Students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design have published the results of their survey into the question of whether architecture can be practiced remotely. Launched in November 2022, the survey received 221 responses from across the profession and has led organizers to conclude that “architects believe that the vast majority of architectural tasks can be done ‘entirely or almost entirely remotely’”.
The survey, authored by students Su In Kim, Yun Ki Cheung, and Pedro Rodríguez-Parets as part of the “Frameworks of Practice” course, was designed to reflect NCARB's structure for the ARE, specifying 36 tasks across 6 project phases to create what the organizers considered a typical workflow from project inception to completion as well as practice management. For each of the 36 tasks, the survey asked respondents to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question of whether the specific task could be done “almost entirely or entirely remotely.”
The survey’s respondents hailed from 117 firms across 159 cities/states. The largest age groups represented were 18–30 and 31–40, each of whom represented 30% of respondents, while the position of respondents in their firm struck a balance between Junior Architects (25.7%), Senior Architects (17.4%), Senior Principals/Partners (25.7%) and Project Managers (14.2%). Firm sizes were also equally represented across four categories of 0–9, 10–49, 50–149, and 150+ employees.
The survey results can be interpreted as an endorsement of the potential of remote working in the profession. A substantial majority of respondents felt tasks could be performed remotely across all six phases of practice, namely Practice Management tasks (71% average ‘yes’ response), Project Management tasks (81% average ‘yes’ response), Pre-Design tasks (73% average ‘yes’ response), Schematic Design tasks (77% average ‘yes’ response), Construction Documents tasks (79% average ‘yes’ response), and Construction Administration tasks (67% average ‘yes’ response).
Across all 36 tasks, the most remote-friendly was ‘review building codes and regulations’ which 96.7% of respondents believed could be performed remotely, while the least remote-friendly task was ‘punch listing’ which 28.5% of respondents believed could be performed remotely. Only three out of 36 tasks failed to reach a 50% ‘yes’ response (’punch listing,’ ‘site analysis of existing conditions,’ and ‘networking and marketing’) while the average ‘yes’ response to the 36 tasks was 75%.
For the two project phases that NCARB gives the most weight to when recommending training hours in the ARE, namely Schematic Design and Construction Documents, all 15 tasks received a ‘yes’ response above 50%. 12 of the 15 tasks achieved a ‘yes’ response of 73% or higher, with tasks such as ‘review building codes and regulations’ and ‘coordinate schematics with consultants’ achieving ‘yes’ scores above 90%. The phase which showed the weakest potential for remote working was ‘Practice Management’ where only 46.5% of respondents believed ‘networking and marketing’ could be performed remotely, and 52.1% believed a positive work environment could be maintained remotely.
The organizers noted “very few substantial differences” between demographic groups in the survey responses, whether along gender, age, job position, firm size, or location. Minor differences in attitudes highlighted by the organizers included 88% of Junior Architects believing that ‘communicating design ideas to clients through visualization’ could be performed remotely versus 61% of Senior Architects/Principals, and 61% of firms with 1–9 employees believing a positive work environment could be maintained remotely versus 41% of firms with 10–49 employees. The organizers also specifically note that: “For most of the tasks, the correlation ‘the older/higher position, the more in-person-oriented’ is either very subtle or nonexistent.”
Aside from measuring the potential for architectural tasks to be performed remotely, the survey also endeavored to provide a snapshot of remote working levels across the industry in a post-COVID economy. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 76.8% of respondents worked remotely for 0 days per week, while 10.5% worked remotely 5+ days per week. During COVID, the trend inverted, with 80.4% working remotely 5+ days per week and 7.5% working remotely 0 days per week. In a post-COVID economy, the number of days worked remotely by respondents was remarkably evenly divided across the weekly spectrum, from 19.8% working 0 remote days to 24% working 5 remote days.
“The last three years have witnessed a rebalancing of remoteness vs in-person work in architectural firms,” the organizers concluded. “A mostly in-person pattern before COVID, suddenly led to almost entirely remote work during the pandemic. Now there is a new unprecedented variety of remote-in-person combinations. Consequently, we conclude that this health crisis has substantially changed the way architects practice, and how they believe architecture can be practiced remotely.”
You can compare the results of the Harvard survey with Archinect’s own surveys on the topic from March 2021 and September 2021.
6 Comments
This study looks like it studied whether any of these tasks could be completed in isolation. But I wonder how useful it actually is having not been scoped to look at the greater process of the practice of architecture which is all these things in aggregate.
I am less optimistic that training/mentorship can occur as effectively in a wholly remote environment (there seems to be consensus on this from educators who operated in the pandemic).
At my own org, we've certainly had to rethink onboarding new team members. Its different (less prairie dogging and intake through ambient osmosis) and more scheduled time and extended screen/shared working meetings .
Further and to Will's point, though I think we've mostly figured out initial onboarding at least within our team, I do sense more subtle but long-term changes in our culture. Mostly for the better but it does require more attention/effort to replace.
Our office works 50-50 remotely since covid. It works for a lot of things but not all.
At uni it is very hard to teach remotely when it is a lecture course, but it may be that it is good for students. The caveat is that what is good for students cannot be simply that it is more convenient. Which is what students often mention when they answer this question. Learning without attention and interaction is not good. That reads as a mixed result to me.
For studio, no question it is better in person. Even with great tools like MIRO, which we continue to use in our office, the loss of peer interaction and ad-hoc group learning is clearly an issue that we can feel.
My conclusion recently is that much can be done online once you are a pro, but not everything. And there are costs that seem to accumulate over time. Maybe those costs will be resolved in the next wave of change, but for now its an issue...
I don't understand how a respondent evaluated this - "...and 52.1% believed a positive work environment could be maintained remotely.", or "...and 61% of firms with 1–9 employees believing a positive work environment could be maintained remotely versus 41% of firms with 10–49
employees."
There is no shared "work environment" to evaluate, since everyone is in their own personal space/environment. To evaluate an office's work environment, you need to be in a shared physical space.
Would love to see these results broken out by region. In the southern US, I see very little adoption of remote by multi-person offices. I don't see many principals comfortable with losing the level of surveillance and control over staff that in-office work affords them.
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