Congratulations to John Orrell, who has been elected Chair of the Yorkshire Region of the RIBA.

 

John has acted as Honorary Treasurer for the last two years and was elected Chair at the AGM held last week at the Sandal Magna school in Wakefield. The meeting had over 50 attendees and was preceded by an excellent tour of the school by its architect, Sarah Wigglesworth.

 

He intends to focus on three main areas:

 

1. To make the activities of the RIBA meaningful and interesting to members. There are plans to take the Regional Council meetings out and about to the best of our local buildings and places to try to encourage better engagement.

 

2. The future of practice and how architects can shape the future of the construction industry. Building Information Modelling will have a huge impact on our profession with all Government procurement to be in BIM by 2016. The RIBA is already proactive in this area and John is a member of the Large Practice Group which is currently working on an over-lay to the Plan of Work, specifically for BIM in a similar fashion to the work of the Green Team led by Bill Gething. This work will be presented in November this year which is a tremendous opportunity for architects to regain the professional high ground of the industry.

 

3. Architectural education should be made as good and as relevant to practice as it can be. The profession still attracts the highest quality of candidates and in these current times we all should feel for Part I and II students desperately seeking placements. The Yorkshire CPD programme has recently been moved to Leeds Met to allow students to attend on subjects that might not form part of the standard course: this is a first step to strengthening links between the RIBA and local architecture schools.