United by Design
“Sometimes I worked 90 or 100 hours a week” (image: Jango Jim).
A grassroots labour movement is rising across the US and the UK, driven by the overworked and underpaid employees of Amazon warehouses, Apple stores and Starbucks cafés. Barristers, baristas and baggage handlers are walking out until their demands are met. Once seen as the preserve of the factory floor, union organising has evolved to suit a modern working class defined by precarity, overwork and wages that have failed to keep pace with bills, all set against the backdrop of the pandemic, climate crisis and growing wealth disparity.
Architectural workers [1] are also joining the ranks of exploited labourers pushed to breaking point and burnout, mobilising so as to make collective demands for better conditions and pay. Grassroots organisations including the United Voices of the World – Section of Architectural Workers (UVA-SAW) and Future Architects Front (FAF) have mobilised in the UK to campaign for better workplace conditions, while in the US the Architecture Lobby (AL) and Architectural Workers United (AWU) are assisting people attempting to unionise their workplaces.
It took a lot to push architecture professionals to this point. Those I spoke to while researching this piece told an eerily similar story of how unhealthy industry norms played out, to the detriment of their health, finances and careers. As the philosopher Beyoncé just said: “Damn, they work me so damn hard.” [2]
“The architecture industry is extremely toxic and unsustainable,” says John,[3] who started work at an international office in New York. “We hardly ever worked a 40-hour week, it was at least 50 or 60 hours. Sometimes I worked 90 or 100 hours a week. We didn’t sleep; we stayed in the office overnight.” If that sounds unsustainable, that’s the point. “They’re famous [practices] so they get young professionals who are dying to work there. They ride them like a horse until they die. Then they get rid of them and start again with a new batch,” continues John. “That’s their business model.”
“There’s a super-high turnover rate,” says Vanessa, an architect working for a high-profile New York practice. “This culture of exploitation has existed forever in architecture. It’s a creative service that is really hard to value properly because it’s so complex and it takes such a long time.” Studio founders are unlikely to have received any business training, she explains, and every new practice has to set up its processes from scratch. “They don’t understand how to manage a business or write a proper contract. They end up agreeing to timelines that are unrealistic, or letting the client manipulate us into more studies, or changing the design late [in the process].” Some of these issues are exacerbated by financial structures within the field. Charging too-low fees upfront pushes bosses to try and get more out of their workers for less. Unlike other professions that require similar levels of qualification and training, such as law, architects do not charge by the hour. “If it were unfeasible for [clients] to manipulate us because we had our fees so high, we would be able to have more control over the process,” says Vanessa. Instead, poorly paid junior workers bear the brunt, often ending up working for the equivalent of below minimum wage in expensive cities with large amounts of student debt.
The situation in London is similar to that which Vanessa and John describe in New York. “A toxic environment and culture led very quickly to burnout for me,” says Jonah, an architectural worker in communications. “We were working under a lot of the same kind of constraints and systems as architecture firms – contracted to a developer and a local authority, working under the same kind of artificial deadlines with high pressure.” Jonah tells me that it was a strict hierarchy and poor people management from managers that created a particularly noxious environment for workers. “Decision-making was done by the directors; there was little to no input even from the people under them,” he says. “There was no transparency about pay.” Requests made to management often went ignored. “It’s this culture of a power imbalance,” he concludes.
“We can’t organise people as workers until people realise they are workers.”
But while service and factory workers have a storied history of labour organising to draw on in response to these kinds of abuses, the architecture studio has, until recently, been fairly devoid of class consciousness. “Blue-collar workers who are more likely to be exploited in more physically demanding ways on site have, historically, been unionised and they have been able to build value for themselves,” says Vanessa. “They make a decent amount of money and their hours aren’t terrible because a lot of contracted workers are unionised, so they have power. Architects have none of that. We don’t have these standards [and] we are being exploited.” In the creative industries, workers tend to over-identify with the creative part of their field’s self-appointed title, with its ideals of artistry and passion, but forget the industrial rejoinder. The pervasive myth of the starchitect (usually white, usually male) presiding over a self-titled studio deliberately elides the workers who make grand ideas and dashed-off sketches a carefully designed reality. “We think about Frank Lloyd Wright as this singular genius who was insanely prolific and had lots of different styles and techniques,” explains Andrew Daley, an architect now working for AWU. “But we completely ignore that he had hundreds of employees producing all of that.”
