Archinect - Features

10 Tips for Architects To Survive Downturns by Former HOK CEO Patrick MacLeamy

2024-10-18T13:55:00-04:00

“I spent 50 years at HOK, working my way up from junior designer to CEO,” Patrick MacLeamy wrote in his 2020 book Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories, and Strategies Behind HOK. “Where else can you do that?”

During his time as HOK CEO and Chairman from 2003 to 2016, MacLeamy exerted great effort in shaping a resilient practice that, in many ways, harks back to the ethos of the firm’s founding. As a child of the Great Depression, co-founder George Hellmuth purposely structured HOK along the principles of what he described in 1944 as a 'Depression-Proof Firm,' one that could step off the typical economic rollercoaster that many firms, then and now, continue to ride.

Eight decades later, MacLeamy believes the industry has much to learn from the approach taken by Hellmuth, along with his co-founders Gyo Obata and George Kassabaum. “Architecture is a passion, not just a profession, and my own passion for the field extends to the business side,” MacLeamy writes...

Being Laid off Is Tough; So Is Waiting To Be

2024-08-26T08:00:00-04:00

Findings from our recent Archinect Business Survey suggest that many architecture employees do not feel secure in their current roles. For those facing the looming prospect of layoffs in the coming weeks or months, the emotional strain can be as taxing as that experienced by those who have already lost their jobs. What can employees and employers alike do to mitigate such anxiety?

Are Architectural Workers More Pessimistic About the Economy Than Firm Owners?

2024-08-19T08:00:00-04:00

In our recent analysis of the Archinect Business Survey published last month, we observed a distinct divergence between how firm owners and workers were feeling about the business health of their firm, industry, and the wider U.S. economy. Across the board, our survey suggests that firm workers felt more pessimistic and insecure about today’s economic landscape than firm owners. Why?

There is likely no ‘one size fits all’ answer to this question. However, a number of trends playing out across the economy, including architecture-specific trends previously reported by Archinect, offer several lines of speculation.

Five Big Factors Behind the Architecture Industry’s Economic Slowdown

2024-07-05T12:59:00-04:00

Earlier this week, we released Part One of our findings from the Archinect Business Survey, which invited you to share how you were feeling about the economic outlook of your firm and sector. Our analysis found that across the United States, architects have seen business conditions decline in the past year and are downbeat about their firm’s business health, the health of the architecture industry at large, and the wider U.S. economy. Meanwhile, clients are cautious about starting or continuing projects.

While Part One offered an insight into how architects and clients are faring within the architecture industry’s current economic slowdown, this article, Part Two, explores the potential causes of the slowdown itself. The five factors set out below reflect what respondents to our survey, and economists and commentators from within and beyond the architecture industry, have identified as driving forces behind today’s business climate.

While each of these factors deserves to be isolate...

Architects and Clients Downbeat About Economy: Archinect's Business Survey Results Revealed

2024-07-03T08:29:00-04:00

Throughout May and June 2024, we invited our community to offer us insights and feedback on how you were feeling about the economic outlook of your firm and sector. As we explained at the time, this project was motivated by several observations from economists within and beyond the AEC industry that the U.S. may be “sleepwalking” into a recession.

To investigate how the architecture profession was fairing against such headwinds, we asked you a series of questions on the economic health of your firm, your sentiments on the wider sector, your experience of the job market, your conversations with clients, your plans for the future, and more.

Having analyzed your feedback, Archinect can now reveal our findings, which will be published in two parts. Part One, below, offers an overview of how both architects and clients are feeling about the industry, in addition to how they are responding to the challenges they are facing. Part Two sets out some of the key factors and driving forces behi...

Architects, How Is Work Feeling These Days?

2024-05-16T10:45:00-04:00

We want to hear from our community: How are you feeling about the economic outlook of your firm and sector? How easy or difficult are you finding it to secure projects? What is your employment outlook? What are you hearing from clients?

Fill out our anonymous survey below.

How can architecture become more diverse? On May 5th, L.A. AIA's "Encompass" conference addresses this question

2017-05-04T11:44:00-04:00

Although there's always a few ignorant and ignoble members of any profession, architecture is primarily made up of progressively-minded, ethically-bound professionals. So why is architecture so white, male, and socioeconically monolithic? More importantly, how can these statistics be changed?

Between the home and the market: an interview with Christine Bjerke from Next Up: Floating Worlds

2017-03-28T12:03:00-04:00

“The economy of the home becoming an investment culture instead of a savings culture disrupts the idea of very specific gendered roles in Japanese society,” states the Copenhagen-based architect Christine Bjerke during an interview conducted as part of Archinect’s Next Up: Floating Worlds. Bjerke’s project (On the Floating World of the) FX Beauties, which inspired the name of the event, derives from her research into the spatial implications of the work of the FX Beauties, a club of Japanese housewives who engage in day-trading on foreign exchange markets.

Finding the Contemporary City Between the Local and the Global with In-Between Economies

2017-03-22T12:03:00-04:00

How is the city made? Who is it made by? Who is it made for? These are the questions poised by In-Between Economies, an interdisciplinary research platform based in Copenhagen, London and Oslo. In their view, the only way to address them in the 21st century is to expand beyond the purview of architecture or urbanism. “Urban life, and our experience of it, is a complex mix of economic systems, social relationships, and infrastructural spaces,” they tell me. And to grapple with it, we need to start talking with people besides architects.

The internship test or: why even become an architect at all?

2016-04-06T09:11:00-04:00

The question of internships frames something of a litmus test in architecture – although they tend to indicate more about the hiring firm than the hire. Exploited labor or necessary rite-of-passage? It’s a debate that’s been raging for decades almost exclusively through this binary, even as the context in which it’s been waged has transformed considerably. While certain practices have moved to institute fair compensation into their intern programs, life for many architecture interns today remains a struggle.

Architecture after capitalism, in a world without work

2016-03-18T10:32:00-04:00

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” writes Karl Marx in Das Kapital, likely the most direct invocation of architecture in his influential, and controversial, writings. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”