In this episode, Tom Larsson is joined by Muyiwa Oki, architect, former RIBA president, and now at Mace, to explore what it takes to reform a 200-year-old institution from the inside, why technical grounding matters more than ever for architects, and how the built environment can better serve the communities it shapes.
Muyiwa traces a deliberate route through smaller practices, building technical foundations before moving into large-scale infrastructure delivery at Mace. He shares what drove him to stand for the RIBA presidency, a campaign rooted in the uncompensated overtime that defined his generation's experience of the profession, and how holding that role sharpened his ability to lead, communicate, and advocate under pressure.
The conversation covers the barriers that continue to narrow who enters architecture: the length and cost of training, and the structural gap between education and practice. Muyiwa makes the case for level seven apprenticeships, for building regulations to be embedded in architectural education, and for architects to embrace the principal designer role as a step towards reclaiming responsibility across the full project lifecycle.
Tom and Muyiwa also examine what makes public space genuinely work, the risk of hyper-financialisation in the built environment, and why leaving room for people to inhabit places as they choose may be the most honest measure of whether a place was really designed for them.
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