Architectural education in the United Kingdom (19c-20c)

After nearly a century of endeavour and negotiation which had been led by the Royal Institute of British Architects, a statutory Board of Architectural Education was formed under the Architects (Registration) Act, 1931. For the purposes of constituting the Board of Architectural Education the Act included a list of Schools of Architecture in the United Kingdom. The statutory Board was abolished in the 1990s, and when the Architects Act 1997 repealed the 1931 Act the statutory list of Schools of Architecture went with it.

The 1931 Act had come to be passed at the end of a century of development in educational provision and in the method of qualifying by examination. The 1997 Act was passed in the period after the United Kingdom had become one of the Member States of the European Economic Community, later named the European Union, an organization which, among other things, has required Member States to remove obstacles to the freedom of movement and establishment in respect of professional practice, employment, trade and business within the territories of the Union.

The method of qualifying by passing an examination which the RIBA had recognized as allowing exemption continued in the period when the 1931 Act was in force, and remained available under the later legislation.

By a further development, from 2007 a Chartered Member of the RIBA may apply for the registration of a Chartered Practice in respect of a business providing architectural services and comprising one or more Chartered Members meeting criteria for, and operating in accordance with, a prescribed scheme.

The historian will find some source material in the Archive which the RIBA has made accessible at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in books, periodicals and other publications of the period which have been deposited and retained in the British Architectural Library (of the RIBA). Another contemporaneous source of information, upon which the following is largely based, is provided by two editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the eleventh of 1910 and the fourteenth of 1929. These editions contain articles which conveniently indicate how examination, as a method of gaining recognition for the attainment of the specialist knowledge and skill required of a professional practitioner, had grown and had been thought of in the period leading up to the passing of the 1931 Act.

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