Geoffrey London has served as the Victorian Government Architect since 2008.

He is only the second person to hold the job, after John Denton from architects Denton Corker Marshall finished a two-year term.

Mr London, who did not return calls from The Age about his departure, has long promised to release guidelines governing the size and design of apartments.

A leaked draft of the guidelines, the Australian Financial Review last week revealed, mandated several controversial rules for developers.

The Better Apartment Design draft included minimum ceiling heights of 2.7 metres, and minimum apartment sizes set at 37 square metres for a studio apartment and 50 square metres for one-bed apartments.

With Melbourne's residential apartment building boom has come complaints that many dwellings are poorly designed.

In June, a Melbourne City Council report warned the boom was "in danger of leaving a lasting legacy of poor-quality housing", because of a lack of enforceable density or height controls.

Planning Minister Matthew Guy said Mr London “has done a very good job as Victorian Government Architect’’.

Amid fears from architects that the government would not quickly replace Mr London, Mr Guy said the process of searching for his replacement would “soon begin”.

The minister did not say when he expected to release the government architect’s final apartment design rules.

The president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Peter Malatt, said a government architect’s position for Melbourne, Australia’s fastest growing city, was “just as important as the Chief Justice and the Chief Medical Officer”.

“We need our professional voice to be heard at the highest level of government in order to maximise design quality in all government policies and decisions,” said Mr Malatt, a director at architecture firm Six Degrees, in a message to architects last week.

The Office of the Victorian Government Architect was moved out of the Premier’s department and into the planning department last year - a move seen by the industry as a downgrading of its role.

Mr Malatt said architects wanted to see “the speedy reappointment of the Government Architect using an equitable and transparent selection process”.