At the Cambridge University Department of Fine Art and Architecture, we were brought up in a tradition of architecture in which the architect was the designer of cultural artefacts. Imagination, here, was aligned to the histories and philosophies of European art and aesthetics, leading up to the ‘modern’ age. It was also concerned, primarily, with the language and expression of philosophic positions and values through form and space of buildings. At the Architectural Association, which I joined after completing my degree at Cambridge, the architect was to be a strategist exploring the systemic possibilities concerning what purposes buildings serve in a changing, dynamic world. This was aligned to systems theory and computer sciences, and the potential of new materials and technologies. And at the Tropical Studies Department, which ran a postgraduate course that evolved into the Development Planning Unit at UCL, the strategist architect or planner was to place herself as an expert of the built environment in the service of the challenging tasks of social and economic development in the developing world.

My fellow architects, let me begin this piece with a provocative, even blasphemous, proposition: it is time to do away with the twin terms ‘architect’ and ‘architecture’ as signs that stand in for what we are, what we do or as a ‘thing’ in the world.