Archinect - Features

Organizing and Reforming Architectural Education: A Conversation With Tessa Forde

2024-11-06T11:49:00-05:00

In recent years, the word 'organizing' has taken on a heightened power in architectural discourse, most notably through grassroots efforts by architectural workers across the United States to organize for better workplace conditions.

For Tessa Forde, organizing centers on a vast network of relationships that transcends different scales, disciplines, and actors across and beyond the architectural profession. In particular, Forde sees architectural education as an arena in which organizing holds great potential, with positive benefits for educators, students, the profession, the public, and the planet.

In that spirit, Forde is one of seven co-authors of the new book The Organizer's Guide to Architecture Education, alongside Kirsten Day, Peggy Deamer, Andrea Dietz, Jessica Garcia Fritz, Palmyra Geraki, and Valérie Lechêne. In October 2024, Archinect's Niall Patrick Walsh spoke with Forde about the book and its underlying message. The conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity...

Creativity Won’t Protect Architects from Automation — But Labor Unions Might

2024-02-27T07:31:00-05:00

The proliferation of generative AI tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT has undermined long-held assumptions that artificial intelligence would not threaten creative disciplines. In an effort to balance the opportunities and limits of artificial intelligence in the architecture studio, we ask what lessons architects can take from recent successful labor actions by screenwriters and actors in Hollywood's entertainment industry.

This article is part of the Archinect In-Depth: Artificial Intelligence series.

Unionization in Architecture: Reviving a Dormant Movement to Fix a Broken Industry

2022-05-27T12:50:00-04:00

After decades of inactivity, 2022 saw the resurgence of the union movement in architecture with an effort by workers at New York-based SHoP to collectively organize. Where does this effort, which was ultimately withdrawn, sit within the broader discourse of architectural labor conditions? How might unionization impact employer-employee dynamics, architectural fees, and the design process itself?

In search of answers, we speak with IAMAW union organizer, and former SHoP employee, Andrew Daley, who assisted in the unionization effort while at the firm. We also speak with Peggy Deamer, founding member of The Architecture Lobby, for whom the SHoP effort was the culmination of years of activism and campaigning for reform of what an increasing number of architects see as a broken business model.

Cooperatives: The Real Employee-Owned Firms?

2022-05-06T09:00:00-04:00

In a follow-up to our January 2022 feature on employee-owned architecture firms, we question if the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) models which represent the majority of employee-owned architecture firms adequately fulfill a growing worker-led clamor for reform within the profession. For organizations such as the Architecture Lobby, and its founding member Peggy Deamer, meaningful worker ownership of an architectural firm goes far beyond the ESOP model of stock and retirement plans, and instead requires a fundamental rethink, or even abolition, of the employer-employee dynamic.

Debunking Architecture’s Mythological Work Culture

2022-04-04T14:36:00-04:00

After a recent panel hosted within SCI-Arc, called Basecamp: How to be in an office, sparked protest from students and alumni, a slew of events unfolded within the school that rippled into the architecture community, prompting passionate discourse about ethics within professional practice and academia, especially as it relates to internships and the treatment of students and young professionals. But this isn't an essay about SCI-Arc, or an account of what is going on at SCI-Arc. The events have already been well documented online and in Archinect's latest reporting on April 1.

Instead, I want to explore the deeper historical and philosophical concepts that I believe underlie what we’ll call the conservative view of architecture work culture: that long hours, toil and suffering, and low pay are inevitable realities of pursuing a rigorous design career. I see a disconnect between the traditional professional ethos and the advent of the current zeitgeist that has been born, particular...

Going All-In at Bard Architecture; The Opportunities and Challenges of Architectural Education in a Time of Transformation

2021-07-27T16:23:00-04:00

This spring, the first year of classes came to a close at a new undergraduate program in architecture at Bard College, a 2,000-student liberal arts school in rural Annandale, New York. According to the co-directors, Professors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, designing Bard Architecture’s new curriculum has been an opportunity to rethink architectural education by asking: “What is architecture in the first place?”

For What It’s Worth: Unpaid Overtime Among Future Architects

2021-04-28T16:22:00-04:00

Over recent months, a conversation about unpaid overtime has risen to the top of the United Kingdom’s architectural discourse, spurred by lobbying from the Future Architects Front. We took a closer look at how the latest debate began, what it uncovered about the prevalence of unpaid overtime in architecture, and what it means for the future of unpaid overtime in the UK and abroad.