What is the future management of architectural practice and what impact will it have on the design of our built environment?
Architectural practices in the U.K. are increasingly precarious sites of work in a globalised market of undervalued design labour. Under these pressurised conditions, practices and rank-and-file workers are less able to take ethical standpoints on the type of architectural work they produce – from border walls in the U.S. to gentrification projects in London. This trend might only continue, as outsourcing and automation further erode worker rights and bargaining power. To even begin to address the issues of work that architects produce, we must first look inwards, at the management of the practice and the site of architectural production itself.
How are architectural practices managed, and how does this materialise in the built environment?
Architectural practices in the U.K. are commonly ran as Limited Companies (Ltd) or Limited Liability Partnerships (LLP), where one or several stakeholders make the important decisions about the scope and direction of the practice: from what projects to work on, to the working conditions of the employees, to the office hierarchy. The practice is divided into job roles and positions of power such as: cleaners, project architects, administrative staff, Part I’s, Part II’s, Part III’s, visualisers, BiM technicians, senior Architects, associates, directors, partners, managing partners. By creating such clear divisions of labour and decision-making, the rank-and-file workers are left with little or no agency and alienated through repetitive, monotonous work.
The unbalanced office hierarchy, separating worker labour from creative authorship, is an extension of the long-told idea that the architect is sole or individual genius — a conception that erases the work and the workers who actually do the work of architecture.“The discourse of the lone genius with individual authorship, creativity, and talent leads to the rationalization of our long, unpaid hours as the intangible sacrifice we make for society. The resulting system prevents us from identifying as workers and, as a consequence, we remain ignorant of our exploitation by others who aren’t so uninformed and can profit from the value of our work.”
From hiring practices to basic contracts, there already exists a state of precarity and competition within the architectural office: from long 6 or 12 month extended probationary periods for new employees, difficult interview/employment processes, to regular periods of growth and redundancy. Workers are seen and treated as a disposable resource placed under increasing pressure in environments of fear, anxiety, and stress. This is exemplified by how few practices pay for overtime: 18% as noted in a survey conducted by the Architecture Lobby.
The existing management organisation of the architectural office has a huge impact on the design of our built environment. It’s quite clear from recent leaks such as the Shitty Architecture Men List or the Architectural Workers report Collective Empowerment through Sharing, that architectural offices are patriarchal and violent spaces with 86% of those surveyed feeling the need for an architectural workers union. The office as a space of exclusion is also reflected in the demographic makeup of the practice: with less than 5% of architects from BAME backgrounds, and only 33% of architects being women, without even bringing up class we can make a fair judgement that the values that are ingrained in the designs of our city are not that of a representation of the people who live in them. Maybe this is most clear when we see these issues amplified in the design process of estate regeneration projects in London, with well documented impacts of resident displacement, where less than 8% of those designing for people in social housing have grown up in that environment. It’s not surprising that amongst architects there is a disconnect and misrepresentation of what it is like to live in an estate, in turn massively impacting the design of these spaces and the lives of the people who live there.
What is the future management models of architectural practices?
In the last few years, several large practices in the U.K. have slowly transformed their management and ownership models to now operate as employee-ran/owned trusts or as ‘innovative’ forms of cooperative practice. What future forms of management might emerge under increasing external market pressures both from automation and ‘lean platforms’? How will these models materialise in the design of our built environment?
More and more the design of our cities is becoming conducted through spreadsheets: various factors such as financial, environmental and spatial parameters are used to determine architectural propositions, with the primary aim of not only balancing cash flow, but creating monetary value. The worker’s role has effectively become to internalise parameters such as planning policy, building codes, accessible design data etc. And then translate these inputs to architectural propositions, to generate maximum financial efficiency out of a given site. The architect’s role is performed either through spatial arrangement of these regulatory requirements (like Tetris), or by careful negotiation of planning policy, negotiating Design Review Panels which serve to offer design quality as a strategic offset for developers breaking other policy demands. This mode of architectural work could very quickly become automated through the use of machine learning, AI, and parametrics. How might this form of design affect the practice management models?
Alongside the codification of design, more and more workers who draw, model, and design architectural projects are fractured and outsourced to lower-paid labour markets: render farms in India and visualisers in Greece. These modes of practice are currently facilitated by larger corporate agencies, who hire contractors on a project-by-project or drawing-by-drawing basis. This form of outsourcing could invariably be quickly replaced by centralised platforms as has been seen in other professions. In the U.K. 4.4% of the population or 2.8 million people have worked in the gig economy in the last 12 months. This rise in “Lean Platforms” has also emerged in other creative and professional sectors, such GP at Hand in medicine and UpWork in graphic design.
Platforms and Artificial Intelligence-led design, are in some part, an inevitable future for the architectural profession. What would a world designed through these structures materialise as? We can already see that if a workforce is individualised, precarious and exclusionary then the projects that they produce will invariably reflect the middle-class values that are seen as paradigm. But with a potentially globalised outsourced profession, where design becomes broken down into a series of separate tasks, who retains agency and control, and how is legal liability addressed? What space is there in this potential future of architectural management for appropriation and subversion to create ‘socially useful’ architecture?
Platform Practice: a alternative collective management structure
This part of the essay takes a critical look at how a platform architectural practice could be managed and what impact that might have on the design of our built environment. Platform Practice was a collective project which evolved as part of a week-long workshop series called Radical Practice Studio as part of the MA Architecture course at the Royal College of Art.
Platform Practice is a network-collective, meaning the decisions about projects, rates of pay etc, would be decided by both the designers and the clients. There are multiple ways of governing a platform as a collective: democratic voting, consensus decision-making, or perhaps even demarchy — a form of governance based on random allocation of administrative roles. For example, the platform should operate on a completely transparent basis, where anyone who uses the service can access information about its governance: from visible pay structures, to management meeting minutes published online. The main principle for ensuring the best working rights and the ethical production of labour is to empower those impacted by the practice: the workers and the communities that are being designed for.
Another important aspect of the platform’s decision-based structures would be the process of its initial formation. It’s key that there is a representative group who are the initial framework of the platform, perhaps made up from a Citizen’s Assembly, comprised of architects, designers, and the community of clients who would be using the designs.
The projects the practice would be involved with facilitating would be jointly decided by the clients and the designers, through a process of open forum discussions, up-and-down voting, crowdfunding, and self-directed design. The platform which allows for designers to upload editable designs which can be freely downloaded by a client would invariably disrupt existing contractual relationship agreements in the profession: likely, a platform of this nature, would require clients to sign a liability waiver completely eradicating the responsibility of the architect.
Platform Practice could radically alter the way in which architecture, as a profession, and individual architectural designers relate to society: by empowering designers and communities over the production of architecture to better determine the ethical implications of the work we produce. Although, there is a real risk: that by creating a centralised body of collected workers that relies on a form of advertisement model, unless able to generate large enough revenue, this could just increase the precarity of architects and designers and if the contractual agreements become meaningless there then leads to less oversight of the profession by organisations such as the Architects Registration Board because being an architect will effectively be meaningless, and so this might also decrease the ethical responsibility of the architect further. The only way to prevent such measures is to ensure that the encoded systems of governance embedded within the Platform Practice are collectively driven and that the platform is collectively owned by the designers and the communities of clients impacted by architectural work.
