Niels Barrett PhD.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon University

The rise of a Profession within a ProfessionPrefaceThe Development of the Architectural Technology Discipline within the Profession of Architecturethat this area had been growing significantly and continued to do so. I remember thedescriptions I had to produce to the projects for which I became responsible. Theywere about 30 times the size of the descriptions of buildings of a similar size, but just40 years older, that I could find in the attic.In my training at the Royal Academy I had never had to make a description of abuilding that accounted for the technicalities. The descriptions we made wereexplaining the function, the shaping and the main choice of materials and that wasall. So, what was my background for doing this new description work? It was myprevious technical training before I entered the architect education and a kind ofinformal apprenticeship in the drawing office. This meant of course that I was fairlyslow at doing the job in the beginning – and, as a more serious problem, that I mademistakes. Who had to pay for this? Sometimes the drawing office and sometimes theclient, but in the end it might have been society that paid for this lower level ofproductivity in comparison with what a well skilled professional could have done.How come I was asked to do something that I had no formal training in doing? Well,that was simply the tradition and my superiors had gone through the same kind oftraining in their days. But there was a difference and that was the above mentionedsize of the description and all the many detail drawings now required. Now we werenot acting within the tradition any more. We were facing the rather complicatedchallenge of doing ‘the coherent technical design’ of modern, designed buildingswith all what it took of materials and possibilities to choose or not to choose. – Andwe had to carry it through with no educational background.Did I find it strange that the industry made many mistakes in those days? No, notreally. In fact, I realised how huge a challenge it was, but thinking whether otherprofessionals could do the job better made me conclude that it was still the bestsolution that architects did the tasks because that secured a higher level of designintegrity compared to what would probably happen to the building if engineers had totake over. Furthermore, no one was trained to do the job. The engineers were good atgoing to the very depth of narrowly defined areas but they had no idea about how to17