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The death and transformation of the american architect
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Shiva, the Hindu god of creation and destruction
Earlier this year, when a wave of layoffs and closings first hit cities, there were predictions of civil unrest and trouble in the cities during the hot summer. This hasn't come to pass in the New Economy.
By the time unemployment crossed the 10% line in the Great Depression, there were already riots in the cities, as the workers in the industrial age vainly sought other means of employment, housing, and compensation. The anger was directed at the Wall Street crowd and the unfeeling, compassionless orgy of greed that got the economy into so much trouble in the first place. Desparate intellectuals sought the rise of unions and experimented with socialism as paths towards the future.
None of this has come about so far during this most recent economic malaise. The press has dubbed it "the great recession," and may need to rebrand the coming time "Great Depression 2" or something like that when it is recognized that things are not getting better.
Credit is not coming back to the marketplace. Banks refuse to lend money for new projects. In the meantime, layoffs in the design and construction industry continue at incredible volumes.
For architecture firms, this will be a time of great transformation as they learn to do more with less. Layoffs typically hit the highly paid, seasoned professionals, leaving firms with a staff of interns - of which there is a ready supply, thanks to rising enrolment in architecture schools. Big firms got steadily bigger, as the few remaining architects gathered more and more experience underneath them to accomplish the expansion dreams of their clients.
In this Great Depression 2, however, architecture firms might follow the GM model, which teaches us that in this era, big is weak and small is strong. Among the architects who have been laid off, the enterprising ones are starting their own practices, and those whose talent and discipline may have been sublimated while working for big firms now find themselves able to move nimbly, quickly, and responsively to unusual demands in the marketplace.
The future of the profession is still rather foggy, but several avenues may become possible. One possiblity is for American architects to evolve more towards the European model. In Europe, very few independent firms exist, and these tend to be boutique firms revolving around a star. Most architects work for large construction firms, and the design/build model is how most work gets done in Europe. Now, anyone who has visited Europe may have noticed that, compared to the US, very little building activity seems to occur. This model is suited to a low-volume construction economy quite well, and for the next decade, there could be a low-volume construction economy in the US as well.
The other model that architecture firms may follow is that of the newspaper. Slow to follow the customer to the internet, newspapers find themselves competing with unknown startups for attention, and some of these unknown startups are racing ahead in terms of content, relevance, and pure reading enjoyment. The few national dailies left, like USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times continue on, and are referred to collectively as the "legacy press." This fate could also befall architecture firms, with a few national chain "legacy firms" serving a certain client base, while small, internet-based architecture firms serve the creative and practical needs of a vast majority of clients.
While it is too early to predict the future of the profession - death by merging with the large, or death by attack from the small - there is surely fundamental change afoot. Death, while a harsh word, implies transformation, and the nimble and creative will accept this transformation and use it to their advantage. Already in the last decade, architects have accepted huge transformations in their work process - large abandonment of physical design tools for digital design tools - and the built environment shows it. It is essential to the future of the American City that architects grasp this transformation and become masters of their own future again.
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