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In the second part of Archinect In-Depth: Licensure, we chart the origins of licensure in the United States. We explore how a combination of safety concerns, technological advances, and insecurity among architects over their own relevance led to the protection of the title 'architect,' legislation which remains in force in every jurisdiction of the United States today.

Before Licensure

From the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the United States underwent a period of major economic, commercial, and technological transformation. So, too, did its architects. Up to this point, the formalized architectural profession that we recognize today did not exist, and the title ‘architect’ was not protected by law. Across the construction industry, a wide range of individuals with skills in drawing, craft, or patronage could call themselves an architect and lead the design and delivery of a building.

“In those days, prior to the widespread adoption of architectural registration laws, what separated a mere draughtsman from the accolade of ‘architect’ was the possession of a client and a commission in-hand,” George Barnett Johnston writes in Assembling the Architect: The History and Theory of Professional Practice, a book that includes licensure in a wider history of the development of the U.S. architecture profession. Such draughtsmen, designers, and technologists did not emerge from a singular, standardized education but rather from a range of vocational and academic paths, each more attuned and responsive to local conventions than to shared national codes or customs.

This model of professional practice, or lack thereof, would become strained by forces shaping the built environment of the late 1800s. Chief among these was urbanization. In 1860, 20% of the U.S. population lived in cities. By 1900, this figure would rise to 40% and, by 1920, would pass 50%. The mass movement from rural to urban areas gave supply and demand to a host of new technologies deployed in construction, from heating and mechanical ventilation to structural steel and elevators, demanding a level of expertise beyond that which the ‘master builder’ architect traditionally required.

This model of professional practice, or lack thereof, would become strained by forces shaping the built environment of the late 1800s.

“For centuries, the list of trades, the work of which went to form a completed building, changed but little, when of a sudden, and within a single fifty years, were added steam-heating, mechanical ventilation, electric light and power, hydraulic and electrical elevators, and other equally technical developments of the applied sciences,” Frank Miles Day wrote in the first unpublished draft of the influential The Handbook of Architectural Practice in 1917. “The Architect staggered along under his added burden for years, trying to keep himself abreast of subjects, each one of which, developing as rapidly as it did, was sufficient to fill the mind of a specialist.”

The rising scientific and technological complexity of construction brought with it a renewed emphasis on finance. As building technology advanced, the financial and organizational control of buildings grew in scope to a level beyond the managerial capabilities of typical architecture offices. More widely, urbanization gave rise to a prevailing business and capital-motivated culture in the United States, with property and real estate increasingly serving as instruments of profit and speculation in the eyes of clients and developers. Architects were, therefore, required to adapt to a “new political economy of building, one still emerging from a tradition-bound building culture founded upon patronage and handicraft,” as Johnston describes.

A Profession Under Siege

The urban-centric technological and financial upheavals of the late 1800s would present two interconnected though distinct crises for the architectural profession of the time, both leading directly to the birth of architectural licensure.

The first centered on building safety. The completion of the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1885, regarded as the world’s first skyscraper, alongside Carnegie Hall in New York five years later, exemplified the ambitious architectural culture of U.S. cities at the time. However, such feats were joined by what architect and journalist F.W. Fitzpatrick described as the nation’s “annual ash heap” in 1906.

“A million buildings are wiped out of existence inside of ten years,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “In New York, they average 8,700 fires a year; in Chicago, 4,100. Our normal record is three theaters, three public halls, twelve churches, ten schools, two hospitals, two asylums, two colleges, six apartment-houses, three department stores, two jails, twenty-six hotels, one hundred and forty flats, and sixteen hundred homes burned up every week in the year. Last year we indulged in 45,000 fires. The year before we burned up over 6,000 people.”

The implication that architects were responsible for such incidents led to calls from within and beyond the architectural community for a more formalized, controlled, and regulated profession.

In some of the most deadly and high-profile incidents, design and construction played a significant role. In 1903, 600 people were killed when Chicago’s Iroquois Theater caught fire, with the death toll exacerbated by difficult locks on emergency exits and poorly designed fire escapes. In 1922, meanwhile, 98 were killed in D.C.’s Knickerbocker Theater after snow accumulated on the roof, which collapsed due to inadequate design. Against the backdrop of the “annual ash heap,” Fitzpatrick singled out architects for blame.

