About

Established in 1922, the club’s original purpose was to enlarge the public appreciation of good architecture and the allied arts, and especially the best work of today. The club had a membership limited to a total of 300, of which less than half might have been architects.

Today the club has approximately 350 members, as well as architects, we seek members with a passion for the built environment from other fields, clients, planners, engineers, urbanists, academics and artists, people at the top of their game who champion good design. The club is managed by a committee that meets four times a year, applications for membership are considered at these meetings.

Today its aim is to promote architecture in its broadest sense through events designed to educate and inform.

As a club without premises, every year The Architecture Club has a winter party and a summer party, two dinner debates, the annual Robert Maxwell Lecture, and a range of building tours and practice visits. We also organise study trips in the UK and abroad.

It has also held several exhibitions, including The best architecture in the last twenty years in 1923, followed in 1925 by the second exhibition (held in the RIBA Galleries in Conduit Street, opened by G. K. Chesterton), and more recently 50 years of London Architecture, supported by the late Christina Smith OBE, which consequently toured successfully in Europe.

Topics of debate over the years have been diverse, ranging from The architecture of 1851 is preferable to that of 1951 to No building should last more than one lifetime and The influence of Le Corbusier was a disaster. In more recent times debated topics have included Architecture in Britain today has lost its social purpose and Globalism and Architecture.

Speakers at dinners have ranged from Mies van der Rohe to King Charles III, Lord Rogers of Riverside to Leon Krier, and Denys Lasdun to Philip Johnson. Architect led tours have included Turn End (Peter Aldington), Bloomberg’s European HQ (Foster and Partners) Sadlers Wells East with O’Donnel Tuomey. International study tours have included Moscow, Lisbon, Barcelona and Eritrea.