The Center for Emerging Professionals introduces a campaign dedicated to informing all generations of architects about the value Emerging Professionals bring to the field and the importance of getting paid for internship hours. — aia.org

Employers have considerable leeway to use unpaid interns legally when the work serves an educational purpose... — New York Times

A student was underpaid almost $7000 during an internship with a Sydney firm of architects, a Fair Work Ombudsman investigation has found. The student was completing a masters degree in architecture when he was paid $12 per hour for six months of full-time work. His duties included architectural drawing, consulting with clients and and conducting site visits...the student, aged in his 20s,... was short-changed $6830. — smh.com.au

Proponents of unpaid internships say the jobs help aspiring professionals get on-site experience and résumé entries that can spur their careers. Detractors insist that unpaid positions exploit workers, take jobs from would be entry-level employees, favor the privileged who can afford to make no money, and perhaps most importantly, break longstanding labor laws... employment defense lawyers are increasingly advising clients to start paying interns at least the minimum wage... — forbes.com

... the Labor Department established a six-point test for circumstances in which aspiring workers in need of skills, like trainees and interns, don't have to be paid.

Must be similar to training you'd get at a school
Must be for the intern's benefit
Must not take the place of other, paid, employees
Must provide the employer "no immediate advantage"
Must not necessarily be entitled a job after the internship
Must be understood by both the employer and intern to be unpaid — vox.com

“Any time you post an ad for an unpaid internship, you’re writing ‘Poor people need not apply’ in big letters at the top,” says Mikey Franklin, founder of the Fair Pay Campaign to end unpaid internships.

If the fairness argument hasn’t been persuasive, the threat of lawsuits has been. Magazine publisher Condé Nast just settled a suit brought by some of its former unpaid interns. Rather than start paying, the company shut down its internship program altogether. — marketplace.org

Call them members of the permanent intern underclass: educated members of the millennial generation who are locked out of the traditional career ladder and are having to settle for two, three and sometimes more internships after graduating college, all with no end in sight. — The New York Times

In April 2010, the Department of Labor released a six-point test to help determine whether an internship in the for-profit sector qualifies to be unpaid under federal law. One of the key criteria is that the position must be of more benefit to the intern than of benefit to the company. Companies can’t just use interns to replace regular employees. — propublica.org

fschlem started a blog The Dirty South...The blog takes it name from a studio titled the "Dirty South," offered at the Georgia Tech. The studio was the brainchild of TVSDesign Distinguished Studio Critic Jennifer Bonner and it’s goal was to look at the city of Atlanta through the filter of the rap ideology of east coast/ west coast/ dirty south, translated to the realm of architecture...Connely Farr thought "wow. really interesting idea for a studio..."

Unpaid interns are common in architecture firms, but recent lawsuits brought by interns across other industries may have the architecture industry forking out some cash.

In many industries, the term ‘intern’ is often used to describe someone who works for no pay, but the NCARB’s IDP has been trying to detach interns from the assumption by architecture firms that they are willing to work for free. The council defines architectural internships as post-graduate, pre-registration professional work. — DesignBuild Source

Estimates put the number of unpaid interns every year between 500,000 and one million. So, in a country where working for free is mostly illegal, a student population somewhere between the size of Tucson and Dallas will be working for free, in plain view. — theatlantic.com