ArchiTeam interviews the architect TOAL O’ MUIRE

The ENACA is a network of Competent Authorities for the architectural profession. The purpose of the ENACA is to provide a forum for discussion for Competent Authorities with a view to helping administrative cooperation and consistency in implementing the DIRECTIVE 2005/36/EC on the recognition of Professional Qualifications (PQD).

How do the DIRECTIVE 2005/36/EC affect the Architectural Profession within Europe?
Τhere was, previously in 1985, made the Architects Directive and this was just for architects. That existed for 20 years before the Qualifications Directive was made law. There were also other sectural directives for the medical professions, for doctors, for nurses or midwives, dentists, pharmacists, and also there was a sectural directive for veterinarians as well. So, in 2005 the European Commission and Department decided to amalgamate all of the sectural professions with what was known as in-general system for qualifications, which also began in the 1980's. And this is for example for tradesmen for consulting engineers, for example, are within the, what is called, in-general system.

The principle is that if you are, for example, a Greek architect coming to Ireland, for example, that you apply in Ireland to the Irish Competent Authority for recognition of your qualifications as an architect. The Irish competent authority which is what I am representing in the ENACA, the institute of architects, it can contact the technical chamber of Greece to check that you are who you say you are and that your qualifications are what you say they are. So this is what administrant cooperation means; it means that twenty applicant applies in a country, which is not their home country, but what is generally called a host country, then the competent authority in the host country can talk to the competent authority in the home country and this will make the process of recognition much more consistent and very importantly much better.

Are the competent authorities for the Architectural profession in Europe satisfactory for the architects? What more actions must take place?
In Greece and in Ireland and in both countries in Europe, in effect, the competent authority is the professional chamber. There are some countries where this is not the case and some countries, for example in Spain which is a Ministry, the Ministry of the national government, which is the competent authority and in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands there is a separate state registration board which is appointed by the government to be the competent authority.

In general, in this evaluation, which is happening at the moment by the Commission of the Directive, I am happy to say that the profession and the competent authorities are generally in agreement. I cannot say that perhaps with any confidence for the ministries, international ministries which are competent authorities, because they are not active in our network. We have had some contact with them maybe through the Commission, but, there is difficult for any network of competent authorities to speak with a single voice, because, of course, each of us as a competent authority is responsible only to our national government, we are not responsible to the Commission, we are not responsible to each other, we are answerable to our national government, so we have to be very careful and prudent in what we say.

The Directive requires administrative cooperation between EU/EEA Member States in registration procedures for architects and others, who seek recognition of their qualifications so as to register under the laws of a host country. Has this goal been achieved?
In general, it has, but, there is still quite a lot of work to do. The first problem is that the list of qualifications in the annex of the Directive for architects is quite out-of-date. This is because in 2005 when the Directive was made, they simply took the list of qualifications from the old architects' Directive and put it into the new Directive so they were already in some cases out of date. There are two problems; one is that many of the qualifications have changed their names because of developments across Europe and university education there is a thing called the Bologna process which has to do with mobility not of professionals which is the concern of this Directive, but with the mobility of students and although the European Union has no legal pars or legal competent in the area of education, it has promoted the mobility of students across the Europe through this Bologna process. It has a set of steps or grades, centered mainly on Bachelor's degrees and Master's degrees. So many of the 5-year Diplomas for architects are now re-designated because of this, as Master's degrees and for transparency at the clarity, the annex in the Directive which lists the recognized qualifications needs to be updated. 

Of course there are also schools of architecture which are opening, so there are new diplomas. Those diplomas are notified by international governments to each other and to commission and then, they can be checked or even challenged by the commission or by the member states and obviously there is quite a lot of work in that. There is also the problem that some countries and some universities have been very slow to notify the new diplomas; they don't seem to care enough about their young graduates, to help them to migrate around Europe. Especially for architects this has been identified as a problem by the commission, by the architects themselves, by the architects across Europe, so there is still a big task to be done there, so that the annex is up-to-date, not only in relation to the diplomas, but also in relation to, what is called, the accompanying certificate.

Many countries have a requirement in addition to the diploma. For example, you are reading  the title of the Greek accompanying certificate; in some countries this certificate reflects either en examination or a period of supervised professional experience or in some cases, as in Ireland and United Kingdom, both. In Slovakia, for example, there are both. Those accompanying certificates, as they are called, it is not stated clearly the Directive that it is an obligation of the member states to notify these to the commission in the same way as it is an obligation to notify the diplomas. This wasn't done and really only the last year the Commission made it very clear to the member states, that if they have requirements in addition to the diploma, they must notify them and they must have a signal for the migrant through the annex, that there is something else they must provide in addition to their diploma. That process is also happening not as quickly as it should but, it is happening.

