Royal Institute of British Architects

Mm.

And we're lobbying with the RIBA and the ARB for protection of the function-

Mm

... of an architect.

I am your host, Maria Skoudari.

And this week, we will be talking about the latest updates to the RIBA Domestic Professional Services contracts.

Today's episode meets PC1 and PC2 of the Part 3 criteria.

And make sure to stay until the end for today's scenario.

Now, before we get into which contracts have been amended and what the changes look like, I just wanted to remind you of the current suite offered by the RIBA, which includes the RIBA building contracts, which are the agreements between the client and the contractor, split into the domestic building contract for consumer clients and the concise building contract for commercial clients.

Then there are the RIB professional services contracts, which is what we're focusing on today, split in two families.

On the consumer side, we've got the RIBA Domestic Professional Services Contract for architectural services, a version for conservation architectural services, and a version for interior design services published jointly with the British Institute of Interior Design.

Now on the commercial side, we've got the standard, concise and sub-consultant professional services contracts, and the Client Advisor Professional Services Contract.

It is a framework developed by me and I have developed it from observations of how projects are approached and how decisions are made.

Its stages of work are very closely connected to RIBA, the RIBA-based stages of works, drawing on the Royal Institute of British Architects' approach to organising building projects.

Because in essence, that's how they are developed.

But the RIBA stages of works are a little bit too stark, speaking too much to the professionals.

If detailed work reveals a problem, an earlier decision may need another look.

If something changes on sites, the information and records may need updating.

And although the blueprint is RIBA-based, its numbered questions are my client-facing way of explaining the process.

They should not be treated as identical labels for every RIBA stage.

£2,000 to £9,000.

And, you know, the Royal Institute of British Architects did, you know, a diagram where they showed that, you know, over the course of your study, you would accrue a certain amount of debt.

And over the course of your working life, you wouldn't ever pay off because the interest rate on it was always higher than your salary.

And that's like a scary position to be in for a profession where you think no one without private means will enter the profession.

I mean, it

quickly becomes an institution because

we went through all of the accreditation for Royal Institute of British Architects, which is a validator, the Architects Registration Bureau, the Professional Accreditor, the Office for Students, which gives you the ability to borrow their tuition fees, the Quality Assurance Agency.

So there's a whole range of things that you have to... navigate as a kind of buccaneering bureaucrat to figure out the way through these routes.

On each side of the figure of empire stand the personified elements of its greatness— on the right of the spectator industry and agriculture on the left science letters and art above the occasion of the celebration commemorated is expressed by two winged figures representing the year eighteen eighty seven the advancing figure and the year eighteen thirty seven with averted head holding each a wreath where these wreaths interlock the letters v r i appear and over all the words in commemoration the issue of both the new coins and the medal began on june twenty first the day appointed for the celebration of her majesty's jubilee illustrated london news section ten

Section 11 of Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887. bricks and brickwork part one by professor t roger smith f r i b a footnote a recent lecture delivered at carpenter's hall london wall e c building news and footnote timber stone earth are the three materials most used by the builder in all parts of the world where timber is very plentiful as in norway or switzerland it is freely used even though other materials are obtainable and seems to be preferred notwithstanding the risk of fire which attends its use where timber is scarce and stone can be had houses are built of stone where there is no timber and no stone they are built of earth sometimes in its natural state sometimes made into bricks and sun-dried but more often made into bricks and burned london is one of the places that occupies a spot which has long ceased to yield timber and yields no stone so we fall back on earth burnt into the form of bricks Brick was employed in remote antiquity.

The Egyptians, who were great and skillful builders, used it sometimes.

And, as we know from the Book of Exodus, they employed the forced labor of the captives or tributaries whom they had in their power in the hard task of brickmaking.

Then move to a few of the headline shifts from the consultation that didn't survive in the form they were proposed and why that matters.

And lastly, we'll look at how the RIBA and the wider profession have responded to the published framework.

So starting with the first theme, what's changed since the consultation in December? So the most obvious thing, if you open the new NPPF next to the old one, is that it doesn't look like an NPPF you'll recognize.

It has had a whole scale restructure into lettered policies, each explicitly labeled as either a plan-making policy or a national decision-making policy.

So that captures some of the proposed changes that, uh, raised concerns during the consultation and how they were addressed within the published framework.

Now, finally, in today's episode, let's look at how the profession has responded to these changes and the new framework.

So the RIBA's response was broadly positive in tone.

They welcomed the framework's shift towards a more proactive plan-led approach, and specifically welcomed two things; the requirement for local plans to set out the proportion of accessible homes on major developments, and the clearer expectations for mixed tenure delivery on larger sites.

In 1988, he founded O'Donnell and Tuomey with Sheila O'Donnell, who's here with us tonight, a practice that has given us the Irish Film Institute and the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, the Glucksman in Cork, the Lyric in Belfast, the Saw Swee Hock Student Center at the LSE, and the V&A East Museum in London, amongst many others.

He's made six appearances at the Venice Biennale as the inaugural professor of architectural design at UCD, and in 2015, jointly with Sheila, has won both the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, each given for a lifetime's work.

But we're here tonight to talk about John's writing.

First Quarter, which is the first installment of his memoir, took us from a childhood spent moving from town to town around Ireland, as far as the founding of the practice, in prose that owed as much to poetry and drama and a literary tradition as it does to architecture writing.

They can have a role in doing that.

The sort of standards piece is where the RIBA should take its role seriously in that.

So in maintaining the standard of what the mark of being an RIBA chartered practice needs to be.

So that's where that can be.

So it should be more than The starting point was the surveys.

Do you think the scale actually has some power and inherently has more ability to move things forward in a certain way?

Yeah, yeah, very much so.

So one thing I give you an example, Whenever I was talking at big conferences with RIBA or even at parliament, I always started off with like, I'm a president of the RIBA, looking after 50,000 members.