Daley was a part of the recent, aborted union drive at the architecture firm SHoP,[4] before leaving the practice to spend more time with his young family and taking on a communications role at AWU. Not a union itself, AWU is associated with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and provides education, support and resources to architectural industry members attempting to unionise their workplaces. “There’s this ethos that if you work hard enough, you can become a partner at the firm or start you own,” says Daley. But this, he argues, is often a trap. Getting to the top is nigh impossible “unless you have crazy amounts of money and you never want to see your kids.” The intimacy of studio life further complicates matters. The CEO is rarely a distant, fat-cat figure making your life miserable from corporate HQ, but a regular(ish) person you spend most of your waking hours with. “When you’re having cocktail hour with your boss,” he says, “it’s a lot harder to see yourself as labour.”
Educating architects to see themselves as workers who could benefit from a union is half the battle. “Architects have been absolutely endlessly alienated from any identity as a worker,” says Charlie Edmonds, a designer who co-founded activist network Future Architects Front (FAF) with Priti Mohandas. “We’re indoctrinated into this idea that architecture is something more than work. We don’t work for a company – we work for a studio, we work for an atelier. That myth-building helps to alienate people from their real economic conditions.” FAF uses acerbic memes on Instagram to build solidarity with architecture professionals and encourage them to see themselves as workers. “[We] can’t organise people as workers until people realise they are workers,” he says. “FAF is trying to first build solidarity through illustrating that workers are suffering from the same conditions, and then build class consciousness through introducing concepts of organising labour, collective action, so that people can actually identify why a union is relevant to them.”
Originally, the FAF network coalesced around an open letter to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the UK architecture industry’s professional body, with demands based on a survey of architecture workers. “The things that came up most frequently,” says Edmonds, “were unpaid overtime, accountability for exploitative practices, equity and representative governance.” Unpaid overtime is perhaps the clearest example of how broken the current architecture system is in countries such as the US and the UK, where relaxed labour laws and prevailing neoliberalism provide fertile ground for exploitation. In order to appear competitive to developers, studios compete to offer the lowest fees. The only way to deliver these projects on time and in budget is to pressure junior staff, who are contractually obliged to sign away their right to paid overtime, to work long hours.[5] “When this idea of the free market was introduced in the profession, what happened was a series of practices undercutting one another in a race to the bottom of devaluing the profession,” says Edmonds.
“[Studio bosses are] super dependent on the free labour that we donate on a daily basis to be able to deliver the deadlines,” says John. He experienced insecure middle managers, desperate to impress the principal architects, who would regularly include people’s weekends in deadline-crunch schedules. Ironically, charging so little for professionals’ time in a business model that builds in high turnover due to burnout only further devalues design. “There’s very little respect for the design work of the architectural industry,” he notes. “From the client and consultant’s point of view, design is something fun. You don’t have to be paid as much [as] you’re not doing something so special; [they think] everyone can do it.” Workers who were born in countries with greater worker protections are particularly shocked when they experience the way things happen overseas. “Labour rights are much stronger [back home] than they are here [in the UK],” says Jonah. “There’s paid overtime, there’s a maximum number of hours you can work a week that either doesn’t exist or is insufficient here.”[6]
Unpaid overtime that effectively takes pay below the legal minimum is just a fancy name for wage theft, something a workplace union can seek to address. Once a workplace has a union, they can negotiate for less overtime and better pay. Once union density in a city reaches a certain level, the entire industry will be in a better position to negotiate with their developer clients. “If over half of the firms here [in New York] are unionised, then we can start to raise the minimum standards across the board,” says Vanessa. Her dream is to see architectural workers eventually use their collective bargaining power to have more of a voice in how cities are designed. “We could start to have more of an impact on land use. How zoning occurs in the city, how much green space there is and trying to be more equitable about it, and trying to push low carbon.”
The unpaid overtime, the toxic culture of overwork that dogs creative services, the power imbalance both within architecture studio hierarchies and the hierarchy between developer and architect – none of these are new. So why are architecture workers looking to organise now? The consensus amongst those I spoke to revolved around two major factors: the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Seeing protesters out on the street galvanised them to start looking critically at their own workplaces. Racial diversity in architecture is atrocious: only 2 per cent of registered architects in the US are Black, despite Black people accounting for over 12 per cent of the general population. Similarly in the UK, only 1 per cent of architects are Black. While Black people make up 3 per cent of the general population in Britain, they account for almost 8 per cent of the population in London, where all the big architecture practices are based. “It was ridiculous: [we were asking] where are all the Black people in our office?” says John. While managers made emotional statements about the tragic police killing of George Floyd, Black employees remained underpaid and underpromoted. It became clear that while diversity was a serious issue, simply trying to hire more Black people into an exploitative work environment wasn’t the solution. “Wanting to increase representation and access to the field is one thing,” says Daley, “but what conditions are we recruiting people into? We need to think more radically.”
