Space for Engaged Architecture, as part of the Faculty of Architecture at BUT, invites to a roundtable with an architect Charlie Edmonds. Charlie is one of the members of Future Architects Front, an UK based initiative addressing inadequate working conditions and financial remuneration of (young) architectural workers. The roundtable will be in English on Saturday, 14 January 2023, at 2 pm at the Brno Gallery of Architecture as part of the project Dear architects… — Architecture as Labour. 

Spots are limited. Please register: https://forms.gle/kaujzGQ4FDdsiW4x8 

Future Architects Front (FAF) is an initiative of young architectural workers and students. FAF was created and is run by Charlie Edmonds and Priti Mohandas, British designers and researchers. FAF is a fully independent group and exists beyond the pressures and interests of architectural practice, education, and media. They operate in a number of different capacities, from research to activism to quasi-political campaigning. Since 2020, the FAF has been making waves in architecture, raising massive awareness around the exploitation of architectural assistants in the UK. What started as an Instagram poll transformed into a national survey headed by the Architects’ Journal. After conducting a survey, FAF wrote an open letter to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) concerning the working conditions in the profession. More than 1,800 people signed the letter, and RIBA responded and met with FAF. As a result of his whistleblowing campaign and continual social media activism, the Architectural Registration Board (ARB) and RIBA initiated institutional and systematic changes to address the issues and mistreatment experienced by those at the bottom of the profession.  

FAF continues campaigning to end the exploitative practices that have come to define the world of architecture. In March 2022, an informal collective of aspiring architects, students and activists, supported by FAF, UVW-SAW, ACAN, Failed Architecture, the London branch of The Architecture Lobby and BREAK / / LINE, wrote an open letter to RIBA in the context of the upcoming election of the next RIBA President. The campaigners behind the letter bid to get an architectural worker elected to shake up an institute ‘out of touch’ with the wider profession. The FAF also said RIBA has not delivered on commitments it made to the group regarding the previous open letter in 2021. In May 2022, thirty-one-year-old Muyiwa Oki was put forward as the candidate representing the young architectural workers and was actually elected as the next RIBA President on 2 August 2022; he will take office for a two-year term in early September 2023. 

The project is realized in cooperation with the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology and with the financial support of the Statutory City of Brno, the Ministry of Culture and the Czech Architecture Foundation.