Architecture and the Bubble

A friend and former teacher recently asked if I would be available to talk to recent graduates of my alma mater about the job market. I remember having a pretty...uncharitable reaction to this idea.

My feelings on the state of the profession and the job market are strong and extremely complicated. I'm not sure I have sorted them out yet, but given the state of the job market, which is quite bad, and the terrible situation that recent grads find themselves in, maybe it's time we all had a great big conversation about the economic meltdown and the profession. I think it's probably high time the profession did some soul searching.

Just to give you an idea of how bad things are out there, a very large, multinational firm we are working with just laid off 125 people a couple of weeks ago. This is on top of the 600 people that have already been let go. This is just one firm.

In the last 13 years I have worked at 7 firms. I've worked for a big multinational one with 400 people in one office, and I have worked for a sole proprietor. I've worked in the U.K. and the U.S. I've worked in the South and in the Mid-Atlantic, done developer driven work, medical, institutional- high and low design. No stararchitecture, just a lot of real firms doing real projects. I don't have a complete picture of every working condition in the profession, but I have more of an idea than some, albeit from the interns perpsective. By the way, when times are good, I would reccommend this career path to anyone, because it really gives you an idea of what you want and you get to see a lot of different ways, good and bad, that people run firms.

And this is one of the really important components of the conversation we need to be having right now- how do people run firms, particularly how they look at labor (which after all is what interns represent in our profession)?

And I would say the brutal truth is that large segment of the profession, of firms, don't treat labor very well. In fact, I would say that the abuse of labor, of interns, has almost been institutionalized in our profession. Some 'leaders', like Peter Eisenmann, brag about it. In the case of SANAA, surely one of the more exciting and progressive practices out there, working conditions are like something out of a Dickens story. In many cases, the more desirable the internship, the worse (not better) the intern is treated.

What modern profession incentivises its young people this way?

To add more insult to injury, most of these firms refuse to interview anyone who has not attended an ivy league program, and many of these kids have had to take on a huge amount of debt to finance their education.

The reason that this is all very relevant in light of the economy, is that the profession of architecture has in large part been one of the primary beneficiaries of the cheap money that characterized the bubble. Cheap money is the reason many of the Star architects were able to realize their work, it's the reason that many more firms who worked in the housing market did very well, particularly in the speculative housing sector. And so, one of the consequences of this, is that many leading firms were able to swell their ranks with young (and cheap) interns, who were for the most part dispensable.

I think this is an important thing to bear in mind, because all of that labor had to come from somewhere. One of the more painful truths about this story is that this great demand for labor was fed by the schools. In the 1990's and the early part of this decade, attendance at the architecture schools increased significantly. I will tell you that I, like many many students, benefitted greatly from this increase. But I will also tell you studio sizes in 1999, which was my fourth year of study, were at least twice the size they were when I started in 1994. At one point that year I had a desk in the hallway because there just wasn't any room left in the studio. Three visiting professors team taught a class of over 70 that year.

I think that, ultimately, I recieved a fantastic education at my school from some of the best faculty anywhere. My impression was, however, that studio sizes don't get that big that fast without losing something. And I think that many schools, like any institution that faces rapid growth, lost some of the quality in the kind of work the students did in that time. And I think that this was understood and largely tolerated (with grumbling) because there was a hungry labor market waiting for these kids when they got out.

In the memorable words of Chuck Prince "..as long as the music is playing you've got to get up and dance."

Once these graduates got out, what kind of work could they expect to do during the recent bubble(s)? To be sure, a lot of work that needed to get done was done in the last 15 years, particularly on our city cores. But in an environment where speculation exceeds demand, where everyone is trying to cash in as fast as they can, there was a lot of work done that didn't make a lot of sense, it was done quickly, it was done cheaply and it was done without a lot of thought. In ten years we will, I think, see a horrific spate of lawsuits by condominium owners over failures in the exterior envelope.

From my experience, again not exhaustive, I think that poor management practices in firms were widespread. When confronted with owners who made very unreasonable, profit driven, demands particularly with respect to schedule, firms didn't put up a fight. This is an understandable reaction to the 'music', but what is less understandable, more widespread and less often remarked on is that project teams often didn't grow with the demands placed on schedule. Teams were often allocated before the schedule was understood, and when the schedule contracted- teams pretty much stayed the same size. Why? Because firms that tended to do speculative work were overbooked, and didn't have a lot of contingency capacity. Also, despite the drive to have larger and larger classes, quality hires with the right kind of experience were expensive and hard to come by.

This actually highlights one of the problems of this kind of subtle response in academia to hiring conditions in the labor market. The schools will always be behind the curve when it comes to feeding the market, because if and when a market condition emerges where work needs to be done fast (like a speculative bubble), a firm is better off spending more on one hire with experience than several cheap recent grads. The porblem is that recent grads don't really know how to respond to a project setting out of school. That is one of the strange things about architectural education- you get out and you don't really know anything about how projects are really done and it takes several years before you are able to put a set of drawings together.

This is an aspect of the situation that I think needs to be well understood. In the majority of cases that I have seen, both as an intern and as a project architect, new graduates come into firms with what is at best a rudimentary knowledge of the toolset required for their work. CAD programs are, lets face it, the baseline tool that is the industry standard. Even within the industry, they are often used poorly and incorrectly because we still have a large number of managers and principals who are more comfortable with a drafting board. This is changing for the better, but slowly. What is not changing for the better, is the amount of investment required to use these tools correctly. It is large and largely concealed. When a software vendor wants to sell you a CAD program seat on a yearly subscription for over 5K a seat, that last thing they want to tell you is how much time and money you will need to spend to actually learn how to use it properly. And so many firms, forego that investment. When new hires are thrown into this mix, the results can verge on the disastrous. You get overworked, underpaid kids that are trying to respond to high stress project situations, drawing something they don't understand with a tool they don't know how to use. This cost the profession money, created widespread quality problem and contributed to lousy work experiences for interns.

Here's the larger point to all of this. Labor conditions in the construction industry are bad, hiring freezes are widespread and graduates are having a really hard time getting hired. This is a very difficult time and the profession may lose people to other career paths. Loss of real talent is a problem that we should try very hard to avoid. I'm pretty optimistic that this will end and passionate young people will find work in the profession. What I am more concerned about is what kind of profession will they return to? Will the profession be stronger, will it be smarter? Will we use this downturn to start making better choices about how we educate architectural students, how we give them the skills to really compete in an environment that will almost certainly be tougher than it has been the last few years?