Before the Covid-19 lockdowns, it was harder to realise how insidious studio mindsets could become, says John. “There’s a cultish culture. It’s ‘fun’ to be here and ‘you’re lucky to be a part of this.’” Until he was forced to work from home, John hadn’t realised how being employed by a huge practice had changed him. “I was extremely stressed out. I wasn’t myself anymore, I was always irritable. Work always came first and if anybody messed with that I’d freak out,” he says. “My credit-card bill and my expense-report bill were the same number. The only thing I had done was take cabs to work and have dinners there.” While many headlines in the wake of the pandemic have focused on the “Great Resignation” as unhappy workers quit their jobs, the architecture world has experienced a Great Reflection on the poor conditions that workers had been conditioned to accept. “I knew architecture was intense,” says Vanessa. “I just didn’t understand that [studios] were bad at business and [architects] weren’t valued. I also realised that the people that start firms are, for the most part, already fairly wealthy,” she adds. “A lot of people started to realise all this during the pandemic.”
“On the back of the door they had mug shots of all the students. As people dropped out, they would cross off their photo.”
It was the time to reflect provided by the pandemic that gave designer Eleni Kyriacou the motivation to blow the whistle on the discrimination and harassment she had experienced at University City of London’s Bartlett School of Architecture (BSA) some 20 years prior. “It was a combination of the pandemic and the #MeToo movement that gave me courage,” she tells me. “It shouldn’t be an endurance test going and studying architecture.”
Kyriacou’s tireless work putting together a dossier of former students’ experiences forced UCL to employ independent investigators Howlett Brown to examine historic and contemporary student experience at the Bartlett. The “environmental investigation” published in June 2022 makes for queasy reading. Students reported being told to work nights and weekends to keep up with coursework, and even being encouraged to take drugs that would help them stay awake. “The structural and procedural aspects of [Bartlett] culture, together with a small group of staff, are the central cause for[…] creating a toxic and in parts, unsafe learning and working environment,” said the report. The school’s famous unit structure was singled out for encouraging “a culture of unhealthy and unsafe competition by promoting an ‘any means necessary’ attitude to achieving success,” with students finding themselves co-opted to burnish their tutors’ industry status. “The unit structure included having students work excessive hours for the entirety of their time at the BSA, or working for free during holidays,” said the report, making students “fearful of the consequences to their future careers if they did not comply.”
Sexist and racist bullying was also found to be rampant in the school and escalated to physical abuse, with documented cases of staff members shoving students or throwing heavy objects such as laptops at them. Staff ripped up drawings in front of their class or threw their models out of their windows in aggressive displays, leaving traumatised students to stick their work back together to submit it. “From reading the report, I can see things have gotten worse,” Kyriacou sighs. “It’s really sad to say this, but it is a real dehumanising of students. To be honest, I think that report might be not even 10 per cent of the misconduct that’s gone on in that school.” Now the report is out, she says that more people have come to her with stories of developing eating disorders and depression during their time at the Bartlett, with some dropping out due to the extreme conditions. “They told me all these weird stories: how on the back of the door when you went to the Bartlett they had mug shots of all the students [pinned up]. As people dropped out, they would cross off their photo.”
It’s not just that an abusive education system predicated on pulling all-nighters and having your work quite literally torn to shreds in a crit leaves young designers more vulnerable to toxic studio culture. FAF is clear that they are two sides of the same coin. “Currently, practice and education are like an evil, awful ouroboros,” says Edmonds, “constantly encouraging and enforcing the worst in each other.” Studio heads, for example, are often the ones leading modules at schools. “There’s a very porous membrane between academia and practice,” says Edmonds. At the risk of stating the obvious, no one who was well adjusted, with a healthy attitude towards their practice, would think it was appropriate to violently destroy the work of young people to whom they owe a duty of care. The hazing ritual that begins in education perpetuates through industry. “I worked for a practice here in Athens,” says Kyriacou, who lives in Greece. “All of the partners had studied at the Bartlett and there was sexism, long hours, really bad pay and no value of personal time. It was just a continuation of the same thing.” While lockdown gave her the time to reflect on her experiences, she had also gained distance after having quit architecture for a career as a fashion designer. “I had nothing to be afraid of, [whereas] a lot of people were terrified about their careers,” she says. “I’m not in London anymore. I’m not an architect. So the Bartlett has no hold over me.”
