The Architects’ Revolutionary Council: Architectural anarchy in Britain & Ireland in the 1970s and how to destroy the R.I.B.A.

Out of the architectural establishment of nineteen seventies Britain came one of the most subversive and radical architecture pressure groups in British history. A group of architects, planners, renegades, and political radicals who sought the overthrow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

The Architect’s Revolutionary Council (ARC) set out to remake the architecture profession and this thesis is a history of them and the ‘movement which has not been called a movement’ to which they were a central. Their efforts, and those of many outside of the profession, coalesced into an architectural movement that provides us today with a clear example from history of how to democratise architecture and destroy the RIBA as an elite social class within which architects and their institutions sit.

I have established, using anarchist ideas and theories of organisation the ways in which these movements, that whilst not having a single political credo the ARC have conformed in almost all cases to anarchist modes of ‘doing architecture’. The people of Bridgtown, Colne Valley, Covent Garden, The Divis Flats, Ealing, were ordinary people, spontaneously originating grassroots organisations to take control of their built environment.

The Architects’ Revolutionary Council was a roughly formed, militant, loud, and brash response by working class people in architecture to Architecture having divorced itself from most people in these Islands.

I conclude that the ARC is the British architectural manifestation of a real attempt to forge a new architecture. I have told a history that has not previously been known in toto and defined a movement in British architecture history that had not previously been called a movement.

Today Architecture remains the province of the rich and powerful. The ARC were right, if we want to have a truly democratic and accessible form of architecture in Britain we have to look outside of the profession. Architecture should not include non-architects out of a sense of duty, or in some lip service to participation, but because they realise that they cannot succeed in their mission to provide for them without their contribution.