What, exactly, is a façade engineer? Tom Donald of Eckersley O’Callaghan frames it as an ‘ongoing professional existential crisis’. With Gareth Winstanley, Elizabeth Carpenter, Vera Tchikina (Rickard Engineering) and Alison Potter, the panel set out to define the scope and competency of façade consultants, because the profession has been asked to, and because no common definition yet exists.

Scope came first. Eckersley O’Callaghan’s own diagram spans environmental and physical elements, design intent and process, far too much to legislate, so the panel introduced the idea of a ‘core scope’: the essential subset a façade engineer must own. Competency then rests on four criteria the Society of Façade Engineering has been working from: skills (practical and process-based, requiring trackable training and CPD), knowledge (the educational base, tied directly to scope), experience (time and relevance, raising the awkward question of when the clock starts), and behaviours (ethics and codes of conduct, which imply regulation, registration and a body to administer it).

The reason all of this matters now is New South Wales’ Design and Building Practitioners Act. Gareth Winstanley gave the potted history: the Act exists to stamp out building defects in NSW residential construction, and its practice standard for professional engineers is reshaping what a façade ‘design practitioner’ is responsible for, regulated designs, documentation, competency and assurance, with the standard now naming professional engineering work on a façade explicitly.

The wider point, and the reason the question matters to architects and engineers alike, is that New South Wales is the leading edge: where it has gone on defining and regulating façade competency, the rest of Australia is likely to follow. That makes getting the definition of scope and competency right a question for the whole profession, not one state.