Insights from tomorrow’s architects: how Bartlett Part 3 students see the future of practice

As part of their Part 3 studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture, candidates on our course are tasked with producing an opinion piece. This allows them to explore and develop their thinking around specific issues facing our discipline and their role in shaping its future – distinct from the specific focus of their case study, which remains a central piece of Part 3 scholarship. The exercise encourages them to engage critically with architectural practice as it stands today while considering its wider social, economic, and environmental responsibilities.

In the coming weeks, you will have the chance to read a selection of five of these texts, each offering distinctive perspectives on topical issues and raising overlooked questions. These essays capture a profession in transition, where debates on inclusivity, sustainability, and work culture intersect with new challenges from regulatory reform, economic pressures, and shifting industry expectations.

Molly Harper’s Appreciating Women in Architecture examines gender representation in the field, challenging the status quo and advocating for greater inclusivity. While conversations around gender in architecture are not new, Harper’s essay highlights the persistence of structural inequalities that continue to shape career trajectories, workplace cultures, and the visibility of women in leadership roles in her generation.

Her argument is not just about recognising these disparities but about actively working to dismantle them – ensuring that diversity is embedded into the profession in ways that are substantive rather than symbolic, an argument that gains significance given the current political climate.

Diego de Silos Urena’s Teleworking: Urban Utopia or Dystopia? considers the changing landscape of work in architectural practice, asking whether the shift towards remote working represents a positive evolution or a threat to the profession’s collaborative ethos. The pandemic forced an industry known for its studio culture into a new mode of working – one that, for many, has become permanent.

Urena explores how this shift has affected productivity, work-life balance, and firm structures, but also questions what it means for creativity and the exchange of ideas. In an industry that thrives on conversation and iteration, can a decentralised workforce sustain the same level of engagement? Or does teleworking risk isolating architects from both their peers and the urban environments they design for?

Sustainability is a pressing concern for architects today, and both Hadley Clark’s Finding the Grey Space and Robert Serman’s Haste to Banish Waste examine different aspects of the profession’s response to environmental challenges. Clark’s essay explores the complexity of implementing sustainability in practice in a refreshingly architectural reading of the subject.

Whilst sustainability frameworks provide guidance, they can also be rigid, limiting innovation rather than fostering it. Clark argues for a more adaptive and nuanced approach – one that allows for sustainable design to be responsive rather than prescriptive.

For decades, architectural education has struggled to balance creative exploration with professional preparedness

Serman, on the other hand, focuses on material reuse and circular economy principles, calling attention to architecture’s role in the global waste crisis. His essay critiques the industry’s reliance on extraction and disposal, advocating instead for practices that prioritise longevity, adaptability, and repurposing. Many architects support sustainability in principle, but Serman highlights the gap between ambition and execution, asking how the profession can take more direct responsibility for reducing waste at every stage of design and construction.

Together, these essays explore significant themes – labour practices, gender equity, social and climate justice – at a time of major restructuring within the profession. This period of change has been accelerated by the ARB’s Tomorrow’s Architects reform to education and training. Despite a limited response to the consultation – just 672 respondents out of 41,886 registered architects at the end of 2023 – Tomorrow’s Architects and the resulting competency outcomes set out by the ARB are driving a shift in how architects are prepared for practice and maintain their professional standing.

The reform and its expanded competencies highlight the growing demands placed on architects, both within the profession and by wider economic, political, and environmental forces. It also raises fundamental questions about what it means to be an architect today.

For decades, architectural education has struggled to balance creative exploration with professional preparedness, or the so-called divide between theory and practice. The evolving demands of the industry – shaped by economic pressures, regulatory shifts, technological advancements, and cultural change – require graduates to be technically adept while remaining critically engaged. They must learn to operate within the profession’s structures while also questioning and challenging them.

As the profession continues to be shaped by the to and fro of internal and external pressures, it is more important than ever for architects to remain active participants in the conversation

If the project has been central to architectural education since the formalisation of the profession (some would trace its origins to Vitruvius’s treatise in the 1st century BCE), then today, it is practice – its design and potential critical agency – that has become architecture’s new locus of inquiry.

These essays reflect that shift. They are written by candidates on the verge of entering the profession, grappling with its complexities, and thinking beyond the immediate demands of accreditation. They engage with architecture not just as a technical discipline but as a broader cultural and social practice – one that must continually adapt and struggles to remain relevant.

As they step into practice, these short texts bring with them fresh perspectives, a willingness to question established norms, and a commitment to meaningful change. Their insights and ambitions signal a promising future for architecture – one that strengthens its role within the wider built environment industry, contributes to public discourse, and serves society with greater inclusivity, sustainability, and social purpose.

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What also emerges from these essays – and from many others submitted this year – is a recognition of how far the scope of Part 3 has exceeded mere ‘accreditation’. No longer confined to a narrow professional qualification, it now serves as a space for critical reflection, allowing candidates to position themselves within the profession and articulate their vision for its future. The challenges facing architecture today are complex, but a disciplinary perspective can be a way to think with and about the world.

These articles, to be published in BD over the coming weeks, remind us that architecture is more than just the buildings we design – it is a discipline shaped by ideas, values, and the people who engage with them. As the profession continues to be shaped by the to and fro of internal and external pressures, it is more important than ever for architects to remain active participants in the conversation.

Through this initiative, we hope to encourage further reflection, dialogue, and action, ensuring that architecture continues to evolve in ways that are meaningful, responsible, and forward-looking.

I would like to thank BD’s Ben Flatman and architect Eleanor Jolliffe for their support of this initiative, as well as tutors Nick Jewell and Donald McCrory, and external reviewers Kay Sadiq and Stefanie Fischer for their careful review of the work. Finally, I would like to thank my predecessor Felicity Atekpe for first imagining this project.

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