“I’m the first of a kind,” says Muyiwa Oki. He is, in more than one way. At 32 he will take office on 1 September as the youngest-ever president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Born in Nigeria, he is the first black person in the post. In his regular job – which, like other presidents, he will continue to do part-time during his two-year term – he is an employee rather than a principal, working for the construction company Mace, which isn’t primarily an architectural practice. He aims to speak for the unsung workers of the profession, rather than its bosses: “We need to do more work celebrating the community, the village that creates good architecture,” he says.
We are sitting in a boardroom, its walls lined in leather and Indian laurel, of the institute’s 89-year-old headquarters in Portland Place, central London. Behind him is a portrait of the moustachioed Aston Webb, an architect whose practice designed the Victoria and Albert Museum and the facade of Buckingham Palace, and a previous holder of Oki’s post.
It couldn’t be much clearer how different Oki is from his predecessors, nor the scale of the task he has taken on. Webb, like almost all past presidents, was a white man in charge of a successful practice that designed a series of famous buildings and who is routinely credited with these collective creations as if he were the sole author. Oki’s role at Mace is, as he puts it: “To work with clients on decarbonisation strategies” – a phrase that Webb would not have begun to understand. As president, Oki intends to throw the weight of the RIBA behind the idea of “retrofit first” – that it’s environmentally better to reuse existing buildings whenever possible rather than rebuild them.
Many of us – historians, critics, architects, quiz show hosts – are responsible for the shorthand that ascribes St Paul’s Cathedral to Christopher Wren or the Gherkin to Norman Foster. The focus on great works by great individuals is easy but incomplete – and has a cost: those under-recognised associates tend to go under-rewarded and sometimes exploited, while the many useful things that architects might do that are not under the heading of “genius” (for example, in relation to sustainability) are also pushed to the side.
Oki intends to address these imbalances. He was elected on a platform of championing workers’ rights after an open letter in March 2022, signed by a coalition of pressure groups, that called for the next RIBA president to be “representative of its members”. He aims to end such things as unpaid overtime, which in a 2021 survey by the Future Architects Front was experienced by 88.6% of respondents. He wants to convince practices that “taking care of your employees doesn’t hurt your business” and to “create a working environment where it’s easier to grow”.
At present, he believes: “The route to growth is long and arduous in university and then in practice.” As president, he will support proposals to provide a shorter alternative to the seven-year period of training and professional practice that is the minimum needed to qualify as an architect.
He also says: “Architects need to be more expansive, going into multiple areas, and not think that there’s only this narrow thing of drawing details.” He envisages a profession with “a diversity of people learning to solve the big issues of the day”. For him, “fantastical designs” are less important. Perhaps, if architects make themselves more useful to the world at large, they may earn more and pay their staff better.
Oki’s life in architecture so far has been more about getting things done than aspirations to artistic greatness. “There was a push generally in education to ask: ‘Do you want be like Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright?’ – but it wasn’t particularly my thing, maybe because of the ethnic connection, or lack of it.” He gets more excited by such things as the level of organisation that created Central Park in New York – “A marvel, this relief within a bustling city – this is what good design looks like” – or seeing how the Gherkin “came together and was successfully executed”. He appreciates the “ingenuity” whereby, on this curvaceous-looking building: “There is only one piece of curved glass.”
He admires what he called the “forensic architecture” of the French architects Lacaton & Vassal, best known for their creative reuse of unloved existing buildings: “That going in and finding a solution that could be in built form or not, with elegance and economy.”
At Grimshaw Architects, his employer before Mace, he worked on the rebuild of Euston station to receive the HS2 high-speed railway line. Apart from the fact that the government has now stalled this part of its grand scheme, Oki liked that this was “a big, socially significant infrastructure project, bigger than the client and bigger than us”.
Oki tends to speak in generalities, possibly because the specifics of his programme are not yet ready to be revealed. He will need to be focused in practice, as his job requires robust engagement with government and housebuilding lobbies and others who might care less than architects about the quality of the built environment. The ideal RIBA president could usefully have some of the campaigning zeal of the trade unionist Mick Lynch.
Oki’s job is made a little easier by the fact that he takes over an organisation that should be in better shape than it has been for decades. For all the grandeur of its name, the splendour of its headquarters and its 189 years of history, the RIBA has tended to be ineffective, prone to bitter internal disputes and (despite considerable income and assets) financial shortfalls. Reforms of its governance and structure under Oki’s predecessor, Simon Allford, have hopefully turned it round.
I wouldn’t usually trouble the general reader with the RIBA’s inner workings, but a healthy architectural profession, respectful both to its employees and its clients, is for the good of the buildings and public spaces everywhere. Oki, apart from his personal achievement in getting this job so young, has already made the institute more newsworthy than I can remember. It’s in everyone’s interests that he succeeds.
