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...

10 Tips for Overcoming and Preventing Burnout in Architecture

2024-08-01T12:30:00-04:00

If you’re experiencing burnout in your architecture role, you’re likely not alone. In 2023, Archinect’s Mental Health Survey found burnout to be a common theme among those who told us they were experiencing stress at work. Our community has also raised the issue among themselves, with an Archinect Forum post titled ‘Burnout Check-In’ prompting almost 100 comments by users describing their own experiences.

Building on our previous feature articles on the subject, which focused on both the architecture work culture and architecture workplace, we have assembled below a series of tips for those currently experiencing and seeking to overcome burnout in their work setting.

Do you have advice for overcoming burnout beyond those set out below? Let us know in the comments.

A Guide to Salary Transparency Laws Across the United States

2024-03-26T08:54:00-04:00

At present, there is no federal pay transparency law in the United States. However, as Archinect frequently reports on, several states and cities across the United States have enacted their own requirements for employers seeking to hire or promote within their organization.

Below, we have listed the details of salary transparency laws across American cities and states as they exist in March 2024. As is noted towards the end of this resource, several more states with no existing requirements are currently in the process of debating or passing legislation to strengthen salary disclosure requirements.

You can help us make architecture salaries more transparent through Archinect’s ongoing salary poll. The poll, currently approaching 20,000 submissions, allows workers from practices across the U.S. and globally to anonymously offer their salary levels.

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.

HDR Chicago on Learning From Other Industries, Employee Empowerment, and Representing the Community

2019-10-11T06:00:00-04:00

Over the past few years, the field has received a growing amount of attention that has highlighted long-standing labor issues within the architecture industry, ranging from unsustainable pay models to unwelcoming work environments. Looking for an alternative, the Architecture Lobby created the Just Design Initiative, which recognizes fair labor practices in architecture. Beginning with nominations submitted by employees, and followed by an evaluation process, the team looked at practices that can serve as models of a new status quo within the profession.

Archinect has teamed up with the Just Design crew to profile firms across the country that meet the initiative's standards. Whether it is a family-friendly work schedule or a health coverage plan that goes above and beyond, the series spotlights practices that honor the basic rights of their employees and can serve as exemplary models of what should become standard for the field.

How Shore Point Architecture Values Its Team Members

2019-08-09T07:00:00-04:00

Burnout, Fatigue and the Architecture Workplace

2019-07-19T11:57:00-04:00

With the discussion on burnout growing, it’s a natural progression to dive deeper into some of its related characteristics. Fatigue is an obvious symptom of overwork and presents a daunting threat to creativity, productivity, and most importantly, mental health. With architecture’s notoriousness with long hours, rigorous (often unnecessary) deadlines, tiredness and fatigue present very real roadblocks to the workforce. What can firms do to mitigate this risk? It’s worth an exploration.

Burnout, and the Architecture Work Culture

2019-07-02T12:00:00-04:00

How many stories have we heard of the extreme working conditions in our industry? Starting from school, "all-nighters" become an inevitable part of our participation as students. It's our ticket to the club. A simple Google search reveals that architecture students are one of the hardest working majors, spending the most hours per week on coursework. And it doesn't stop with school. Naturally, this culture bleeds into the workplace. The experienced reader has probably found themselves, late one night, well past the end of the day, at the office working on something for a client. We vow to get the work done at all costs. But what costs are those really? Our health, wealth, and happiness? Is it really worth it?

BLUR Workshop Wants Their Employees to Think Like Owners

2019-05-08T12:36:00-04:00

The Architecture Lobby's Statement on Unpaid Internships

2019-04-25T11:10:00-04:00

Over the last few weeks, the question of unpaid internships in architecture has blown up across industry media. The Architecture Lobby is pleased to see an issue we’ve been raising for a long time gain traction in the mainstream. And, we’re pleased to see concrete changes being made: the Serpentine Gallery has prohibited unpaid interns from working on its pavilion, and Elemental, the firm headed by Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena, has ended its almost decade-long unpaid internship program.

Challenging Architecture's Grueling Work Culture, Kimberly Neuhaus Carves Out Her Own Space

2019-03-20T11:56:00-04:00

Over the past few years, the field has received a growing amount of attention that has highlighted long standing labor issues within the architecture industry, ranging from unsustainable pay models to unwelcoming work environments. Looking for an alternative, the Architecture Lobby created the Just Design Initiative, which recognizes fair labor practices in architecture. Beginning with nominations submitted by employees, and followed by an evaluation process, the team looked at practices that can serve as models of a new status quo within the profession. Archinect has teamed up with the Just Design crew to profile firms across the country that meet the initiative's standards. Whether it is a family-friendly work schedule or a health coverage plan that goes above and beyond, the series spotlights practices that honor the basic rights of their employees and can serve as exemplary models of what should become standard for the field.

Based in New Haven, Gray Organschi Architecture Creates a Working Environment for Critical Engagement with Architecture

2019-01-21T10:00:00-05:00

At McMillan Pazdan Smith, Great Culture Produces Great Work

2019-01-08T14:05:00-05:00

How Aamodt/Plumb Architects is Bringing the Slow Movement to Architecture

2018-12-17T14:49:00-05:00

How Elizabeth Eason Architecture Achieves Work-Life Balance

2018-12-10T12:13:00-05:00

Over the past few years, the field has received a growing amount of attention that has highlighted longstanding labor issues within the architecture industry, ranging from unsustainable pay models to unwelcoming work environments. That’s why it is “more urgent than ever,” says Peggy Deamer (who started the Architecture Lobby to tackle such issues), that “we have a system that highlights labor matters, that fights for fairness and not management.”

Looking for an alternative, the group created the Just Design Initiative, which recognizes fair labor practices in architecture. Beginning with nominations submitted by employees, and followed by an evaluation process, the team looked at practices that can serve as models of a new status quo within the profession. Archinect has teamed up with the Just Design crew to profile firms across the country that meet the initiative's standards. Whether it is a family-friendly work schedule or a health coverage plan that goes above and beyond, the se...

Screen/Print #66: Hans Hollein's Mobile Office and the New Workers’ Reality

2018-04-05T09:00:00-04:00

In 1969, decades before winning the Pritzker Prize, Austrian architect Hans Hollein built an inflatable mobile office that could be carried around and set up practically anywhere. Prophesying what would later become a laptop, the project—part pneumatic architecture, part performance, part video art—involved Hollein landing a small airplane on a runway and setting up the portable, plastic space, in which he could be seen talking on the telephone and typing.

May Day: a Round-Up of Articles on Working Conditions and Labor in Architecture

2017-05-01T20:41:00-04:00

While most of us might be spending our May Day in the office, that doesn't mean we can't take the occasion to discuss issues surrounding working conditions in the field.

Who Builds Your Architecture? A Critical Field Guide

2017-03-17T11:53:00-04:00

Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) asks architects and allied fields to better understand how the production of buildings connects their design and consulting practices to the workers who ultimately build them. As a primer, the WBYA? Critical Field Guide introduces key terms, questions, case studies, and proposals that locate architecture within the complex transnational networks of contemporary building construction and connects it to the problems faced by construction workers who exist within the same system. It aims to shift the focus from how buildings are conceived by architects to how they are materialized by a broad network of people including architects, construction workers, and a host of other actors.

CONTOURS: On Business and Bosses

2012-02-06T13:47:00-05:00

The business of business from the top is changing. The pace of that change for everyone who has directly suffered from the Great Recession is admittedly glacial, though some continue to argue that the Great Recession hasn’t done “too much” harm to the building and design industries.