Just Practising

76% of Architects Practices are fewer than 10 people

Here is a breakdown of the size of RIBA Chartered architects practices by size (no. of employees). It shows that over three quarters of the 2800 chartered architects practices in the UK have fewer than 10 staff, and more than half have fewer than five. Why is this important? Firstly it is interesting to consider why it [...]

Are you Aspirational?

Do you aspire to be in the Architectural Review? When you were a student, did you covet an association with the AR – thinking – one day, I’ll design a building that gets featured in the AR. Then I’ll have made it, but in the meantime, I will get a subscription as soon as I [...]

RIBA President Ruth Reed in Chelmsford

On Wednesday the new, first woman president of the Royal Institute of British Architects continued her tour of the East of England with a stop off in Chelmsford to see the new Salvation Army Citadel and to meet local architects and architecture students from Anglia Ruskin University. Working for a Chelmsford architect myself I was [...]

A Different Mind Set

Guest Blog post by Philippa Bowen Life is full of coincidences. Su Butcher and I met for a chat over lunch a couple of weeks ago and one of the conversations we had struck a real chord with me. I had had the same conversation with 2 businesses I work with in the last month; what is [...]

Don’t faint, I’m going to be in London

Cheshire Cheese, Tower Hill, EC3 Originally uploaded by Ewan-M In two weeks time I’ll be running a twitter workshop at the Emap Construction Marketing Conference in London. Whether you’re able to be at the training day on Wednesday 3rd February or not, fortunately be2camp are organising a tweetup (a social event organised via twitter) afterwards at this charming [...]

How I deal with Cold Calls

After a conversation on twitter about cold callers this morning, I was asked how I deal with cold callers, so here are my thoughts: Remember the person who rings you is a person, and be civil. You don’t know who s/he is yet anyway. Find out what they really want – If it’s your job to [...]

Architects who tweet – over 850 in the league

Welcome to the 162 new additions to the Architects Twitter League. I started the league at the end of 2008 as a way of putting architects on twitter in touch with each other, I hope you meet some new contacts via the league. You can see the full league of Architects on Twitter here. Each architect in [...]

The Elephant in the Room

On Tuesday I had a the pleasure to attend the TechCrunch Europe Christmas Crunch, an event for techy people hosted by the portal for news of internet and mobile companies. I say pleasure because as you know, I’m a secret techie. But what interested me was how some of the same problems that haunt architects also [...]

Architects joining twitter peaked in Spring 09

Three months ago, with the help of Rob Annable (@eversion on twitter) I analysed the signup dates of all the architects in the Architects Twitter League. The plot showed a huge growth in architects joining twitter in early 2009, but dropping off before the summer. Since October, another 79 architects have been found and joined the [...]

I’ve got a new blog – about Networking Online for Professionals

As you know I’ve been writing about architects here for nearly a year, and sometimes I’ve strayed off topic a bit. One of my favourite alternative topics of choice is networking, particularly networking online, and this became the subject of my talk to the RIBA in October. Now occasionally taking your blog off topic is fine, but [...]