by Candi L. Adams, Assoc. AIA
Shortly before my term began as AIA Arkansas Associate Director, an Associate asked me when Arkansas was going to allow interns to take the ARE alongside IDP. Apparently our neighbor Texas has allowed this for quite some time, and some folks would just as soon hop the state line for a license, as wait a few more years to take their tests. I decided this was a good question to forward to our state registration board.
I started reading everything I could find about ARE+IDP, including publications by all the acronyms of architecture and the former website www.ArchVoices.org. I soon decided it was information overload for one person, and sent a general email asking for interns to join a task force on the issue. Our group of five interns researched and met weekly for almost two months to discuss what we had found. We talked with licensed counterparts to get their opinions on the tests, “back in their days” and we called registration boards across the country to obtain the number of new licenses issued each year. We quickly realized that the ratio of new licenses in concurrent states overwhelmed those of non-concurrent states. We e-polled 680 interns, architects, and B.Arch. students across the state with the yes-or-no question: Do you believe intern architects should be eligible for the ARE upon graduation with the accredited degree, while compiling IDP Training Units as defined by NCARB? To this, we received nearly 200 responses, over half from licensed architects, with 77% overall in favor.
Once we had organized our research, we created a Word document with explanations of everything we had found in support of ARE+IDP. This poor thing was edited and emailed within our group at least a dozen times, and explained our support in the form of seven documented points in nine pages. Perhaps the most important of these explained the effectiveness of an architect’s education where degree, internship, and registration are a continuous learning process with licensure as the end objective. An intern would not only gain the necessary experience to practice architecture, but would apply and test that knowledge along the way.
Eventually, we realized that concurrency was not only a highly debated issue, but a complicated one as well. The process to change a policy like this is inconsistent across the nation, and for reciprocal licenses to be maintained, there has to be some continuity. Since we had already decided Arkansas should begin this process, we scheduled ourselves on the May agenda for the Arkansas State Board of Architects meeting to share our research from intern’s perspectives. The Board was very receptive to our discussion, and at the NCARB annual meeting in June, they endorsed a model law change to allow concurrency.
In a sense, our hard work paid off, and the whole experience opened my eyes to a new expectation from our profession. An architect’s position in society is public by nature, and the ability to advocate our position is practically our responsibility. Sometimes taking the first step is a matter of trying to answer a simple question.
Candi Lynn Adams, Assoc. AIA, is an intern architect and ARE Candidate working with The Wilcox Group Architects in Little Rock. She graduated with her B.Arch. from the University of Arkansas in 2004, and served on the AIA Arkansas Board of Directors in 2006 as Associate Director. She hopes to continue her advocacy efforts to see that concurrency is soon passed in Arkansas.
There is an important lesson I learned when I moved from private practice to become a city planner. What I once considered to be fixed objectives—zoning ordinances and municipal development standards—are not obstacles put in the way of single-building design, but tools for bringing good design to the community as a whole. And, to meet the changing needs of the community, they can—sometimes they must—be changed.