Who are they advocating for again?

A couple times a year I get a postcard, and a couple times I laugh. But this time I write, too.

When a person can’t sing, they’re told “don’t quit your day job.” I didn’t intend to make this writing gig into my side hustle, but there was a point I indeed lost my day job through no fault of my own. So I did the next best thing to use one of my God-given talents.

This story is about the other one.

Four years of school and three cracks at the exam later, I became a registered architect almost thirty years ago. (And after the unexpected detours in my life, I was successfully able to be reinstated a few years back.) I wasn’t in a hurry to take the ARE initially, but felt somewhat forced to do so because the window of my being able to take the exam without a) going back to school to secure a five-year Bachelor of Architecture degree or six-year Master of Architecture sheepskin, and b) wasting my time and money having to go through the IDP program, was closing quickly. The prospect of either or both was unappealing to a young stepfather with a family, so I schlepped my way down to Columbus on three occasions to sit in a big room with hundreds of other would-be architects and take the Architectural Registration Exam because I was still grandfathered in.

I’m sure many of those who took and passed the test then went back to their offices or other places of employment and signed up to be a member of the American Institute of Architects. I know I did, and I was a card-carrying member of AIA Toledo for most of the time I was there.

But over time, I grew to dislike the AIA because it advocated for things which likely scored them a lot of points with the ivory tower crowd, but wasn’t as useful to the rank-and-file. They had a good thing going with their AIA contracts and other legal work, but you know how mission creep is. Suddenly they were getting into things which the average architect in the field may have thought was worse than useless. The first example was the IDP program itself: back in the day it was possible to sit for the ARE by working in an office under the supervision of an architect for a sufficient time (as in over a decade) without a college degree. I worked for an architect who did just that, and his design skills were sufficient to maintain a client list. In my case I qualified because I had four years of work experience to go with my degree - had I gone the extra year in college I could have gotten by on two years of work.

Yet as college became less about learning and more about indoctrination, the AIA was pushing for longer and longer degree programs - hence the reason I had to take the ARE. (Before it was an IDP-style program, but one where the AIA and NCARB weren’t getting a cut.)

And then it rolled over into continuing education, which I believe was only a requirement to maintain AIA membership initially. But over time the concept morphed from that of keeping a professional affiliation to a requirement for keeping your professional license - and guess which organization was there to cash in?

Fortunately, I have other ways to comply with these stupid and generally useless continuing education requirements, which have devolved into shilling for “green” or “sustainable” architecture or sales pitches for the sponsor company. If continuing education is really necessary, it should be on the nuances of the updated building codes that come out every three years. That’s the education I need the most, yet they want to sell me on the supposed benefits of LEED compliance or DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) requirements.

And speaking of “diversity,” the AIA is way too invested in pumping up its numbers among the so-called “underserved” population. I don’t worry about the amount of pigmentation or the presence (or lack thereof) of a Y chromosome, I just worry about whether they do good design that satisfies a client.

Yet here is the latest AIA missive, telling me “we’re taking on urgent issues like climate change and inequities in the built environment, in numbers that can make a difference.” While they claim over 96,000 members, the AIA only represents a fraction of practicing architects, as AIA also counts members who are students, those in “allied professions,” and emeritus members who no longer practice among their ranks. (As of 2021, there are about 122,000 registered architects nationwide. I’d guess maybe half are in AIA, moreso in large urban areas.)

I need my architect advocates to do two main things, but AIA doesn’t seem to be interested in them: figure out a way for architects to get better fees, and to bring about a decent statute of repose so that architects aren’t sued for something they did twenty years ago. If a design is flawed, that will come out a lot sooner.

The climate’s going to change no matter what we build and I believe architecture should be a merit-based profession. So I suppose the AIA is going to waste someone’s exhorbitant dues on sending me more postcards I’m going to laugh at.

And don’t forget: you can also Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.