Profession at a Crossroads: Reconciling Architecture’s Past with the Demands of its Future
More often than not, the architect teams charged with designing the buildings that fill our cities encounter difficulties that hinder the quality of what gets built. When a building is designed well, it not only meets minimum contractual and building code requirements but also can provide valuable social benefits that directly contribute to human creativity or mental health, or encourage new social relations between disparate groups. Or it might showcase replicable innovations in building materials and systems. Some buildings inspire future development projects that carry any one of these kinds of advancements forward, and in that way a great design idea can reverberate and make an extended impact.
One of the largest factors driving the success of a building project is how well the architect works within and across a variety of stakeholders: the project team, the owner who commissioned the project, builders and other trade workers, and the people whose community a new building project resides in. As the design leader, it is the architect’s responsibility to respond to all the agendas, priorities, and concerns these groups bring, which often at the very least includes how the building is used, the cost of the project, its constructability, and its aesthetics, in addition to the needs and desires of community members whose lives are bound up in whatever is being built. If an architect fails to meet the varied, challenging, and sometimes contradictory criteria for success, it usually isn’t a failure of design itself, but rather is the result of their design team’s failure to fully leverage the promise and value of incorporating a diversity of perspectives in their work.
Such failures underscore a paradox of the profession, which is that while specialized training equips architects with strong design skills, such training can also pose a significant barrier to achieving the kind of truly outstanding design that architects aspire to. A quick survey of the demographics of licensed architects and firm leaders reveals that people with certain backgrounds face steep challenges in even entering the profession or that they simply do not consider architecture as a possible career path in the first place. Consequently, the ideas and experiences of underrepresented groups are often absent from the very design process that benefits from their contributions.
To address this paradox, architects must reassess the structures of architectural education and internships across the broader field of design, and fundamental to doing so is that they also must be able to clearly articulate what design is and the importance of good design to achieving a just society. For more than a century—as long as it has been a profession in the United States—architecture has struggled to explain to people who are not architects why they should care about design. But a big factor in that is simply that architects and nonarchitects have different ideas among themselves about what actually constitutes successful architecture. It is a failure of communication that makes the field of architecture inscrutable not only to young people considering their career options, but also to the field itself. The result is an ever more exclusive profession composed of self-selected practitioners who are economically able to take low fees in exchange for the privilege of seeing their designs built.
Time
To effectively communicate the value of design to the wider world and attract a more diverse group of future architects, the profession of architecture needs to change in fundamental ways. Doing so will mean scrutinizing long-accepted industry norms, only three of which I take up in this article. They are: how we value and manage our time as designers, the mystique of design as a creative practice, and architecture’s professional identity. These are three topics where what we claim to care about as a profession doesn’t necessarily align with what we actually do, and I strongly believe that addressing them will put architecture on the path of becoming a more welcoming, thriving profession that is ready to make significant contributions to the world’s urgent crises, that will produce a diverse and robust pipeline of eager and brilliant talent, and that we’re proud to be a part of.
Among architects and architecture students there is a tacit understanding that the greater one’s willingness to work long hours—often to an unhealthy degree—the greater one’s commitment to the practice of design.1 Physiological data, however, shows that sleep deprivation greatly lowers cognitive function, particularly higher-level executive decision-making.2 Indeed, chronic levels of overwork take a severe toll on a person’s mental and emotional health as well as on their relationships with others. Burnout and isolation are correlated with lower levels of engagement and declines in quality and volume of productivity in the workplace. Cultural and professional expectations around time management are established for students while they are in school, and there have been organized efforts to improve design studio culture in school and to reduce work-life conflict in both school and the profession. There is also broad agreement that industry norms around long working hours are not adding value. It’s a rational and uncontroversial conclusion.
Yet there is a pervasive sense that changing this unhealthy norm would amount to a loss for the profession of architecture—that if we “coddle” students by limiting their studio work time, we might inadvertently curtail the expression of individual passion for design, where working long hours is born out of the intense flow state that designers crave. This sentiment was underscored in focus groups that my team organized for the Equity in Architectural Education supplement to the AIA Guides for Equitable Practice.3
If persuading those who cling to the idea that working long hours stands as a proxy for design rigor were the only obstacle to change on this front, a shift in design culture might not be so difficult. But the very structure of the profession reinforces the assumption that time is a practically unlimited resource. In school, policies preventing all-nighters send one message, while coffee makers and couches in studio send another. At work, employee handbooks may promote a reasonable work-life balance, while jokes about colleagues who stop work at 5 p.m. as “working a half-day” or scheduling “optional” meetings over the weekend send contradictory messages about expectations.
There are easy ways to introduce a more humane approach to time management. Studio assignments could include notes about the expected amount of time to complete them, or how long an average student will need to work to get an average grade. Using such averages, instructors could also adjust course workloads and assignment deadlines so that they align with typical university class credit hour guidelines (typically three work hours for each one hour of course credit). Some instructors are doing this now, but it is not a cultural norm in design education, and yet in the profession of architecture it is customary to budget and track billable hours and manage project teams transparently and according to established time limits.
