Coffee this week with Alan Jones, newly installed as president of the RIBA. I went to talk to him about the Young Architects and Developers Alliance (YADA) that I started with Jane Duncan during her presidency. Conversation about young architects and how to increase opportunities for career progression is always interesting – ours quickly widened to cover the relationship more generally between architects and developers and, most interestingly, how we should be working better to help architects make more money.

You’d think that conversation might be anathema to a developer whose priority is to keep costs as low as possible on a scheme and revenues high. But that’s too simple an analysis. What developers really want is value for money. It’s much less important what something costs if it can provide an exponential increase in the value of the product it delivers. Architects have the greatest capacity of all contributors to a scheme to either reduce its cost or increase the price it will command in the market through their professional design skills. It’s only a lack of understanding and trust between architects and their clients that makes them feel as if they are being treated like just another line in a cost appraisal.

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