Why Architecture?

Author as a small boy

I didn’t really choose to study architecture. I wanted to paint, but signed up due to a fear of poverty and an interest in mapping the world around me. I made a decision based on ‘career prospects’, foolishly. The blame for my career has to be handed to two long dead stars, Mies Van De Rohe and Howard Roark. On a sunny afternoon in my school holiday, aged 12, I watched The Fountainhead and fell for the self-obsessed, dictatorial, narcissist architect, Roark. Ayn Rand’s 1943 fictional character lionised the architect as superman and, while this chapter is in part about the gender-linked failings of architecture as a career and the role of ego, it is also about a fundamental, systemic issue that pervades our profession and damages the lives of many architects, regardless of gender: that of the long hours culture.

All of us face conflicting life demands. We have to find balance between professional achievement, power, income, lifestyle, family and partners. The impact of these demands on the lives of both male and female architects is hard to ignore; this is not a career where nine-to-five hours and low stress are on offer. The RIBA report Why do women leave architecture? (2003) demonstrated in its findings that there are multiple complex reasons why women leave our profession, but in summary it stems from ‘a gradual erosion of confidence and de-skilling, leading to reduced self-esteem and poor job satisfaction’.¹

The report notes that the findings, including discriminatory and anti-family tendencies in male-dominated practices, apply to both genders. It goes on to identify the long hours culture as a core issue. Given studio culture still encourages allnighters in the run up to portfolio submission, the unhealthy hours habit shows little sign of changing.

Broken Promises

Architecture is seen as a vocation. Long hours and weekends are needed to break even or make a profit, which makes us the laughing stock of other construction professionals who work less and earn more. Early on, I realised that the power did not lie with those who labour late into the night. The power lay with the three partners, and the key to success in architecture seemed to reside in:

1. Being older (the BD ‘young architect of the year’ can be 45 years old).
2. Being a man (it is simply true that, for many reasons, more men stay in the profession).
3. Being slightly ‘unhinged’ (psychological profiles of architects in the US show a tendency to the ‘psychopathic’ being in the majority).²

I realised rapidly that reward-based success was about more than the ability to design; it was about communicating and selling the practice, about political posturing and pushing above competitors, while all the time interfacing with clients, discussing money, cars and skiing. This was the key to reward and success.

I also realised that the matter of time (age) could be ‘hacked’ by not actually doing the long list of box ticking that was required to be an architect, ditching academia and just doing the job one wanted by acting much older.

Like father, like daughter: one of the author’s children exploring construction processes

Father Failures

Towards the end of my time as an associate with my global ‘AJ100 top 10’ firm,³ I wanted to step up and get in front of both clients and fee winning opportunities on my own platform. I was incentivised by marrying young, becoming a dad, and acting responsibly. I was appointed as a director for the first time. This is where it gets harder. My already poisonous relationship soon failed, and my guilt as a father haunts me. I have seen my kids less and less each year since. I have consistently let my family down ever since, in all apart from my professional success, which only made it seem worse that I was able to afford to be a dad but couldn’t actually be one most of the time. I found the possibility of work-life balance in architecture to be a myth. Architecture had helped to break my marriage, just as I started to seek the cracks and break with ‘real’ architecture. Walking away from architecture school had allowed me to learn about the gentle, cleansing nature of failure, something I’d otherwise been taught to fear.

Money Matters

When we work for nothing, we give away services and are shocked when we’re not profitable. We have a massive cost base and still we work for free. We look at our highly trained creative staff, many of whom could be paid 50–100% more by simply changing job title while doing more or less the same thing every day (design manager, games environment architect, branding agent, real estate agent, developer, CGI artist). And still we work for free. We pick up new staff when times are good and, because of the delicate balance of our studios’ profit and loss, we stupidly watch talent nurtured by our studios leave to start somewhere else when times are bad.

In so doing we undervalue our staff’s personal time and our own; we undervalue our input to the process of making architecture. We undervalue the intellectual rigour, the rich vein of useful data we control. We allow others to guide our industry, and often to take our fees from us, and actually say to clients that we ‘do it for the love of it’! But is that why? The bigger your reputation and your brand the better your income from fees, but all must give away work at some point in order to grow any reputation. At such practices the staff work late, giving up their time as ‘good will’, but to whom? The clients, or the boss? Or, perhaps, to themselves, since certain practices are seen as a stepping stone where the long hours and poor pay are exchanged for the knowledge that when one leaves the starchitect, their legacy rubs off on you like fairy dust. By training highly educated individuals to be part of our ‘team’, we draw them into the culture of long hours and low pay because we charge for work only when the client is prepared to pay. And since we all behave in the same way, we push that line further back into the project. I have had many conversations with clients where content is compared to another firm who have done more work for less, or no, money. We are in a downward spiral of more for less.

Indeed, those architects most lauded by our profession as ‘genius’ and awarded the highest accolades are, allegedly, the worst offenders in poor pay and conditions, ‘shape making’ ego projects for massive personal profit. Their staff will suffer long hours for better career prospects. We are trained to idealise and to dream, yet the top of architecture is occupied mainly by part-psychopathic men who are out to win for themselves. Curious, isn’t it? While our profession is capable of beautiful creativity, some of it is little more than a sweat-shop for enthusiasts. Architects are delusional and dangerous to their own health. We believe the myth that we alone can change it all. When students are taught to chase the accolade of prodigious ‘one off’ genius, we fail to remind them that 40% of architects will work in a practice of more than 50 staff, and a lot of the rest will be employees.⁴ The way forward is not clear but if I were to sketch out a path it would be this: the value we bring to our clients is measurable in many ways, but always looking for the social benefit will not pay the bills.

Learning from My Mistakes

We have to speak the languages of planning, property, and money, not just architecture. We have to sell clients our intellectual input to their projects as early as possible in the development process, based on the financial outcomes that we all understand can be generated and paid accordingly. Good places and spaces sell well and make money. We need to take a share. Finally, we as architects now need to make sure we talk among ourselves outside of the forum of the RIBA. We need to form a new guild. Stop undercutting each other, or at least set a time limit on free work. Once we stop this, we can start generating higher fees and pay better. Maybe we can employ more staff who can then live a better life.

The alpha male and female characters of architecture need to listen more, to care more, and to lead by example. I can’t remember meeting any of these characters back at art school, where I started this journey, but it occurs to me now that maybe that is because I was one.