Does architecture as a profession need empowerment? In which ways should this be done?
In my opinion the architects individually and not collectively need to engage the society in which they live, both at the European level and at the national level.  We all do this in our own way. One thing which is very necessary and does relate closely to the kind of work that we do as architects is to engage policy research. There is a lot of talk in European affairs about lobbing and this is a word that I don't like very much because there are some kinds of lobbing that are clearly permissible in interest of all free citizens to protect their interests. The difficulty with us is sometimes that it implies that the more powerful interests, we have bigger resources for lobbing and we always defeat the weaker interests because they simply don't have the same resources.

One thing that we can all do voluntarily with our own time is to explain to each other and to the public what we do, which things help us to do it well, what things hinder us in doing it well and so to be part of a wider society, trying to do things better. If we don't speak, if we don't engage and if we don't do policy research, maybe in a very humble way, in a very mondain way, then European society will not work so well. This is why administers of cooperation are so boring because it involves a lot of very mondain tasks. For me as a practicing architect the reason I'm interested in doing that is that I think at the end it helps to promote and to protect the high level objectives; for a better environment, for a more sustainable planet and so on.

There is a kind of civilest Continuum from the boring Monday tasks of administers of cooperation to the high level tasks of creating a more beautiful and sustainable world. So as an architect I feel a little privileged. It's a very nice life even if it's not as well paid as other professions that architects consider less useful. The answer to the question "how can architecture as a profession be more empowered", it's in our hands as architects.

Is the world financial crisis an opportunity for everyone to reconsider the ways that we design and construct the buildings and the urban environment?
I'm sure that it is. It is not the only crisis that we face. We face a crisis of global warming for example, we face a crisis of food, not perhaps something that architects can do too much about it directly but we face a problem that is related to financial crisis of the number of people who cannot afford to eat and also the depletion of resources which seems to continue despise everybody seeming to understand the need to deplete the resources less quickly and perhaps to be more efficient in how we use the resources as we deplete. I see the financial crisis very closely related to those other kinds of crisis that we face and I hope that we will come up with some answers better than the ones we are trying to come up with in Ireland where we are trying to deal with financial crisis in a very narrow way, sometimes surprisingly trying to use in order to get out of the problem the same people who got us into the problem instead of engaging new ideas and new skills and new people into the process.

At the end, can you please provide your personal proposal for 10 buildings (constructed and visitable) which you think as the most important worldwide that someone must visit anyway?
The first thing to say is that very much related to the last two answers I gave, there is so much focus in our profession on the individual building and there is also so much focus in our profession on new buildings. Because of this entire crisis I just mentioned, the first task in a way of the architecture profession is not to build new buildings, it is to make better use of the buildings we have and to see them not individually but to see them in their context.

So my choice of buildings which are visitable and which people should visit are perhaps things like the Greek islands where you have a kind of collective indigenous architecture which clearly architects for the last half century tried to learn from but the preoccupation in the profession with iconic public buildings is unfortunately  a destruction from this.

If we are to tackle the ecological challenges, the sustainability and carbon challenges, what we need to do is to improve the stock that we have, to protect the architecture heritage. We need as architects not just to design passé systems; we need to understand the active systems. The kinds of buildings we can learn from sometimes are the groupings of buildings. When I'm in Greece which is a country I know less well than I know parts of Italy, but I think of land source in Sicily where you have the footprint of a city which is 2, 5 millennium old and you can see the draining systems, you can see the courtyards of the houses, you can picture how sustainable as a group they were. Those are kinds of buildings architects should go to see; I think of places like Orta, the island in Italy and I think of Italian hill towns the same way I think of the Greek islands.

Also I think about buildings such as Scarpa's Castle Vecchio where you have modern architecture in a very historic context. We have lots to learn from those kinds of buildings. But for the kinds of iconic buildings that I remember and I'm not so winded travelled that I have seen all the buildings I want to see myself, but buildings which I found really beautiful and which I'd recommend to people, perhaps not far away from here is the Blue Mask, it's a very beautiful building. I think of Luis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Texas and also the village of Palladio because in Ireland we are completely Palladian in classical architectural tradition. Also I think of smaller buildings like the Victor Horta Museum in Brussels. I think perhaps street buildings like examples of how architects and craftsmen produce great beauty.

ArchiTeam
Production: Giagkou Virginia, Gkavogianni Kyriaki, Anagnostou Maria
Translation: Tsigkou Christianna, Batsilas Andreas
Editing: Vandoros Alex, Anagnostou Maria
Video: Anagnostou Maria

Notes
Bio and Photo Credits

http://www.architravel.com/pointofview/pov/people/toal-o-muire