Image credit: Archinect

For many salaried workers, freelancing and contracting may once have been a scary proposition, little more than placeholder labels as one moved between secure, salaried positions. However, the past decade has seen a notable increase in skilled workers and professionals becoming freelancers out of choice, with a unique skillset increasingly being capitalized upon by firms and businesses. Where do the architecture industry and its workers sit in this emerging landscape of the blended workforce?

Across the United States, freelancing is on the rise. Over the past decade, the number of U.S. workers freelancing either part-time or full-time has steadily grown from 53 million in 2014 to 64 million in 2023, now representing 38% of the nation's workforce. Within this group, the number of freelancers who have chosen the route full-time grew from 17% in 2014 to 36% in 2020. Globally, Gartner expects that by next year, up to 40% of the workforce will be independent workers, a definition spanning contract, freelance, temporary, or gig workers.

While opportunities within the gig economy have exploded in recent years due to ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft, or delivery services such as Doordash, more than half of independent workers provide knowledge services such as computer programming, marketing, IT, and business consulting. Where such workers would once have relied on personal connections, SEO-friendly websites, and aggressive targeted marketing to secure work, the emergence of dedicated job-matching platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork allows freelancers to seamlessly advertise work and services, secure contracts, and collect ratings, reviews, and testimonials. In tandem, the emergence of smart AI-driven tools allows freelancers to control business and organizational matters with greater ease, from logging expenses to scheduling meetings.

Almost half of freelancers see freelancing as a long-term, not a temporary, career path.

While the share of freelancers in the U.S. economy was already increasing before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic saw the number of freelancers in the American workforce grow by 22% on 2019 levels. This can be partly attributed to unique factors such as furloughs and job losses, with workers joining the freelance sector temporarily before taking on their next salaried role. That said, almost half of freelancers see freelancing as a long-term, not a temporary, career path. After all, the benefits of a remote-work lifestyle that many employees discovered for the first time in 2020 are already a common staple of freelancers who, according to an Upwork survey, reported “lower rates of the negative impact of COVID-19 on their overall lifestyle, well-being, mental health, and financial well-being.”

When we merge the online channels that freelancing has migrated to with the changing attitudes among salaried employees to the world of work beyond the pandemic, it is perhaps no surprise that surveys have found a generational divide within freelancing. According to the same 2020 Upwork study, 50% of Gen Z and 44% of Millennials freelance, compared to 30% of Gen X and 26% of Boomers.

This supply of new freelancers is matched by an increased demand from employers. As a recent article in the Harvard Business Review explains, companies across a range of sectors are turning to the freelance market to fill a lack of deep, focused expertise and experience among in-house employees. “In many fields — particularly technology, data sciences, and machine learning — the people with the most sought-after skills are freelancers,” the article notes. “Integrating and managing a new 'blended workforce' will be one of the main managerial challenges in the years ahead.”

There is no question that architects have embraced freelancing models to a degree. On Upwork, architects advertising freelance services have attracted almost 10,000 reviews from clients, with interior designers and floor plan designers attracting 6,600 and 4,400 client reviews, respectively. On fellow freelancing platform Fiverr, meanwhile, over 550 freelancers are offering 2D drawing and floor plan services to clients, alongside 355 3D modeling and rendering freelancers, 150 planning freelancers, and 1,000 freelancers operating under the general ‘Architecture & Interior Design’ category. More widely, over 25% of AIA member firms are sole practitioner studios, effectively operating a freelance model.

Architecture firms seeking to attract talent for core roles, such as architects and designers, still overwhelmingly do so through salaried employment rather than a temporary, freelance, or contract model.

Within staffed architecture offices, however, the freelancer’s presence is more sparing. Freelancing services are indeed procured by architecture firms large and small, most commonly in representational tasks such as 3D rendering, illustration, and model making. However, architecture firms seeking to attract talent for core roles, such as architects and designers, still overwhelmingly do so through salaried employment rather than a temporary, freelance, or contract model.

A recent Fast Company analysis, for example, found that 96% of architects work in a full-time salaried position, with only 4% working on a freelance or contract basis, noting that across design disciplines, architects and interior designers “have the most opportunities for salaried jobs with benefits.” This finding correlates with the share of job types currently advertised on Archinect Jobs, the leading job board for the U.S. architecture industry, where only 2% of job ads are for contract services (at the time of writing).

Given the increasingly central role being played by freelancers in the wider economy, it is worth reflecting on the opportunities and risks of such a model becoming more prominent in architecture offices sooner rather than later.

