The Case for Being an Architect
Tough Job Prospects Will not Dissuade People with Passion
Tough Reality
A recent study of the Georgetown University Center of Education and the Workforce reported that students with a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture have the highest unemployment rate among all college graduates, 13.9%. The statistic went viral in architectural circles, recycling the same professional gloom that greeted me over thirty years ago, when I earned my M.Arch in the middle of the recession of 1981. I rebuffed the naysayers who warned me architecture would be a volatile career and went on to enjoy continuous, satisfying work for over thirty years; work that I believe has made a meaningful contribution to our world.
The ironic timing of the recent report is that it coincides with my retirement from paid work to devote myself to philanthropic endeavors. This transition provokes reflection and prompts me to consider the benefits of my career as an architect.
Cool Factor
Let’s start with the most obvious and superficial one: being an architect is cool. Architects thrive at the intersection of art and technology, we deal with the fantastic and the prosaic, we create things that are both monumental and useful. The cocktail party response to learning I am an architect is always a ‘wow’ despite my specialty being hospital design and my rather ordinary eyewear. Architects exist on a high plateau in people’s imaginations, and there is a kick to being an architect that any insurance agent, accountant, you name it, would envy.
Being cool may be shallow, but it reflects the truth that an architect’s daily work contains more variety and exercises a wider range of skills than most other jobs. Under the broad description of being an architect, I have been a draftsman, a detailer, a designer, a specification writer, a construction administrator, an engineering coordinator, a medical planner, a programmer, a strategic healthcare analyst, and a Lean process improvement facilitator. I have made presentations to clients, regulatory agencies, citizen groups, and fellow architects. I’ve had all kinds of initials after my name, AIA, CSI, LEED AP, EDAC, Certified Greenbelt, but each flowed logically through an integrated career. We hear about burnout among teachers, nurses, and many other professionals. Architects don’t burn out, we evolve.
Mix it Up
The variety of being an architect is tied to the range of our work settings. I began my career in a two-person storefront in Oklahoma City. My first built design was an unglamorous generator enclosure for an apartment complex. Within five years we designed and built hundreds of units of affordable and special needs housing. When I moved to Massachusetts I opted for a large firm and found a niche in healthcare, where I’ve had a hand in over two billion dollars in construction that includes three Greenfield replacement hospitals, large additions, and dozens of renovations. Yet, when my children were young and I needed flexibility, I hung out my own shingle for a few years and had successful — if bipolar — practice of designing upscale residential and affordable housing projects.
The flexibility inherent in being an architect is one of its many positive attributes. My motto is, “I always have something to do today, but I don’t have anything I have to do today.” We work on deadlines measured in weeks and months, rather than the fifteen-minute appointment intervals my medical colleagues suffer through. We do our work best when we can do it deliberately, with time to evaluate the merits of different options. That is a luxury workplaces governed by a clock cannot afford.
About Money
After employment uncertainty, the second most common complaint about being an architect is the compensation. Architects are among the lowest paid professionals, yet I believe we earn enough. Star designers and architect developers can earn big bucks; the rest of us make a reasonable living. I work with many doctors who earn $400,000 or more per year, and most nurses push one hundred grand, but their stress level is commensurate with their salaries. I accept an architect’s relatively low salary among professionals because I appreciate the intangibles of a creative, flexible work environment. Even on my most productive afternoon I am not pressed to churn through the work volume that an ED doctor or nurse encounters on a busy shift.
A Vocation, not a job
In the final analysis, architecture is as much a calling as a profession. When my grade school friends fantasized about being a fireman or a policeman or an astronaut, I was busy filling a binder with drawings of buildings. Choice never factored into my becoming an architect since I never considered anything else. It’s in my genes, and no depth of recession or salary bellyaching could dissuade me from my path. When my son was unhappy studying engineering at Cornell, I asked if he ever considered architecture. He replied, “I think I could do it, but I don’t have the fire in my belly. The lights in the architecture studios are always on, those guys are really into it.”
By retiring from full-time work, perhaps I am making the employment picture rosier for new architects. But architects rarely retire in full. We can work as long as our minds stay quick, and I am coming full circle, working on smaller buildings and enjoying a larger hand in their completion. I forfeited a five-year project at Boston Medical Center to devote my energy to a new surgical building in Haiti. It’s a satisfying tradeoff.
Ultimately the Georgetown study is not going to dissuade people from becoming architects. Architects do what we do for love, and our love of career is as irrational as any other form of love. I applaud the twenty-year-old with a craving to make a a physical mark on this world who reads the report and decides, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to be an architect anyway.’ He or she is going to have as satisfying and exciting a career as his imagination will allow.
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