The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London (UCL) is among the highest ranked schools of architecture in the world. Its reputation has come into dispute of late, however, following the release of a report summarizing the results of an independent investigation into decades of alleged abuses of its students. In response to the report, architecture’s Big Names have come out swinging. The report, produced by the investigative consultancy company Howlett Brown, found the school’s educational structures and culture had the “purpose and effect of creating a toxic and in parts, unsafe learning and working environment, where people have felt silenced, and in several instances deeply traumatized by their experiences.” Building on the cases of alleged abuse first documented in a dossier compiled by former Bartlett student Eleni Kyriacoua, Howlett Brown documented in an extensive survey of staff and students multiple complaints of bullying, intimidatory, racist, sexist, and class-discriminatory conduct at the school. One respondent notes that “the environment was very toxic, especially for women, working-class people and individuals of colour,” another remarks on a “pervasive culture of psychological games—a culture of fear” that “comes from the top down.” In all, around forty percent of the current and former students surveyed “confirmed that someone they knew experienced bullying and harassment.”
While identities are kept anonymous, certain senior members of the Bartlett faculty emerge from the report as repeat offenders in bullying, discriminatory, and even violent conduct. Bob Sheil, who had been director of the Bartlett School since 2016, resigned his position following the report, and a number of faculty have in response been removed by UCL from teaching responsibilities, while still being employed by the university. A group established to support and campaign for victims of abuse—Time’s Up Bartlett (now Time’s Up Architecture)—published and then took down from its Instagram account a list of tutors accused of abusing students.
Shortly after the report was made public, an open letter whose signatories include World Architecture Festival director Paul Finch, noted architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, famed British architect Piers Gough, New London Architecture curator-in-chief Peter Murray, Royal Academy architecture head Vicky Richardson, and the Royal College of Art’s Amin Taha, started circulating online. The letter reprimands UCL for prematurely making public the Howlett Brown report thereby leading to an outburst of public naming and shaming of individual tutors.
The letter’s authors draw straight from the victim-shaming playbook. Architecture’s Goliaths present themselves as heroic Davids defending the profession and their peers from “student ‘activists’” and institutional overreach. “UCL,” they claim, “has acted to preserve its reputation, while subjecting all its staff to an opaque, open-ended ‘investigation.’” The scare quotes cast doubt on the legitimacy of the report—elsewhere dismissed in the letter as a “debacle”—and, by extension, its findings and recommendations. The letter also accuses UCL of acting in a “Kafkaesque fashion” by commissioning the independent report, purportedly subjecting staff to scrutiny from unnamed accusers. Invoking the image of intimidatory campaigns practiced by the powerful on the oppressed, the letter also speaks of a “witch-hunt” coordinated by Instagram accounts (unnamed but likely referring chiefly to those of Time’s Up Bartlett and Future Architects Front). The report itself makes very clear that the asymmetries in power relations at the Bartlett are the inverse of those conjured up in the letter. Victims’ complaints were ignored, suppressed, or delegitimated in a cult of conformity to humiliation, sacrifice, and exploitation. “During the course of our investigation,” the report’s authors observe, “we were informed of seven experiences and examples where a senior faculty tutor allegedly failed to appropriately handle complaints through inaction, lack of confidentiality and by making excuses for those complained or gaslit complainants [who] believe they were at fault.”
The element in the open letter most revealing of rearguard and reactionary attitudes appears in its response to the report’s criticism of educational methods in architecture. “A culture of fear and unbalanced press reports,” it claims, “has led to a situation in which longstanding campaigners against ‘the crit’ are monopolizing a very narrow discourse.” Again, the authors summon up a specter of persecution by turning the picture painted by the report upside down. Those subjected to abuse are portrayed as its perpetrators. Those speaking out and speaking for victims of abuse are held to be themselves the ones creating a “culture of fear.” Exactly who these “longstanding campaigners” against the crit might be is unclear, but the Howlett Brown report does indeed identify the part it has played as a vehicle for abuse in the case of the Bartlett. The report goes further, pointing out how certain elements of architectural education—the studio system that pits students against each other, institutional practices like fixed-term contracts that cause precarity, and a student-to-instructor pipeline that facilitates faculty enacting the same kinds of abuse they once had to endure—actively enable a traumatizing educational and work environment.
Finch, Frampton, Richardson, and the rest concede that “institutions need to discipline staff,” meaning individual offenders, but still defend the systems that enable their conduct: the competitive studios of the unit system, the free student labor for large firms, the long nights justified as preparation for the exhausting real-world conditions of architectural work. They have signed off on an all too familiar response to revelations of abuse and discrimination at large that acknowledges the presence of a few bad actors but safeguards the system itself at any and all costs, including shaming the victims.
As many have remarked in the aftermath of the Howlett Brown report, the kind of abuse-enabling educational culture uncovered at the Bartlett is far from unique to this one school. Only two months before the release of the report, SCI-Arc was compelled by a student petition to place two of its faculty—Marrikka Trotter and Tom Wiscombe—on administrative leave. This action followed from a live-streamed panel discussion in which Trotter and others encouraged students to embrace the virtues of exploitative labor practices in architecture and extolled those who do. As students and alumni of SCI-Arc pointed out in the petition calling for their removal from the school, Trotter and Wiscombe not only preached but also practiced labor exploitation: “They leveraged their power within our institution to persuade undergraduate students into deferring their education for a semester in order to work on a competition for their office, only for these students to be severely overworked and mistreated by them.” (Trotter and Wiscombe eventually resigned from their positions in late September.)
The core values so often conveyed to students of architecture—competitive individualism, self-sacrifice and self-exploitation, a one-dimensional devotion to what Marisa Cortright has identified as the “calling” of architecture—ultimately serve neither the individual nor the society whose real needs they might wish or imagine they are going to be working to fill. These values only serve to maintain the mystique of architecture on which abuse thrives. That this mystique is, at last, being dismantled at the hands of its victims is to be welcomed by the growing number of architectural students and workers no longer content to accept the exploitative conditions supposedly essential to practice. As things currently stand, after all, it is clear enough to most students of architecture that their degree is not going to be a passport to wealth and fame, no matter the levels of overwork and self-sacrifice they are prepared to endure. While Norman Foster chills on his inflatable unicorn in a private pool, they will be living in shared accommodation, debt-saddled, and designing gentrifying skyscrapers or billionaire basements.