Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

When I first thought about being an architect, and for most of my time in architecture school, I didn’t think much about what I would earn. I had entered the profession because I had a burning passion within myself to become an architect.

I was a few years into school before I even had a conversation with somebody about what we would make once we graduated.

My friend had “heard” that we would make about $20 an hour. I frowned. I was making $20 an hour at the job I left to go to architecture school.

The summer I got married, a lot of my classmates got internships. I was really curious about how much they made. I knew they were all really hard working, bright, eager people who had a lot invested in this career choice.

Some of them made barely minimum wage. Some worked abroad and made even less than the minimum wage.

Albert Bendersky just posted a blog post about this issue after polling architects around the world. The result, in a nutshell, is that architects the world over are grossly underpaid.

See the results.

While in grad school, I had a crisis of relevancy.

Or rather, a crisis of irrelevancy.

I was learning a lot about how to use AutoCAD. And Rhino. And Illustrator. I already knew how to use SketchUp and Photoshop, but I got better at those two too.

I learned how to make pretty pictures. I learned how to sound smart when I talked about my pretty pictures. I learned to draw from ideological concepts in order to justify my pretty pictures.

What I wanted was to learn how to build. Yes, I was naïve. When I was first applying to grad school, I had this idea in my head that part of learning how to be an architect meant that I would learn about how buildings were put together. I actually thought that we would spend a lot of time looking at and touching actual buildings and actually building actual buildings. I figured that everyone, especially educators, especially educators at an Ivy League school, knew that the best, most effective way to learn something is by actually doing it.

Learning anything in a lecture-based format is the absolute worst, least effective way to learn something. But that is how we were taught building systems. With photographs of the finished building up on a screen, and with black and white line drawings in a book.

Seriously.

Had I been less naïve, I would have applied to perhaps the University of Kansas, which has a year-long design/build course called Studio 804.

Or perhaps I would have tried to get one of the precious few spots in Auburn’s Rural Studio.

Or I would have applied to the University of Washington, which has a number of design/build classes, as I learned when I visited for the first time a few months ago.

Or perhaps I would have skipped grad school altogether and gone straight to one of the building schools listed below under “places where you could probably learn more about designing and building in just a few days than I did after a year of grad school.”

But, being naïve, I thought that the best place to learn architecture was at a big expensive name-brand Ivy League school.

Don’t be naïve.

Most architecture students graduate with a fine set of design skills, and little else. Most have never built anything. Almost all know nothing about how to actually run a business.

And few know anything about all of the hundreds of other things you have to know in the Real World. Schools figure that students will “pick it up” as they go along.

That logic makes sense…if the student is lucky enough to find herself at a firm where others have time to teach.

But this is usually not the case.

I’ve been following a number of threads about the dire state of the profession on LinkedIn. A couple of recent postings are highly relevant to the case of architect irrelevancy. Please read on…

In all honesty, I feel as though the profession abdicated its’ responsibility to the built environment long ago… somewhere around the time that developers, Realtors, and financiers started dictating the terms, scope, and significance of architecture as an art, science, and essential need.

Individuals have always been able to overcome the sluggishness of the appropriate professional societies and I feel as though architects (as individuals) are doing so now. It just isn’t as easy as it was before the profession caved in…

Posted by William Woodsmall

And…

Well I personally feel the science portion of this profession has been delegated to the engineers, contractors or anyone else this can be pushed off onto as I have pointed out earlier. Simply looking at who is liable for what and the amount of liability these parties have related to science makes this very obvious. Scope has always been dictated by money. Anything involving the idea of money has always been a concept architects have had a difficult time dealing with regardless if it’s an employee’s paycheck, paying a bill or quoting a client a price.

I have covered all of the bases here but “art” which is subject to the amount of money someone is willing to pay for and it’s different for every person. What is one man’s treasure is another man’s crap. Since the profession is only left with art, it makes things even that much more of a hard sale for the architect to find work. Watching an architect try and get a client is like watching a con artist run a shell game on the side of the street. They try and provide the client a reason they are necessary which is something no other profession has to do in the AEC industry. How many times did you see a structural engineer have to provide a reason why a client needs structural engineering in their project? How about civil engineering and the survey of the land that goes with it? How about even an electrical engineer or even mechanical? They never do because people know why their services are needed, what they are held accountable for and what they are paying for in layman’s terms.

I can not say the same for an architect. This is why they need more liability, more credibility and a better education that is not all inclusive of design only leaving no regard to reality. I have seen 3 year old children draw pictures. The profession needs to provide more than pictures. They also need to make the profession have a decent return on the investment of time and money spent on taking it up in the first place. I am not talking about the warm fuzzy feeling people get either because this won’t pay the bills.

The only reason a Realtor or a financier has any power in this industry is because the architects gave it to them when architects decided all they want to do is design and have no liability it trashed their profession. This is part of the problem that needs to be fixed in order to save the profession. Right now as we speak the design build and the custom home industries are taking bigger and bigger chunks out of your revenue.

Posted by Chris Currie

After my own experience in architecture school, I’ve found a lot of similar stories from a lot of other students at a lot of other schools:

Most architecture students do not learn how to build in school. They don’t learn how different parts of a building fit together. They learn how to make pretty pictures on their computer screens.