Speaking with companies across the economy that have engaged with freelancers, the Havard Business Review found that freelancers tend to hold a stronger competency over new skills, technologies, and workflows. As our recent Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series showed, the architectural profession is set to undergo a major transformation in workflows available to designers. Firms that increase the presence of freelance and contract designers in teams may, therefore, gain greater access to these new workflows, particularly if contract workers with specific knowledge in complex fields from machine learning to digital simulation join together with more rounded ‘generalist’ in-house designers.

A blended workforce of contract and permanent members may allow for more nimble scaling by firms in response to the economic climate of the day.

Freelance and contract workers embedded within design teams may also bring with them the benefit of years of accumulated experience across a range of projects, geographies, and scenarios, with an ability to fluidly move from one project to another, bringing fresh, external perspectives on design approaches to be adapted and molded by salaried employees. Elsewhere, a blended workforce of contract and permanent members may allow for more nimble scaling by firms in response to the economic climate of the day. This ability to scale teams up and down takes on particular relevance in an architecture profession that is particularly exposed to the cyclical nature of the construction sector.

“Having a 10% increase or decline in construction spending on the previous year is not at all uncommon,” AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker told me back in 2022. “But increasing or decreasing architectural staff by 10% per year is a dramatic move for firms.” Baker identified this mismatch as a “chronic problem” for the profession, telling me that “if you look at the volume of construction activity as the definition of what the need is, and the number of architectural staff at architecture firms as the supply, those are almost never in balance.”

While a strong case can be made for further integration of freelancers into core architecture teams, there are challenges and risks for firms, freelancers, and salaried employees alike.

For architecture firms that pride themselves on unique cultures and values, and particularly on a unique approach to design, increasing the role of freelancers in design teams runs the risk of diluting such values unless dedicated managers or procedures are put in place to infuse freelancers with the firm’s outlook. Moreover, a firm that excessively relies on freelancers to fill a skills gap in roles such as BIM or representation could find that comparable skills among salaried employees stagnate or deteriorate due to a lack of training protocols or practical use.

Freelancers working in architecture teams will also require an inherently different approach from management than their in-house peers. Unlike salaried staff whose dedication to the firm may be tied to relationships among peers, future salary rises, and potential promotion, freelancers are more likely to desire autonomy and flexibility, subject to comparably little formal authority by firm management. Within a particularly toxic office culture, freelancers may also suffer from a lack of in-house employment protections and mechanisms for conflict resolution, while in-house employees may come to resent the ability of freelance colleagues to pick and choose assignments nimbly.

Might an architecture office whose culture becomes increasingly defined by short, transactional relationships lose interest in promoting the long-term strategies for mental health, work-life balances, and worker agency that many hoped would emerge after the pandemic?

When drafting contracting agreements with freelancers, firms may be required to devote resources or personnel to addressing unique requirements of architectural practice, such as indemnity insurance, non-disclosure agreements for sensitive projects, and adequate licensure credentials. Both employers and freelancers alike must also be aware of their respective taxation responsibilities, as freelancers assume responsibility for filing their own tax returns each year. Due to the U.S.'s tax and labor policies that favor full-time employment, both freelancers and employers can face additional costs and administrative complexities associated with a freelance/contractor working relationship.

More fundamentally, increasing the share of freelancers in design teams would require a radical change in how architectural projects are delivered by offices, with strict time and compensation contracts for freelancers leaving little room for delays, extension of deadlines, or repetition of design tasks that define so many architectural projects at present. However, as our previous reporting on unionization highlighted, such a change would be timely even without the catalyst of the freelancing economy.

On a final related note, an increase in the share of freelance or contracted staff, if unethically exploited, runs the risk of undermining that same resurging architectural labor movement. If more roles in U.S. architecture offices are outsourced to remote contractors in lower-wage economies, will the bargaining power of in-house workers suffer as a result? How might a union form among architecture workers if a sizeable share of those workers see themselves as temporary or transient, with little interest in engaging with the collective mindset so crucial to a union’s formation? Moreover, might an architecture office whose culture becomes increasingly defined by short, transactional relationships lose interest in promoting the long-term strategies for mental health, work-life balances, and worker agency that many hoped would emerge after the pandemic?

Before freelance and contracting models form a strong presence in core architecture teams, as they are currently doing across the wider U.S. economy, the architectural profession at large would do well to internalize, debate, and attempt to answer such questions, with managers, unions, and workers of all mode of service developing a model of best practice for administering tomorrow’s blended workforce.

Are you a freelance architect/designer, or an architecture manager who often employs freelance or contract designers for your firm? Tell us your experiences in the comments section or by reaching out to niall@archinect.com.