Architects of their own demise
A November 24 article on Dezeen1 and probably everywhere else screamed outrage because, in the US from 1 July 2026, architecture is on track to no longer being considered a professional degree. Its opening sentence was Loans available to architecture students in the USA will be reduced under the terms of president Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, as architecture will not be considered a professional degree. The solemn concerns voiced in the article were valid in that limiting the amount of loan an architecture student could take on would almost certainly restrict student intake. Students relying upon loans to fund their education – a dodgy concept in itself – would effectively be excluded from the study of architecture that in the US now looks like it will return to being limited to those whose parents can afford it. There was no discussion of what claim Architecture has to being a profession, why a student might want to study it, or whether a university is the best place to learn how or what it is to be an architect. Alternative forms of architectural practice are a thing but discussing alternative forms of architectural education is off the table. Beyond the likely impact that reduced student borrowing will have upon university intake, there was no mention of other scenarios such as a return to an apprenticeship system (a.k.a. paid interns in ourspeak) or alternative forms of practice not dependent upon marketing, cashflow, and media attention.
For reasons similar to why I only look at ArchDaily every three years, I’ve never made it a habit to visit Dezeen. It’s just that I don’t want misfitsarchitecture to be about commenting upon comment. Having said that, here I am now commenting upon comment. I visited Dezeen twice last week. The other article was titled Everything that’s going wrong with architecture.2 It tried to be exhaustive but was still quite the list.
Collective guilt: Hm. Architects may be anxious about the negative effects construction has for the environment and for social inequality and they’d be right to question the role of an architect as designing the built manifestation of capital. Counselling isn’t the answer for this anxiety. Can architects do anything else than give shape to capital? And even if they were to, what would it mean for their cashflow? Do alternative forms of practice even pay salaries, or does everyone have a second income that allows them to practice the socially and ethically responsible architecture of their dreams? Is it even architecture if it’s not done by a university educated and professionally licensed architect? Our framing of architecture suggests not.
Waning authority on projects: It would make an interesting line graph if architect authority could be charted from the 15th century to the present. When was peak architect? Authority is probably inversely proportional to the rise of design and build contracts where an architect’s design is no more than a suggestion for what the builder should build. This assumes that what the architect designs is good and what the builder builds is bad. It also assumes the difference somehow matters. Sorry, I’m a bit cynical at the moment.
No political clout: Apparently, architects have no position in the political process. In the UK, politics is all about housebuilders and housebuilding and it’s a long time since architects wanted to be associated with anything so unsexy. Architecture occasionally enters into political debate but only over how much it costs to, say, build a swimming pavilion for an Olympic Games, repair and retrofit a Houses of Parliament, or build a High-Speed Rail Terminal or a Terminal 5. It’s always about big-ticket items that have zero impact upon people’s lives. If architecture has no political clout, it’s because chasing the money has made people with none to spare irrelevant.
Free and undervalued labour: The production of drawings can be quantified and billed by the hour but we can only make fair compensation for this thing called architectural value if we know what kind of value is being created, and how that’s related to the short-term hours or the long-term experience required to produce it in less time. We lack data on this.
Exploitation of the workforce: The music industry is worried that AI-generated music is becoming too popular. AI’s biggest impact on architecture will be to replace the intern farm as a source of unremunerated labour and ideas. AI can do whatever it does for 24 hours a day without complaining, eating, sleeping or getting paid a wage on which to live. We may bang on about AI vs. real creativity but interns and their non-jobs are the first to go.
Lack of unionisation: Everyone is entitled to a living wage but unionization is most effective when workers are doing a clearly defined job or service necessary for society to function, and when the necessity of those jobs and services is universally recognized. Train drivers, pilots, air traffic controllers, police, doctors, nurses and truck drivers are all in a strong position. Lawyers less so. Architects even less. If architects and the idea of architecture no longer existed, then it’s difficult to imagine our built environment would be any different or that anyone would notice. People aren’t going to go around and say things like “Hey, this one particular corner of the world isn’t as nice as it could be.”
The preserve of the privileged: From Egyptian pharoahs on, the construction of edifices has been the preserve of the privileged. Castles were as much about the representation of power as well as the means of ensuring the keeping of it. The urgency to physically protect that power lessened in The Renaissance but the representation of it lingered with rustications, etc. Twentieth century architectural history was obsessed with summer weekend houses for the wealthy. Worker housing existed only for as long as workers a necessary energy source. Post-WWII architecture was as obsessed with consumer demand and the buildings were mere containers for the appliances and automobiles. Post-modernism was a post-war variant using similar but more colourful containers for the objects that became small. We never got to find out what a post-modern refrigerator looked like. I don’t think architecture is the preserver of the privileged. It’s more that architecture tends to follow the money.
Issues with academia: Earlier, I was getting ahead of myself by saying we have discussions about alternative means of practice but none about alternative means of education. Architectural education isn’t really designed to produce alternative means of practice. Should “acclaimed” architects teach and, if so, what? Or even how? Observant employees of those architects will soon understand the link between self-promotion and securing commissions.3 I’m not saying this is something all architects should aspire to. It’s just that this is how fame replicates. [c.f. The Creative Spark]
Stifled innovation: Whether or not this is a problem depends upon what you think innovation is. Some innovations should correctly be called novelty or fashion. I’ll venture that innovation is nothing more than less expensive or less damaging way of doing something. Building with mass timber is not innovative. Cladding buildings with inflammable materials is not innovative. Buildings with highly-contrived and carbon-consuming structures are not innovative. We don’t hear as much about innovation as we used to a decade ago as we’ve probably come to be suspicious of it.
