Association of Licensed Architects

Our Story

The full story of ALA begins before the license existed.

The Association of Licensed Architects was founded in the fall of 1999. The story its members carry is a century older. It runs through the first architects’ licensing law in America, a theater fire that changed how buildings protect the people inside them, and a patented set of contracts whose descendants ALA members still use free today. This is the long version, and it is worth the read.

Chicago, 1897: the profession gets organized

After the building boom that followed the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, architectural practice in Chicago was marked by fierce competition for commissions and by open corruption. Building codes were routinely violated, and the general public suffered from fraudulent building services.

A group of Chicago architects, dissatisfied with a professional establishment preoccupied with aesthetics while standards slid, organized the Chicago Architects’ Business Association in 1897. Functioning statewide from the start, it became the first independent state organization of architects in the United States. Its early leaders included Harry B. Wheelock, George Beaumont, F. E. Davidson, Charles E. Fox, Emery S. Hall, H. L. Palmer, and George Maher, remembered as one of the most prolific and original architects of the Prairie School.

That same year the association helped draft and pass the Illinois Architectural Act. Signed into law on June 3, 1897, it provided for the licensing of architects and the regulation of architecture as a profession, the first legal recognition of its kind in the United States and the model other states followed. When the act needed teeth, the association went back to Springfield and won amendments in 1899 and 1905 that gave the state board the power to prosecute violators.

A century of firsts

1903

The Iroquois Theatre fire

After the deadliest theater fire in American history, the society investigated its causes for the City of Chicago, work that helped push life safety into building law.

1907

Putting draftsmen to work

An Information Bureau matched draftsmen with employment from 1907 to 1911, decades before anyone said job board.

1912

Contracts, patented

The society formulated and sold uniform building contract documents, patented March 23, 1912. ALA’s free member contracts are their direct descendants.

1914

A new name

The association adopted the name Illinois Society of Architects to match its enlarged professional scope, and kept publishing the Handbook for Architects and Builders it had run since 1898.

1920

Seeding NCARB

The ISA organized and advanced the first funds for the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, the body that still coordinates licensure nationwide.

Fall 1999: ALA is founded

A century later, a group of architects who had served on the boards of other associations wanted something those associations were not delivering: a community built on education, collaboration, and a commitment to the profession, with affordable dues backed by genuine, practical services. In the fall of 1999 they founded the Association of Licensed Architects.

Two months in, history came to the new association. In November 1999 the Illinois Society of Architects, the oldest independent state organization of architects in the country, joined ALA. The newest association in the profession and its oldest legacy became one and the same.

The founding five

Don E. Erickson, Patrick C. Harris, Melvin S. Markson, Gary Ruck, and James K. Zahn, all Fellows of the association they created, had each served on the boards of other architectural associations before founding ALA.

Founding Member

Don E. Erickson, FALA

Erickson apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and carried those organic principles through a five-decade Chicago-area practice of residences, hotels, and commercial work.

Founding Member

James K. Zahn, Esq., FALA

Architect and attorney, Zahn spent more than three decades in Chicago construction law as a partner at Sabo & Zahn, counsel to design professionals on contracts, licensing, and disputes.

Patrick C. Harris, FALA · Melvin S. Markson, FALA · Gary Ruck, FALA

2004 to today: beyond Illinois

In October 2004 ALA chartered its first chapter in Wisconsin. Today members practice in 34 states, led by the Midwest, and the association grows the way it started: record attendance at its programs, an industry-leading magazine in Licensed Architect, continuing education that keeps licenses current in every state you practice, and dues that stay affordable because the value is real.

Architects united to advance the Profession of Architecture.

That has been the motto from the first meeting. Be part of the next chapter.

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