Its the industry's dirty secret.

The gulf between professional practice and artist ateliers is massive: Architects who run viable businesses will pay their employees. Artists who are already heavily subsidized by academia will not - Without clients, their "practices" are frivolous pursuits in all but name. The only argument they can muster is that they are contributing to the field as only artists can - for the sake of the work and nothing else. Unpaid workers, the logic goes, are a necessary evil in the pursuit of greater art.

Yeah, I would think that if you pay your people then if someone asks if you do you would just say “Yes we do” rather then delete and block the questioner. 

note too the organizers of the serpentine pavilion who commissioned ishigami just want to sweep it all under the rug - their response wasn't that he (or all architects) need to pay all staff, it's that the unpaid interns shouldn't work on their project. more likely it just means if interns work on it they won't be listed on any credits for the project.

Any SCI-Arcers out there with similar experiences? You’re right liberty bell and midlander. Excuses pour out from all cracks for these exploitative practices. 

I worked unpaid. I know the arguments for/against. I got a lot out of it. But in the end I was exploited, someone profited off of my incurred debt, and most couldn’t have taken the same opportunity as I, and the structural disadvantage to those less able is even further perpetuated. It’s outrageous how stratified along class lines architecture is.

Hernan Diaz Alonso is a profit-oriented business man who, like half of his faculty, learned well from L. Ron Hubbard on how to build the infrastructure for a scalable con. And how to insulate it with glossy images, massive investment in marketing schemes, and glitzy endorsements and PR stunts.

A general call-out document like Shitty Architecture Men needs to be brought back, this time unattached to an individual so that it can’t be litigated out of public hands. It needs to include labor practices. Happy to see Arch lobby’s just design initiative but I don’t believe in letting those guilty off the hook.

Hernan is a fucking moron with an idiotic design "ideology". [Waiting to see if this gets erased]

mark lee drives a 150k 2019 porsche cayenne turbo.  he could pay his workers more, but perish the thought that he gets forced into a car for plebians, like an Audi S5, which costs a piddling 60k.  

Ishigami is the only one taking the fall (and that Pritzker-prick Aravena) because they are not European or American. They are safe and easy targets to focus all our moral outrage on and to go back to business as usual. Glad you called out Hernan, at least here on archinect, now we all know he doesn't pay his interns AND prefers censorship over free speech. What a dick!

What's weird for me is that unpaid interns are indeed getting paid "market wages" since by the rules of the free market, they would flock to a job that pays. Instead they head to unpaid shops instead. Either the non-wage portion of compensation (E.g. prestige, connections, signalling functions) outweigh the paid portion or the architecture intern job market is essentially a bizarre arena between actual workers (Competing for wages) and hobbyists (For whom wages are irrelevant).

"Academic" firms are just vanity projects for their principals unless, or until, they strike it big. Full-time teaching or deaning doesn't merit time for business development outside of architecture magazine puff pieces or op-eds. The hope is that paper architecture turns into stacking that paper. Until then, you're unpaid and if the time comes, you may finally be underpaid. 

Schools play a huge role in subsidizing these 'artists' - free student labor via work study, free office space, free production facilities. The downside is that one could be easily lulled into staying put within one's circle instead of spending time doing business development.

Jeanne Gang made a point to hang out with developers early in her independent career - and it paid off handsomely when she met the developer who handed her the Aqua commission.

not trying to bump this, but felt compelled to add that I learned Hernan currently pays employees and I’m not one to promote slandering gossip, especially when it was my own. All I know is a couple years ago, my friend wasn’t paid by xefirotarch for a summer internship. But this explains the block. Could have DMd me to explain it and request I delete the comment instead of do the exact thing a guilty party would do when faced with ugly truth lol