Sarah Gaventa, communications director for City of Artchitecture and Design 1999, looks at ways of making the profession more accessible

ARCHITECTURE is a notoriously difficult subject to communicate to

a public audience and architects themselves are notoriously bad at communicating their ideals. But, as many would argue, their work is their communication. When it comes to publicising their work, most architects look to their own trade press rather than the mainstream variety and understandably so.

British architects have an astounding number of glossy magazines devoted to them - 39 at the last count, probably more than any other profession - which range from the gossipy and technical to the gloriously gratuitous in full colour.

Communicating to their own peer group is paramount to architects and they can generate a huge amount of publicity without ever reaching the public. It is little wonder that the popular ranges of the successful German publisher Taschen include cheap but well-produced, glossy, coffee-table books covering architecture and others covering soft pornography. Both offer close-up shots of impossibly glamorous and sexy objects with no real human content and both are about control.

The homage that is rightly paid to the best of the profession's work in its own press is not replicated in mainstream newspapers and magazines. For this is an entirely different market which (usually) requires articles or features to be story-led with a human content, taking an outside perspective. And heaven forbid architects providing images of architecture with people in them - that is rare in the architectural world.

There are many good stories behind buildings but some architects, when discussing their work, tend to concentrate on the building itself, its construction, design, and philosophy, interesting to the architectural press but often difficult in huge doses to the lay person.

Once a practice asked me how to achieve coverage for housing association flats they had just completed, and were justifiably proud of producing a decent building on a tight budget with some rather nice detailing. But to their amazement it proved of no interest to the media.

After heavy quizzing, it turned out the flats were the first to be built for Vietnamese boat people living in Britain - here was the story which they hadn't noticed, partly because it took the emphasis away from the building itself and moved it to the users, people. The result: sudden interest from the media. You cannot blame architects for this; they are, after all, trained to create architecture, not communicate it. Yet an increasing number see the value of promotion in their increasingly beleaguered profession - the RIBA has more than 28,000 members; that is a lot of architects looking for work.

Young practices are becoming media-friendly and marketing-orientated; rather than call themselves after their partners, they adopt provocative names that help attract attention. FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste) and MUF (a group of female architects, you work it out) are such examples and just by the fact I'm mentioning them proves it works.

Like most other professions architecture comes complete with its own language, a mystifying combination of spatial planes, interactions, and voids. This excerpt from the Architectural Review describes a bank's headquarters in Turkey by John McAslan & Partners (not written by them): ''Accommodation is broken into eight three-floor courtyard buildings, which are connected by a grid of internal streets and the junctions of which dramatic cylindrical vertical services . . . link the whole in a three dimensional matrix.'' Fascinating.

This is a valid form of communication among professionals, but used for the general public and media it creates confusion and acts as a definite turn off. To compound this, many ''non-arch'' journalists feel uneasy writing about architecture - it is seen as a difficult subject with a language to match. They need encouragement as much as the public. Giving architecture an accessible language is a key concern which architects are trying to address.

Recent initiatives such as the Glasgow Institute of Architects new magazine, The Architect, seek to include a wider audience in the architectural debate; distributing the magazine throughout the construction industry and related professions is a valiant attempt to reach others.

For Glasgow 1999 and the architectural profession, making architecture accessible is a mighty challenge but not an impossible one.

n Sarah Gaventa is communications director for Glasgow 1999. This article is extracted from a paper presented at the RIAS conference in Aberdeen

this weekend.