prosecuted.

Students flock to London to study in the world’s creative capital and earn that status. Unfortunately, they are also flocking to architecture schools that are, unlike London’s fashion and fine art colleges, struggling to hold their own internationally. Of the capital’s 10 architecture schools only the private Architectural Association regularly makes it into global education top tens; the honours go instead to colleges in Zurich, Tokyo, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Delft and a clutch in the US.

Our public universities’ architecture departments have been cut to the bone; resources are diminishing and staff morale is in the basement as class sizes rise and fees head for £9,000 per annum next year. Their international appeal has relied in part on London’s graduate architect job market, which is now threatened by ever-tightening visa restrictions.

It’s a shocking situation for a creative industry that has been one of Britain’s most successful creative exports. London’s great architects are emerging in spite of rather than because of its patchy architecture schools. (Conversely, the US has great architecture schools but dreary contemporary architecture.)

The London School of Architecture, England’s first fully-fledged independent school of architecture for more than a century, is hoping to transform that situation. It begins recruiting students tomorrow and will be using the capital as its laboratory while aiming for study to be cost-neutral for its intake of students this autumn.

The LSA is the idea of Will Hunter, until last month the 33-year-old executive editor of The Architectural Review, and grew out of an article he once wrote on the issue. The start-up faculty is a Who’s Who of the respected London architecture world with a sprinkling of glamour in the form of Nadja Swarovski — the crystal heiress who will act as the LSA’s patron alongside ex-Tesco CEO Terry Leahy.

LSA teacher Nigel Coates photographed at The OXO Tower Restaurant, @OXO_Tower (Picture: Matt Writtle)

Staff include former head of architecture at the Royal College of Art, Nigel Coates; director of the Architecture Foundation, Ellis Woodman; eminent architecture historian, Alan Powers; and Professor Leon van Schaik, who put the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on to the architectural map. Other architects in the faculty include Deborah Saunt and Clive Sall, with Elsie Owusu among the trustees.

“I like progress,” is Hunter’s response when asked why he’s risked his shirt on the venture. Architecture education in the UK is organised into a three-year undergraduate degree and two-year postgraduate course with two years of practical experience mixed in and final professional exams. It will soon leave graduates with bills upwards of £40,000 — making the profession the privilege of the rich in the process.

“There had to be a better way of doing it,” argues Hunter. He thinks that the long-established schools can have trouble shifting direction. “It has been the same model for a long time and so is inevitably risk-averse. We are starting again from first principles.”

The LSA will start off by taking candidates for the two-year postgraduate degree, the first year of which will see students (who Hunter would rather call “associates”) embedded for half their time in 43 architectural practices recruited to take on these apprentices.

Participating practices include big names such as Grimshaw Architects as well as at smaller outfits. The second year will be full-time study. Students will be paid a minimum of £12,000 for their work in the practices, an equal amount to their fees for the full two years.

In some ways the apprenticeship scheme is a return to traditional architectural training, as is the inclusion once more of disciplines such as planning and urban studies at the heart of the syllabus (urban design tutor Tom Holbrook is an adviser to the Greater London Authority).

In other ways, the LSA will be progressive. It will change its tutors after three years, for instance, and — combating architecture’s shocking record on diversity — women, gay and black staff will be to the fore. Each year it will focus its research projects on a different London borough — starting with Camden. Its Design Think Tank programme aims to produce practical rather than theoretical outcomes. “The threshold of the second year is students have to arrive with a project,” says Hunter.

The LSA still has hoops to jump through before the students are eligible for maintenance loans and it also has to win approval from the Architects Registration Board (ARB) before its courses lead to the privileged title “architect”, although Hunter is confident they will achieve ARB recognition by the time the first students graduate in June 2017.

If successful, the LSA will reach a maximum intake of 80 students but rather than expanding numbers further, Hunter says the school would consider offering different disciplines or setting up branches overseas — Brazil perhaps, or Tokyo.

One of its more radical aspects, however, is that the LSA will not have a permanent home. Academically it will start life supported by the Cass architecture school at London Met University and it may be offered temporary space at a major (but yet to be confirmed) museum, but otherwise it will be peripatetic.

Surely this will have an impact not just on the LSA’s identity and culture as a school but also the ability for students to spend time with other students? Hunter says not only does this not matter, it is not something he wants: “When you don’t have a base you look at the city in a different way,” he maintains. “The city constitutes the school and you start to say, ‘How can I use that’?”

It also reflects the reality of today’s working life, he maintains: “When you start a practice you have a laptop and a table. It is everyone’s normal life; it is how people work. This will be a 21st-century architecture school.”

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