It was a side effect of the pandemic that opened a similar Pandora’s box of toxicity at SCI-Arc, a private architecture school in California. A panel discussion for undergraduates given by tutors on 26 March 2022 as part of the school’s Basecamp lecture series was recorded and posted online; the content drew anger from students and the wider architecture industry. The roundtable, titled ‘How to be in an Office’, was held by three faculty members, Margaret Griffin, Marrikka Trotter and Dwayne Oyler, who work in practice for Griffin Enright Architects, Tom Wiscombe Architecture, and Oyler Wu respectively. The discussion was a slowmotion train wreck that laid bare the underpinnings of toxic studio culture, in which the architects extolled the virtues of low pay, long hours, and hustle culture to their student audience. “[Do you want] a 40-hour work week that you can barely get through?” asked Trotter, “[Or] a 60-hour work week that you can’t wait to start every day? You have got to choose your poison.”
Unimpressed students were subsequently prompted to come forward with damning accounts of how Trotter and Tom Wiscombe, who is also a teacher at SCI-Arc, had treated students who had been asked to work unpaid for Tom Wiscombe Architecture in place of following a taught course. According to a report in The Architect’s Newspaper, the students were made to work 18-hour days with no breaks and ordered to deep-clean the office. When they refused, Wiscombe allegedly “intimated that students could ruin their professional reputations if they quit.” Trotter and Wiscombe were placed on administrative leave by SCI-Arc and posted an apology on Instagram [7] that they later deleted. An external investigation has been commissioned, the results of which are still pending.
Grim reading as all this makes, real change may be just around the corner thanks to the activists, students and architectural workers determined to detoxify the industry at all levels. FAF is working with the Architects Registration Board (ARB) to get rid of the UK’s current three-part model of architecture training. “The journey to becoming an architect needs to be more inclusive so that the profession can become more diverse and reflective of society,” ARB chief executive Hugh Simpson said last year. “This means we have to make our regulatory framework more flexible to encourage new, different and cheaper routes to becoming an architect.” The recent summer 2022 RIBA elections also saw a historic win for President-Elect Muyiwa Oki, who will be the first Black RIBA president and its youngest. As an early-career architect, Oki represents a significant break from a long line of RIBA presidents who have been bosses, not workers. “I am grateful to the grassroots movement whose support and passion offered a platform to represent architectural workers,” said Oki of his win. “I hope this is the start of many great things to come for those who feel disenfranchised and under-represented.” Edmonds is positive that this is just the beginning. “This wave organising is definitely gaining momentum,” he says. “The fact that in the wider political economy, things are just getting more inequitable adds fuel to that fire.”
In New York, Daley is also hopeful that the city may see its first unionised architecture studio. “Going first [feels] impossible,” he says. “You saw it with Starbucks. Years of effort to get those first couple of stores over the hump, [now hundreds] have filed. It’s pretty wild to see that happen in six months from the first election filing.” Currently, workers at eight studios in the city are in the process of gathering support and signing union cards. “We’re hopeful that by the end of the summer, there should be some good news,” he adds. “Who knows, maybe by the time this article comes out.”[8]
1 1 Union organisers are careful to use the term architectural workers as it encompasses everyone working in practices, including support staff. The title of architect is reserved only for those who can afford to complete a laborious, multi-part qualification process that often requires years of work experience in underpaid assistant roles in studios.
2 From the song ‘Break My Soul’ on the album Renaissance. The fact that Beyoncé, a billionaire with a royal moniker who hasn’t worked a nine-to-five in a long time is moot when she unfailingly captures the zeitgeist.
3 Names have been changed and identifying details withheld to protect those who spoke with Disegno on condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions from management.
4 Workers at SHoP began talks about unionising in 2021, but ultimately pulled the petition in May 2022 after managers mobilised an aggressive anti-union campaign. In the US, a workplace can be unionised when 30 per cent of workers sign cards or a petition in favour of a union, or one is voluntarily recognised by management.
5 Riffing on Dolly Parton’s famous anti-boss anthem ‘9-to-5’, the next line in ‘Break My Soul’ goes: “Work by nine, then off past five.” See, even Beyoncé knows unpaid overtime sucks.
7 “We know we have an intense, high-pressure office culture[…] We acknowledge that students are just absolutely tired of being faced with industry-wide failures that reduce access, exhaust workers, and create little outlook[…] we acknowledge that some faculty and students feel that way,” said their textbook non-apology apology.
8 Disegno #34 was published in September 2022, the same week that New York-based studio Bernheimer Architecture unionised.
Words India Block
Illustrations Jango Jim
This article was originally published in Disegno #34. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.