Strange Case of the Missing Assistant

This essay has its origin in issues related to the alleged failure in 2018 of the Royal Incorporated of Architects in Scotland (RIAS), a chapter of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), to comply with the requirements of its Royal Charter. This engendered a wider inquiry into the operations and legislation affecting architecture, enacted by and on the RIBA since its founding in 1834, in the promulgation and regulation of the interrelated processes of architectural education, registration and practice in the United Kingdom (UK). Pivotal moments in the late nineteenth-century debate on the "professional or artist-architect", the enactment of the Registration Acts of the 1930s, the 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Education, the Monopolies legislation of the 1970s, the 1997 Registration Act, and the 2003 European Union Directive amended in 2015 are all put to the test by the contemporaneous structures and procedures of the office and the architects work. Texts on and by architects relating to education, registration and practice, as well as the various reports made by the RIBA, the UK Architects Registration Council (ARCUK) and subsequently the Architects Registration Board (ARB), are referenced and their impact on the architectural profession is assessed. The essay will seek to demonstrate that decisions made and directions chosen at those pivotal points and the lack of understanding of the links between them have left endemic structural flaws in education, registration and practice in the UK unresolved.