Ray Verrall

Project Title

(Re)constructing the 1958 RIBA Oxford Conference on Architectural Education)

Project Description

The 1958 RIBA Oxford Conference on Architectural Education reshaped the British architectural profession — reinventing its framework of qualifications and idea of knowledge, and shifting its position within society, industry, and academia. The Conference enshrined in both outlook and structure the values of technocratic modernity forged in the immediate prewar and postwar years, and can now be understood as a redolent expression of its time.

Until the 1960s, students of architecture in Britain continued to enjoy a variety of entry routes to the profession. However, whilst facilitating a certain amount of social mobility, this situation also produced widely differing standards and expectations of education and training, which became imagined as unacceptable for a profession then seemingly concerned with preserving prestige and proclaiming expertise. Aiming to raise and unify professional and educational standards, the Conference severed architectural training from its vocational hinterland, situating it instead as a detached, academic endeavour.

Several decades later — following the expansion and marketisation of universities in the UK, and professional ruptures such as the de-regulation of architects' fees — the legacy of the Conference is a contemporary qualification system and pedagogical approach increasingly incongruent with the concerns and mechanisms of contemporary practice, resistant to change, and sitting anachronistically amidst an intellectual, cultural, and economic terrain that has shifted around it. Only now, prompted by recent EU directives and informed by decades of debate, is the RIBA fundamentally restructuring this framework.

For something so consequential, the Conference remains superficially examined. Although several authors have described its impact, little attempt has been made to map the dynamics of its provenance and the motives behind its agenda. Our understanding is based largely on a summary — sanitised, one might say — report prepared by Sir Leslie Martin, who chaired the Conference. His uncontested account suggests that the discussions were straightforward and attracted little opposition. My project unpicks this mythologised reading, and tells a broader, deeper story.

In the absence of the original verbatim transcripts, there is no way of knowing how the Conference proceedings actually played out. However, instead of seeing this as an epistemological problem, my thesis inverts this absence into an opportunity for "perhapsing" provisional narratives, built upon the full extent of available empirical evidence but augmented by interpretive readings. By revealing and exploring the convergence of cultural conditions, webs of relationships, and value-systems of key actors, the thesis uncovers deep tensions around questions of professional knowledge,
distinctions between education and training, and definitions of the architect's societal identity — tensions which continue to resonate today.

Supervisors

Professor Adam Sharr

Professor Zeynep Kezer

Dr Stephen Parnell

Qualifications

• Postgraduate Certificate in Research Training, Newcastle University (2017)

• ARB Part III, Architects' Professional Examination Authority in Scotland (2011)

• MArch Architectural Studies, Cardiff University (2007)

• BSc (Hons) Architectural Studies, Cardiff University (2005)

• BA (Hons) Fine Art (Combined and Media Arts), Sheffield Hallam University (1999)

Conference Papers and Publications

'A Very Brief History of UK Architectural Training'. Book section in Architecture Apprenticeship Handbook, ed. by Daniel Goodricke and Luke Murray (RIBA Publishing, 2024), pp. 18–20.

'A Curious Failure to Correlate and Co-ordinate: The 1956 RIBA Conference on Building Training'. Paper presented at Production Studies International Conference, Newcastle University, March 2024.

'Situational Perhapsing'. Book chapter in Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture, ed. by Ashley Mason and Adam Sharr (Routledge, 2022), pp. 28–39.

'Perhapsing Gaps: (Re)constructing the 1958 RIBA Oxford Conference'. Paper presented at Architectures/Archives, SAHGB Conference, June 2020 (online).

'Repositioning the Profession: The 1958 RIBA Oxford Conference and its Impact on Architectural Education'. Paper presented at SAHGB PhD Symposium, March 2017, London.

Research Group Memberships

• Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC), Newcastle University

Contact

raymond.verrall@newcastle.ac.uk