When the Institute of British Architects
was founded in London in 1834 – it added ‘Royal’
to its name in 1837 – education and research were
at the heart of its objectives. According to its
charter, its purpose is ‘the general advancement
of Civil Architecture’, and ‘promoting and
facilitating the acquirement of the knowledge of the various arts and
sciences connected therewith’. From the outset, it was intended, in the
words of its founders, that the Institute would possess not only a ‘Library
of Works of every kind connected with Architecture’ but also a ‘Museum
of Antiquities, Models, Casts, Specimens of the various Materials used
in building’. Architectural drawings were collected from early on, as an
educational tool for students, a source of inspiration for architects and a
record of British architectural practice. Nearly 190 years later, the RIBA’s
collections consist of one million drawings, 1.5 million manuscripts and
archival documents, 1.6 million photographs, five hundred architectural
models, and over one thousand other artefacts, which range from sixteenth-century
drawing instruments to C.F.A. Voysey’s umbrella. Together with
the RIBA’s library they form the national collection for architecture in the
United Kingdom. It is therefore astonishing and even shocking that there
is a serious threat that from 2027 they will be homeless.
For their first 140 years the collections were housed in the RIBA’s
headquarters, which from 1934 has been the purpose-built 66 Portland
Place, designed by George Grey Wornum and widely admired as one of
Britain’s most distinctive inter-war buildings. By 1972 space had run out
and so the drawings, models and other artefacts were moved to premises
in Portman Square, next door to Home House, then the home of the
Courtauld Institute. The library, archives and photographic collections
stayed at Portland Place, where the books and photographs remain. Thanks
to a spectacular rate of acquisitions over thirty years, by the end of the last
century the Drawings Collection had greatly outgrown Portman Square.
In 1999 an imaginative deal was struck between the RIBA and the Victoria
and Albert Museum (V&A), which owns the second largest collection
of architectural drawings in the United Kingdom. The collections at
Portman Square, together with the archives, would be moved to the V&A,
which would provide a dedicated reading room adjacent to the one used
by the museum’s department of prints and drawings. The benefits were
evident, not least to the V&A, which in partnership with the RIBA opened
the museum’s first permanent dedicated gallery and exhibition space for
architecture, furnished with many loans from the RIBA collections, and
appointed its first curators for architecture. The advantages to scholarship
and education of these pooled resources and of the two collections of
drawings being available in one building were enormous. It has not been
only scholars who have benefited, however, as around a quarter of all
requests to see material in the Drawings Collection are from architects,
architectural students and designers, fulfilling the founding principles of
not only the RIBA but also the V&A, a museum that has as one of its main
purposes the encouragement of contemporary design.
Completed in 2004, the complex move of the collections and the
fitting out of the new spaces to receive them were paid for largely by a
grant of £3.27 million from what was then the Heritage Lottery Fund (now
the National Lottery Heritage Fund). Since then, the RIBA has paid an given to the museum in 2004. At a twenty-year review of the arrangement
the V&A proposed only a modest rent rise and the creation of a new
curatorial position funded by the RIBA to work across both collections.
When the RIBA decided not to accept the proposal, negotiations came to
an end. A formal announcement was made in June last year that the V&A
and RIBA trustees have ‘determined that the Architecture Partnership
will run for a further five years before concluding in 2027’
The background to this decision, which dismayed the V&A, was
the election in 2021 of the architect Simon Allford to the two-year post
of president of the RIBA. Having inherited the realisation that after
ninety years the Portland Place building was in urgent need of repair
and refurbishment, he decided that this should form the basis for a radical
rearrangement of the collections so that they could form the centrepiece
of a new initiative, by which the headquarters would become a ‘House
of Architecture’, designed, in the words of the RIBA’s website, ‘to inspire
members, professionals, students and the public through physical and
virtual debate, discussion, learning and exhibitions’. Whereas the move of
the collections to the V&A had been preceded by extensive consultation
with all stakeholders, the plans for the House of Architecture were agreed
by the board of the RIBA without any public consultation, and if there is
a business plan underpinning it none has been made public.
Shortly after it had been announced that the relationship with the
V&A was being terminated, serious problems began to emerge. Following
the appointment of Benedetti Architects to carry out the refurbishment
of 66 Portland Place, estimated at £20 million, it soon became clear that
the cost and timescale of the work had been seriously underestimated.
Due to begin in 2024, its start has now been pushed back to 2025 at the
earliest. No reassurance has been provided about whether the library and
photographic collections will be accessible while this work is carried out.
At the same time, the RIBA is committed to another expensive project,
the expansion of its collections store in the Piper Centre, Fulham, to
accommodate the archives as well as to provide increased space for the
drawings, and the upgrading of its environmental controls so that the
photographic collections can be stored there, which is not at present
possible for conservation reasons.
There was never any possibility that the Drawings Collection would
move to 66 Portland Place, where there is no more room for it than
there was in 1972. It is extraordinary that the trustees of the RIBA agreed
to end the relationship with the V&A without any clear idea of where
the collection would be housed. Despite vaguely expressed hopes that a
building would be found for it near 66 Portland Place – an area of some
of the most expensive property in London and short of buildings capable
of being converted to museum use with the floor loadings required to
store hundreds of thousands of drawings – there seems to be a real danger
that in 2027 there will be no alternative to placing the drawings and their
associated collections into deep, inaccessible and expensive storage. It
beggars belief that the trustees of the RIBA – which is a charity – should
so patently have failed to exercise proper control over the ambitions of
its president, and should have so casually abandoned a highly productive
relationship with a great museum on the basis of vague and evidently
ill-thought-out plans.
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