But that’s not to say that the profession is well equipped to manage time. Architectural firms could be more effective at tracking hours to the value of a finished project rather than to the project fee. Or they could cross-reference two different ways of quantifying labor hours: one working backward from a project fee to derive an allotment of billable hours, and the other based on the value of the finished building to the client or society and that accounts for financial savings, increased earnings, commercializable innovations, or holistic or social measures that aren’t tied to immediate profit. Transformational change would entail a wholesale shift away from the service industry model, where time is sold in increments, to a model where the persistent value of intellectual property accrues over time.4
Design Mistique
What makes time management for designers so complicated is that the actual work of design is a nonlinear and often unpredictable process. But such unpredictability isn’t exclusive to design, and in fact many other professions are successful at finding ways to quantify it. It would seem, then, that the profession of architecture itself resists more effective time management. I would even go further and argue that, for many architects, there is a sense that quantifying one’s labor in terms of value diminishes the romantic mystique of design as a creative practice. It’s worth examining what we gain and what we lose by perpetuating that mystique.
Design often eludes description. Explaining design thinking to those not trained in it can be challenging, akin to describing a dream whose memory fades as you try to recall its details. Teaching design is even more challenging, since the lateral and simultaneous processes inherent to design can seem frustratingly ambiguous to the beginning design student. And what constitutes a successful design often can seem to depend on subjective aesthetic preference. There is a long and venerated tradition within architecture that defines beauty somewhat narrowly in terms of a building’s geometry and formal composition, apart from whether the building meets functional goals, produces an economic impact or positive social benefits, or integrates important material- or climate-related innovations, and so on.
At the same time, the joy of exercising one’s design skills and wrestling with apparently intractable problems or irresolvable contradictions can be enormously satisfying, because the revelation of new possibilities that unfolds as part of the process can seem magical. The very nature of design thinking lends itself to mystery, and that mystique also has been actively cultivated, with hagiographic stories of solo architect geniuses and apocryphal tales of billion-dollar projects inspired by napkin sketches. But such mysticism around the practice of architecture breeds inscrutability and discontent about what architects actually do and how their work is valued. Such discontent abounds online and recently even prompted a spate of unionization efforts.5
Given this frustration—and given an abundance of empirical evidence showing that overwork is detrimental to both personal health and productivity—why would so many architects persist in spreading the idea not only that architecture as a profession is worth personal sacrifice, but also that being a good architect and committing oneself fully to the practice of design requires personal sacrifice?
Widespread cognitive dissonance might play a role. Most clearly explained by social psychologist Elliot Aronson, cognitive dissonance is a powerful form of self-persuasion that arises when humans convince themselves that something has value when there are many indications that rationally show it does not. In the realm of architecture, it is easy to see how cognitive dissonance could affect individuals who have made tremendous investments of time and resources to join what turns out to be, for many, an unsatisfying profession, and who continue to make that bargain well into their careers. Cognitive dissonance enables the illusory belief that the pleasure or payoff of being an architect is well worth the price of admission to the profession as well as the ongoing personal sacrifice it requires.6 Perpetuating the mystique of design keeps that collective delusion alive.
Identity of the Profession
The profession of architecture has always been infused with boundless energy, creativity, talent, and passion. When I recall the architects I have known, what comes to mind first is a fierce love of and pride in design. I share in their pride and have immense respect for all architects. But I also can’t help but think that our continued appeals to design’s mystique carries an even deeper consequence, a kind of incoherence of professional identity that hinders our ability to communicate the incredible value of design not only to project clients and stakeholders, but also to society at large, future generations of would-be architects, and, perhaps most importantly, ourselves.
It is an existential paradox at the core of the profession’s identity that protects architecture’s traditional idols from scrutiny while also insulating the profession from having to embrace necessary fundamental change. And it is precisely the kind of paradox that architects thrive at resolving with a third way—an approach known as a “both/and solution”—which is a testament to architecture’s endless optimism. But what if current circumstances are such that they demand tougher choices: that we repair this incoherence of professional identity or else risk irrelevance? I believe that is the crossroads where architecture now stands, and that we must change or face obsolescence.7
Articulating a coherent sense of vision and value of design will have cascading benefits for the profession of architecture. Doing so has the potential to attract a greater diversity and number of young people to architecture as a career path, improve industry norms around workplace expectations, alleviate discontent among junior practitioners and provide them with a deeper sense of purpose and confidence in their personal investment in their careers, and, perhaps most importantly, render visible design’s enormous contributions to our cities and the world.
This kind of recasting of our professional identity is not a task for one person. For me, it’s a task that begins with the inclusion of a more diverse and extended range of stakeholders and expertise as part of an architect’s design process. Project stakeholders beyond a building’s occupants and owners could include neighbors who are affected, for example, by changes in traffic flows, shadows and reflections of sunlight, air movement, and parking. And stakeholders need not be defined geographically. They could also include the people who mine the raw materials or assemble the components specified by architects. Digging deeper into the supply chain, for example, reveals forced labor in the manufacture of building materials.8
Integrating a wider range of technical expertise could take many forms. It could mean more extensive assessment of a given building’s economic impact. A project initially assessed to have limited local economic impact might be able to be transformed into one that contributes to a circular economy. Or opening up architectural definitions of beauty to attributes other than harmonious formal composition might, for example, reveal novel methods of capturing solar energy or deflecting solar gain; preference in material selection could be given to materials that capture and bank carbon. Or coordination with disaster relief agencies could become a part of the design process. Precinct-level coordination with them could facilitate important data capture for disaster preparedness efforts or could prompt preventative design measures that would be allowed to supersede legally drawn property lines.
No single individual is capable of bringing about this kind of change, but as an architect and educator, I am personally prepared to relinquish many aspects of the profession that I cherish if it means attracting a more diverse range of talents who can contribute to our collective ability to create a more just and beautiful world. I know many of my colleagues support my vision, and I hope they will shift their own thinking to advance it.
