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‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural Association. This was flattery of the highest order, designed to butter up the audience of budding architects and inflate their sense of how much power they had to shape society. It’s remarkable then, 100 years later, how powerless architects have become when it comes to the biggest architectural crisis of our time: housing. According to the Royal Institute of British Architects, only 6 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects. Everything else is dealt with by volume housebuilders, with the top three alone building 25 per cent of them, churned out from identikit designs.
Architects are salivating at the prospect of being in the driving seat of the government machine
In the niche architects are left with, making houses affordable has become the key focus.
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