The star system: The recent passing of Frank Gehry made me realize I haven’t heard the word starchitect for a while. Was the starchitect just a 90’s media construct that Patrik Schumacher pretended to dislike so he could imply he was one? Listen. Nobody’s asking about the next generation of starchitects, least of all the general public. Starchitects were only noticeable because of the surrounding darkness. We wanted to believe they illuminated it. They didn’t.
Unedifying company: If architects and architecture follow the money, then it leads to (the rulers of) countries with the money to use architecture to launder their country’s image either for the benefit of their populations or international ones.4 Accusations of following the money are usually countered by arguments for the democratizing power of architecture but I haven’t heard these in, oh, the last twenty years.
Artificial intelligence: We’re currently getting an architectural AI that preserves the status quo in that it gives the appearance of replicating the front-end tasks (and generating endless hand wringing in the process) while the back-end tasks normally done by an architect-of-record are being silently automated. These are the parts of architectural production that AI does well because there are databases of precedents and rules to generate, iterate and evaluate some knowably large number of possibilities. This isn’t the case for the front-end tasks that have been likened to a black box in that we have a vague idea what the input is, a good idea of the output, but absolutely no idea of how they are linked. There is no model for architectural aesthetics, and it’s slowly dawning on us that language models aren’t a good fit no matter how big and fasty. Having said that, a large language model can create the appearance of novelty so, in that sense, it’s just taking over an existing role and fit enough for purpose. Even the primitive LLM AI5 6 we have is still very good at finding patterns in huge amounts of data and this is something of enormous benefit for medicine and science and ultimately us. But architectural AI is a mirror of architectural production as it’s currently construed and, by extension, we can reasonably assume it will not improve our lives. The architectural AI we have now, produces results also known as “options” that are clearly derivative because they are either within our knowledge and understanding, or butt ugly because they’re outside it – even if steps leading up to an impressive entrance never go out of fashion. I’m not trying to make a case for some bogus “genuine” aesthetic “innovation” in architecture. Instead, I question why we persist in thinking aesthetic innovation in architecture is necessary, let alone something that needs to be replicated by AI.
These next two are my additions to the list.
Loss of ownership of the word architect: Architects in the old-fashioned sense of people who creatively add value to property have lost ownership of the word Architect. The Royal Institute of British Architects used to allow only Naval Architects and Golf Course Architects to also call themselves architects. The right to use the word as a title was legally protected. I wonder if the RIBA have updated their policy to include data architects, software architects, systems architects, and process architects? The lower-case word architect has returned to language with its original meaning intact as a person who designs thing that get built. Interestingly, we now have the verb to architect. In 1964, Bernard Rudofsky published his book Architecture Without Architects. In 1968. Hans Hollein wrote that everything is architecture. Actually, he wrote alles ist architektur7 but what he was really doing was making an argument for architect scope creep. I don’t think he imagined a situation where we’d have architects without architecture or, more correctly, more than one type of architect and more than one type of architecture. If architecture architects don’t want to associate themselves with the design of things that get built, then we have a language vacuum and other people building other things will come along and fill and, quite legitimately, call themselves architects.The secondary meaning becomes the primary one.
Loss of ownership of the word architecture: ditto.
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Revisited this week:
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- https://www.dezeen.com/2025/11/24/architecture-degree-not-professional-usa/ ↩︎
- https://www.dezeen.com/2025/11/17/everything-wrong-edwin-heathcote-performance-review/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2019/06/30/architecture-myths-25-the-creative-spark/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2013/09/04/arkytektystan/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2025/12/07/i%e2%9d%a4%ef%b8%8fu-vs-%e6%88%91%e7%88%b1%e4%bd%a0/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2025/12/14/i%e2%9d%a4%ef%b8%8fu2-vs-%e6%88%91%e4%b9%9f%e7%88%b1%e4%bd%a0/ ↩︎
- https://designmanifestos.org/hans-hollein-everything-is-architecture/ ↩︎
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Graham McKay
says:I think so too. It’s just not a concept that has legitimacy anymore. (And what did BJ do anyway apart from whip up enthusiasm for this thing called Architecture, the existence of which is increasingly dubious?) And I say this from the perspective of a person who likes the idea of architecture!
Alia
says:I think of Bjarke Ingels as the last starchitect.
Nimmo
says:Good post again, Graham.
I always think of an architecture degree course as an extension of a medieval guild – you go to university to learn how to think like an architect, to understand it critically, etc. Then you might do an apprenticeship with a practitioner master to learn how to do the day to day to get projects built. And the controlling body or association was concerned in preserving the idea of notion of what architecture is, ensuring practitioners put that notion first before pragmatics of making a living, etc. That slipped yonks ago, and architects quoting full service fees priced themselves out of a lot of jobs and opened the market up to draftspeople, registered builders and so on. “Architect” as a noun was protected, but the name was mud. Now the name has gone the way of the refrigerator.