The role of RIBA president is a Victorian-era relic that has lost its relevance and should be scrapped, writes Catherine Slessor.
One of the perks of being president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is that you get your name chiselled for posterity into the marble portals of its Portland Place headquarters.
Royal Gold Medal winners are also accorded this honour, so one portal features a "who's who" roll call of luminaries, such as Mies van der Rohe, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid, while the other constitutes a rather less stellar "who's that?" parade of placemen. Lancelot Keay? Larry Rolland? Lionel Gordon Baliol Brett, 4th Viscount Esher?
It's hard to fathom what a president actually does
And of course, they are, overwhelmingly, men; 174 years elapsed before Ruth Reed became the RIBA's first female president in 2009. But it's safe to say that the oeuvre and reputations of the vast majority, both then and now, would not figure on the radar of a Gold Medal jury.
Established in 1835, the office of RIBA president is certainly historic. But in the modern era, its lustre has palpably diminished, becoming synonymous with a struggle to attract credible candidates, embarrassingly sparse voter turnouts, low-level imbroglios and a general lack of purpose and direction. All in spite of some tub-thumping manifestos and the two-year presidency now being a remunerated position to the tune of up to £60,000 per annum.
Aside from swishing around in the presidential regalia at Stirling Prize and Gold Medal soirées, delivering anodyne responses to government policy announcements, chairing a handful of committees and posing artfully on the RIBA website, it's hard to fathom what a president actually does.
Recently, attention focused for the wrong reasons on RIBA president-elect Chris Williamson, reduced to regurgitating platitudes in the Architects' Journal in an attempt to justify his practice working in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, his involvement with the high-speed railway that will run under The Line, the showpiece of the Saudi regime's controversial regional terraforming project Neom, now toxically tarred with accusations of human rights violations.
Williamson is certainly not alone in succumbing to the lure of the culture-washing petrodollar, but his shifty ambiguity about the precise technicalities of his involvement, in tandem with a vacuous argument about how societies change "and it is important to look at the direction of travel", marked an unedifying start to a presidential term that doesn't technically begin for a year.
Other recent presidential tenures have also failed to inspire confidence. Alan Jones, president from 2019 to 2021, had the misfortune to take the helm just as Covid struck, yet at a time when architects desperately needed an articulate figurehead to steer them through unprecedented challenges, their president was nowhere to be seen, addressing allegations of an affair and misuse of RIBA resources, a brouhaha that even seeped into the lurid purview of the Daily Mail.
The damping down of radical ambition is another dismaying aspect of the presidential experience
Williamson will succeed current incumbent Muyiwa Oki, who was put forward by a group of grassroots organisations, including Future Architects Front (FAF) and Section of Architectural Workers (SAW). As the institute's first Black president and also its youngest, he is at an early stage in his career compared with many of his predecessors.
For all those reasons, Oki's election marked a refreshing break from the norm. As an architectural worker, he is alert to the concerns of his peers, especially the contentious issue of unpaid overtime, without which the operational structure of British architectural practice would collapse like a cake left out in the rain.
Once in post, however, campaigning vigour gave way to platitudes and backtracking. SAW believes it was due to internal pressure from the RIBA, to discredit the feasibility of enacting genuine change.
Obviously there is a limit to what can be achieved by one person in a role that is largely ceremonial, but the damping down of radical ambition is another dismaying aspect of the presidential experience and can only serve to discourage similarly motivated candidates. But perhaps that's just the point.
Though the RIBA has reframed its governance structure, replacing its unwieldy council with a new, slimline body of trustees, the terms of its presidency remain basically the same: a two-year stint, with no real teeth or powers, which tends to attract a dismal succession of provincial non-entities, elected by a minuscule fraction of the membership, who fancy a break from practice to lord it around Portland Place.
Only 4,462 RIBA members voted in July's presidential election, an all-time low of 9.3 per cent. Williamson prevailed at the second stage ballot with 45 per cent of votes. That's just over 2,000 out of a possible 44,000; hardly a resounding mandate.
Architects don't appear to care who speaks for them
Rather, it gives a stark sense of the disillusion and disinterest felt by the vast majority of the membership as to who will next be swishing around in the presidential regalia.
Clearly, architects don't appear to care who speaks for them, but wouldn't it be refreshing to hear the RIBA president on the Today programme or Question Time, explaining policy, making informed arguments and generally seeming like an intelligent and empathic voice amid the static?
The public regularly hears from the representatives of doctors, teachers, even train drivers, valorising their skills and contribution to society; yet never those of architects.
So how to pull out of this death spiral? Expand the gene pool beyond practising architects? Rethink the terms of the appointment? More media training? Depressingly, if previous form is anything to go by, the RIBA will simply close ranks and chunter on.
Perhaps, with the RIBA's bicentenary looming in 2034, it's time to think about retiring the role of president. Fundamentally, it's an antiquated "good chap" relic from the Victorian era that now seems hopelessly out of time and incapable of being meaningfully reformed.
In any event, the RIBA's marble portals are running out of space for the presidential roll of mediocrity. Time to stop chiselling.
Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the Twentieth Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.
The photo is by Steve Cadman.
Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.