Architecture students in Studio 804 at the University of Kansas, get this, actually build a house.

[How jealous are you right now?]

There’s resentment in Rockhill’s voice when he says he never got this kind of hands-on training when he was in architecture school. “The public would be amazed at how detached architectural education has been from the reality of building,” he says. Lectures and computer work dominate curriculum. Internships get students out of the classroom but generally slot them into the cubicle farms of architectural firms to grow into what Rockhill says is an entire generation of ill-prepared professionals. Because they don’t understand the literal nuts and bolts of construction, they pass the buck to the contractors. “A lot of architects are basically just good at covering their asses,” Rockhill says. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Read the whole article about what one school is doing right.

Jared Eder, a 2009 graduate of Studio 804 who now works at Ellerbe Becket in Kansas City, is among the students who have been lured to KU by the program. “I was sick of the ‘paper architecture’ route of the more traditional paths to a master’s,” he tells The Pitch in an e-mail. “There comes a time when you need to step away from the computer and all the ‘photo-realistic’ renderings and make something, put your money where your mouth is.”

I’ve been following Albert Bendersky’s many threads in the LinkedIn ARCHITECT group.

I LOVE what he’s just said about the AIA. It seems that most architects believe the AIA to be a useless, manipulative organization. Here’s what Albert has to say:

I don’t care about AIA, OAA or any other specific structures. I’m above it. Architecture is above it. These organizations might be helpful for the profession at the beginning & destructive for the profession at the end (which is now)… but it doesn’t matter. They will die, yet architecture will stay. I discuss philosophical & intellectual issues on my blog, not administrative problems of some temporary bodies. I think in different categories: chaos, anarchy, freedom, hate, love. Not short-term profit making or structural reforms in some idiotic institution. I am talking abstract not specifics. And that’s the purpose of my blog.

Of course I support my vision & my ideas with concrete samples, real names, certain events. I don’t live on Mars & I realize it. Yet some people, Rafael just don’t care about institutional status or ridiculous abbreviations.

I’ll give you an example. To me State as a category or Government, if you wish is the highest Evil, yet I realize that we cannot exist without a mechanism of State. (People are not ready for that.) It means that even though I will comply with all the laws, will pay taxes, will be an exemplary citizen, will go & vote (which I always do) - I will never take a Governmental position, I will never work as a part of governmental system., I will never run for any governmental office. It goes against my principles. I am ready to work for governmental organizations as a private entity, I will happily design school, community center or government building, but I’ll do it as a professional does for the client - not as part of the state department.

I hope you understand me & if you read my blog next time try to relate to its content more philosophically.

Forget about American Institute of Architects or any other association. It’s all temporary,relative. Life is greater than that. And when we all have our heart attacks HE will not ask us about our membership fees or abbreviations behind our names. Don’t you think so?

Learn how how to design for stability, resilience, and abundance at villages in Kenya that are dedicated to sustainability in the Badilisha Ecovillage, March 9-23, 2011.

Badilisha EcoVillage, on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, operates orphan feeding programs, local scholarship funds, women empowerment and family adoption programs. These courses will be facilitated by Warren Brush, the co-founder of Quail Springs Permaculture Farm and True Nature Design with other local teachers.

Read more about the project.

Download the permaculture class flyer [pdf].

I’v been following the thread “Let’s see what people think about us in terms of how much money we, architects, make!” on LinkedIn.

A member of the group had stated that “Art + Building Science = Architecture”

Chris Currie had an interesting response that I wanted to share with you.

[Emphasis mine.]

When I first saw this comment I couldn’t stop laughing. This is so wrong I don’t know where to start. Art is subjective to personal taste science isn’t. This is another reason why architectural services are looked upon by the public as optional and the architects income is minuscule. Science is closer to math than it is art. Numbers are factual data. Science is based on facts and numbers. Now looking at who is typically liable for that in the process of a design of any project should have been a big red flag for everyone. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the architect. Considering the stark contrast between the two subjects and the very few architects that know any science at all, let alone how the building goes together, you can’t even begin to sell me on the idea that architects are scientific. The probability of that, is like winning the lottery or finding love in a whore house because we all know they are not learning it in their design only curriculum in college. After all it’s so much easier to draw a pretty picture, making it into a reality is always someone else’s problem in today’s world. That’s why there are engineers. I’m not going to go into specifics but I have seen quite a few architectural abortions in my day to support this train of thought.

Thank you, Chris. This issue remains my largest grip with most architecture schools. Students learn how to make pretty pictures on their computer screens.

Do students learn how to build? NO.

Do students learn how buildings are actually put together? NO.

Do students get to go outside to look at real buildings? Only if they can squeeze in the time between their requisit twenty credits, all of thier class work, studio, and their precious few hours of sleep.

As a student, I overheard my classmates bemoan the ridiculousness of the spaces they were designing.

Of course they were ridiculous. We were trying to satisfy ridiculous critics. We designed in a vacuum. We had zero experience with building materials or how they fit together. We learned a number of software programs. We became proficient with the laser cutter and the 3D printer.

Save our occaisional bouts of volunteerism with Habitat for Humanity, we knew nothing about building.

What is it that possesses a school of architecture to write its curricula in such a way so as to exclude any of the building arts? Upon graduation we are like sheep sent to slaughter.