Now for the next step

摘要

We will not return to 'business as usual'. As the pandemic leaves its indelible mark on soci-ety, business and our profession, our actions to respond to and recover from its chaos are what will create our new normal and new practice. While lockdown may have presented op-portunities for some architects to make pos-itive changes to their working arrangements and re-evaluate the work/life balance, most have also experienced high levels of person-al and professional anxiety, fearing future workloads, reduced salaries, redundancies and the difficulties of working from home. But now things are starting to move to-wards a new version of normal. Work on site has resumed, architects' practices are grad-ually returning to the workplace and busi-nesses seem to be switching from 'response' to 'recovery' mode. We still face unknowns, especially regarding the extent of the finan-cial fallout, but while we cannot be certain what lies ahead we can start planning for it. It remains the priority of the RIBA to provide our members and practices with the guidance and support to help weather this storm. This means helping map routes to re-covery and build future resilience through the RIBA Recovery Roadmap; creating a di-alogue around post-pandemic design through our competition Rethink: 2025; and continu-ing to collect and share intelligence to under-stand how architects and students are coping.