AIA Certification is Not a Thing – Becoming Licensed Is
I recently learned that one of the primary searches for what AIA and FAIA mean is “aia certification.” We who are members of the American Institute of Architects, or its allied organizations, know this is not a thing. However, with the predominance of the search term “aia certification” on the web, I cannot help but point to yet another linguistic disconnect between the profession, those entering the profession, the public and, perhaps, potential clients wondering what the designation means. Why? Because “insiders” are searching for “architecture license” or “aia membership.” Thankfully, those searches quickly lead to a page on the American Institute of Architects (AIA) website titled “Getting licensed.”
Achieving Acronyms
So, on the subject of “aia certification”—and you know I almost always have a segue—is all that the letters A-I-A come after, first, working your way through a plethora of acronyms: all the education requirements of licensure via a National Architectural Accrediting Board (a.k.a. NAAB) professional academic program, gaining experience through the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (a.k.a. NCARB) Architectural Experience Program (a.k.a. AXP), successfully passing six parts of the Architectural Registration Exam (a.k.a. ARE), and transferring that information from NCARB to the AIA (you should have that one down by now) and your state board of architecture to become officially licensed. The mystical moment of my official licensure occurred two months after I passed my last exam, shoving me disappointingly from being able to say, “I got licensed in 2016” to “I got licensed in 2017.”
Second involves translating that license into becoming an Architect member of the AIA rather than simply using the acronym “RA” (registered architect) after your name. I have known more than a few architects who don’t see the value in the designation “AIA” after their name or of any form of membership in the AIA. I also know they are missing out on more than a few things, the first being a broad swath of like-minded, similarly experienced colleagues. My first AIA chapter was serendipitously AIA Hong Kong, a small but thriving and overtly welcoming group of 90-some members. With all their bus tours to project sites, celebrations and open board meetings, they gave me an idealistic view of the organization that is more often upheld than not.
Larger Meaning of “AIA”
Though I came from a Fortune 500 R&D job to architecture to get out from a desk and away from meeting tables to spend my days in hiking boots, my calling in the profession has become writing, narrative, storytelling and a host of other fond terms for putting together words in a way that conveys meaning to the largest number of people possible. So, you may ask me, “why are you licensed?” Plenty of Associate AIA members—those with a professional degree but who have not satisfied all the acronyms noted earlier and those who work under the supervision of an AIA architect—are satisfied with where they are. That was me, until a former president of NCARB, friend and colleague, took me by the shoulders and said, “You should be licensed.” [Thank you, Greg Erny, FAIA.] The change, that day in the grey EFIS (Exterior Insulation Finishing System) Parametric testing office building when the woman at the desk printed out my final exam “Pass,” was immediate. I had completed the journey, begun the first day of grad school. Dropping the “Assoc.” (because A-AIA was one acronym too many?) brought a lot of things—AIA friends bragging on me as “licensed,” building code officials (on the small projects where I get to wear those hiking boots) who stopped treating me like a clueless female, more white space on my business card and email signature to name a few—but the intangible is the formalized, internalized spectrum of knowledge that comes with having made it through the acronym swamp to, forgive me one last time, “aia certification.”
Oh, and by the way, the “F” in “FAIA” means AIA Fellowship, which you can find more about by perusing around AIA resources at aia.org or reading my book, Architect + Action = Result.