“Architects are to blame, I say, because so many of them think only of the pretty exterior and dainty effects to be had inside with fine wood, etc,” Fitzpatrick continued. “Everything is sacrificed to those considerations. The safety, the stability of the structure are minor considerations… The average layman knows but little about fireproofing construction. It is the architect’s province, nay, his very duty, to educate his client in that respect. He has been derelict in that duty, and just to that extent do I charge him here with being an ‘accessory before the fact’ to as near a crime as one can well come.”

The implication that architects were responsible for such incidents led to calls from within and beyond the architectural community for a more formalized, controlled, and regulated profession. “Such sober recognition of the interlinked, collective nature of professional status and repute increasingly mitigated in favor of state regulation of architects in the interest of safeguarding the life and property of the citizenry,” Johnston notes.

While efforts to improve building safety played a role in the establishment of architectural licensure, they did not do so alone. Architecture was part of a wider move among disciplines in the United States to establish professional bodies throughout the 1800s, such as the American Medical Association (1847), the American Pharmacists Association (1852), and the American Bar Association (1878). The motivations behind the rapid rise of professional classes deserve a separate study in itself, with a wide variety of suggested reasons, including the influence of Adam Smith’s division of labor model of capitalism, a backlash to President Jackson’s earlier reduction in professional regulations, the desire to uphold standards and competency over increasingly complex fields, or a supremacist desire among existing professional elites to gatekeep their profession against entry from wider society, whether women, people of color, immigrants, or people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

Within this wider context of professionalization, architects were faced with unique challenges beyond building safety that would propel the growth of the profession and licensure. Reviewing the columns, speeches, and literature emerging from architects in the late 1800s, we see a profession harboring deep fears and insecurities over its future. While compiling The Handbook of Architectural Practice, for example, Frank Miles Day received feedback from across the industry that architects were inadequately equipped to administer large, expensive projects nor competent enough in the increasingly scientific requirements of construction.

Reviewing the columns, speeches, and literature emerging from architects in the late 1800s, we see a profession harboring deep fears and insecurities over its future.

“Architects' purview over the science and business of construction had been progressively usurped by — or ceded to — structural engineers and general contractors,” Johnston writes, summarizing Day’s findings from the era. “Within an increasingly business and profit-motivated culture, general contractors emerged as intermediaries between architects and trade laborers and challenged architects’ dual role as both agent and arbiter of owners’ contractural interests.”

As architects voiced concern in their abilities to maintain control over the scientific and financial aspects of practice in addition to the artistic, new architect-free models of designing and delivering buildings began to emerge, realizing fears among architects that their value to clients was under threat. Building companies with internal design staff began to operate in cities, offering clients a ‘one-stop shop’ service without the need to commission independent architects. In the era before licensure, owners or developers could also serve as their own architects, contracting directly with builders. Finally, as the inability of architects to oversee all builders and tradespeople on an increasingly fragmented and complex building site gave rise to the ‘general contractor’ role, architects became concerned that business and finance-savvy contractors would gain more influence over clients in this new age of profit and speculation, even replacing architects as the so-called ‘agent of the client.’

The Rise of a Profession

In response to these threats and critiques, architects saw ‘professionalization’ as the path forward, specifically the standardization, institutionalization, and licensing of that profession.

The case for professionalization was two-fold. Firstly, architects hoped that ‘nationalizing’ the profession across state boundaries, such as sharing legal and contract advice, business procedures, technological knowledge, and design approaches, would better equip the profession to maintain competence and authority in an age of ever-increasing complexity in the built environment. With the American Institute of Architects established in 1857, the profession sought to develop a suite of standardized tools derived from architects across the United States. This aim of distilling ‘best practice’ would lead to the development of the Uniform Contract in 1888 that formalized the architect’s role as the client’s agent, and Frank Miles Day’s conceiving of The Handbook of Architectural Practice in 1917.

It was hoped that by speaking through a single, authoritative, professional voice, infused with best practice from across the country, architects could instill new-found confidence in the eyes of clients and the public alike and maintain a competitive advantage over building site-based roles such as tradespeople and contractors. “In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, architects pressed to cement a professional advantage over builders in their functional relationship with owners on both legal and social bases, by shaping and standardizing their common contractural tools,” Johnston notes.

