‘Professional buck-passers’: why the excoriating Grenfell report was right to damn architects

Architects have long complained of the erosion of their status, seeing their role at the top of the tree relentlessly undermined and usurped by specialist subconsultants. There are now separate experts for every part of the design process, from environmental performance to facade design, people flow to drainage, leaving the architect as an increasingly ineffectual middleman, supposedly presiding over these multiple specialisms while having little technical knowledge of any of them. The role of professional buck-passer is made all too clear in the Grenfell report. It lays out how technical queries from the cladding subcontractor, Harley Facades, about such crucial details as cavity barriers – which prevent smoke and fire from spreading through the gaps in walls and ceilings – were simply passed on to the fire consultants, Exova, “without [the architect] becoming directly involved”.