The desire of the profession to create a ‘self-selecting elite’ through the protection of the ‘architect’ title would also seriously curtail the aspirations of women, people of color, immigrants, and other demographics subject to institutionalized discrimination.

The second case for professionalization by architects at the time stemmed from the belief that access to the role of ‘architect’ was too open and that the title required definition and protection. In 1914, an article by S. Kruse in The Real Estate Magazine read that “practically eight out of ten so-called architects are wholly incompetent and unfit to undertake large building construction,” with Kruse suggesting “stringent legislation, making the architectural profession a licensed profession,” and “making the requirements for admission stringent.”

While Kruse’s article promoted intense debate within the profession, his call for protection of the title ‘architect’ aligned with the prevailing view of the profession, who believed that it was the constellation of self-described architects beyond the AIA which gave all architects a bad name. In The Handbook of Architectural Practice, Day advanced a specific definition of the professional architect, writing: “The architect of standing is primarily a gentleman…, a man of intelligence and education, with all the breeding, tact, and virile honesty that this implies. If he is a member of the American Institute of Architects, he is subscribed to a code of ethics that ensures the highest and most honorable type of service.” As Johnston notes in his analysis, Day’s definition was congruent with AIA membership requirements at the time, and thus “effectively promoted the exclusion from consideration of a wide range of design-and-build practitioners who in earlier days would have identified and solicited under the shared appellation of architect.”

However, design-and-build practitioners would not be the only groups to suffer exclusion as a result of efforts to formalize and restrict access to the profession. Johnston notes that while concerns within the profession over the conduct and capabilities of other construction industry actors were supported by facts, they were also “reinforced by class-based biases and stereotypes.” The desire of the profession to create a ‘self-selecting elite’ through the protection of the ‘architect’ title would also seriously curtail the aspirations of women, people of color, immigrants, and other demographics subject to institutionalized discrimination. The American Institute of Architects would not see its first female member until Louise Blanchard Bethune was admitted in 1888, over 30 years after its founding, and would not see its first Black member until 1923 when Paul Revere Williams joined the AIA’s Southern California Chapter.

The Beginning of Licensure

At the turn of the century, avenues for protecting the ‘architect’ title began to expand beyond AIA membership to engage with state legislation. The desire among the profession to protect the title ‘architect’ by law had led to a decade of lobbying state legislators across the U.S. from the 1880s onwards, arguing that “social closure of the ranks of a professional could serve as a means of market control as well as a marker of competence to bolster public trust,” as Johnston notes. On July 1st, 1897, Illinois became the first U.S. state to require licensing for architects, followed in rapid succession by California (1901), New Jersey (1902), and New York (1915). By 1919, almost 20 states had enacted licensing laws for architects.

Faced with the challenge of how licensure in one state could transfer to another in an increasingly mobile nation, the profession of the early 1900s would develop an infrastructure to adopt uniform standards across states. In 1920, following a meeting at the AIA Annual Conference one year earlier, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) was formed with the stated aim “to foster enactment of uniform architectural laws and uniformity in examinations of applicants for state registration or licensure.” By the late 1950s, the registration bodies of all 50 states had joined NCARB.

At the turn of the century, avenues for protecting the ‘architect’ title began to expand beyond AIA membership to engage with state legislation.

As the 20th century progressed, the components of today’s licensure system began to emerge and solidify. From NCARB’s inception in 1920, work began on a standardized form that would record a licensee’s educational and professional history, which by the 1930s would become the NCARB Record. In June 1928, meanwhile, the first NCARB Certificates were issued to those that certified a candidate’s eligibility for licensing by a state.

The second half of the 20th century would see architectural licensure steadily adopt the ‘Three Es’ which still govern the system today: Examination, Experience, and Education. In 1963, the first NCARB examination (a precursor to today’s ARE) was launched which became a requirement for certification. 1977 saw the launch of the Intern-Architect Development Program which solidified an experience program as a requirement for certification, fulfilled today by the AXP. Finally, 1984 introduced a requirement for a degree from an NAAB-accredited program for licensure, solidifying an educational component whose linkage to accreditation and registration was first established in 1919 with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The current manifestation of the Three Es, their next chapter, and their context within the wider licensing system, will become a vehicle for our continuing editorial series.

For more features and analyses on the past, present, and future of architectural licensure, follow our ongoing series Archinect In-Depth: Licensure.