The Business of Architecture

Architecture is deeply intertwined with economic and political issues, as made exceedingly clear by today’s pressing ecological and societal challenges. However, unlike the construction industry, architecture seems to lack a lobby to advocate for alternatives to the prevailing “growth and construction” mentality in politics. What conditions are needed to establish new systems  of economic value creation, and what role do interest groups play in this process? Ruth Schagemann, President of the Architects’ Council of Europe (ACE), Andrea Gebhard, President of the Federal Chamber of German Architects (BAK), and Susanne Wartzeck, President  of the Association of German Architects (BDA), discuss this topic with Arno Brandlhuber and Olaf Grawert.

– Professional Migration in the Architectural Sector

“There are problems; you can’t say there are not, even if they are not of the same intensity and type as those in Serbia. When you speak with others—not only other architectural workers, but especially with other professions—you realize how many things are wrong and how, even in Switzerland, it’s a really badly paid profession.” That is how Jelena, a Montenegrin architectural worker, framed her view on the economic situation of architects living in Switzerland to me.

In his 2021 photo series The Worker’s Project, architect and photographer Leonhard Clemens depicts construction workers on a building site in Berlin.Through portraiture, the very people often overlooked in discussions about architecture are brought into focus. After all, it is still the architect who is generally thought of as the creator of a building. The myth of singular authorship stubbornly prevails, although there is no secret around the fact that a multitude of people  are involved in the process of producing our built environment. Leonhard Clemens gives visibility to the construction workers while protecting their anonymity— not out of disrespect, but rather out of concern for their precarious employment conditions and volatile immigration status. Respect for and solidarity with all participants in the building industry is what Clemens’s pictures demand of their viewers. Simultaneously, they remind the architectural profession about its own place in the same system of labor and exploitation.

The usual magazine profile of an architect and their office is a string of success ­stories. Rare is the practitioner ready to talk candidly about failures, hard times, unsuccessful project acquisitions, unpaid invoices. For Oana Bogdan, the former Secretary of State responsible for cultural heritage at the Romanian Ministry of ­Culture and founding partner of the Brussels-based office Bogdan & Van Broeck, which she has been leading as a sole principal under the name &bogdan since 2022, a near-total failure right after the firm’s incorporation provided her with an opportunity to reassess her perception of her own job and the profession in ­general. In this interview, she talks about the many roles—manager, marketing ­expert, politician—she has had to adopt in crises and how they in turn have shaped her thinking as an architect.

– Tools of Cooperation

Norms regulate and shape our shared lives and the way we work together. This is especially true of architecture, and particularly in Germany, where the German Building Code (BauGB), technical standards by the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), and ISO standards play a constant role. In fact, the ISO 9000 directive even offers a precise definition of the very term “project”, stating that it is a “unique process, consisting of a set of coordinated and controlled activities with start and finish dates, undertaken to achieve an objective conforming to specific requirements, including the constraints of time, cost and resources.”¹

Just before 1 a.m. on June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story residential high-rise in North Kensington, London. Seventy-two people died and scores were injured in the resulting inferno.¹ As the immediate palpable trauma and distress of the residents who survived settled into public consciousness, it soon became clear that large swaths of the UK’s building stock—including schools and other public buildings—were at risk of precisely the same event.² People continue to live in buildings that may kill them unless substantial—and expensive—measures are taken to reverse developments that have been taking place since the turn of the millennium.

Architectural academia has long had a complicated relationship with architectural practice. This relationship is most harmonious in periods of economic growth, when education expands in step with employment, as it did in the public sector–led heyday of the welfare state or during the neoliberal private-sector boom years. When the number of jobs is in decline, the relationship becomes more fraught. In such moments of crisis, academia develops notions of autonomy; these notions are the ideological expressions of a need to find new clients. As Will Orr and Ricardo Ruivo show using the UK as an example, in the long crisis stretching from 2008 to the present, this academic autonomism has grown to absurd proportions, as if it were trying to become its own client.

Among architecture practitioners, a widespread sentiment about workplace dynamics being “unique”—i.e., incomparable—hides the fact that almost every architecture firm contains the same fundamental work relationship between two types of actors as any other workplace: the employer and the employee. The belief that work relationships in the architecture world are somehow different from other fields stems from the fact that both the employer and the employee seem to pursue the same goals. Everyone simply calls them­selves an architect. But that may not be the whole truth. While a principal’s name on the door ties their personal identity to their practice, that calculation does not apply to those working for them.

Institutions of the welfare state have been experiencing the impact of funding cuts for a number of years now all across the Global North. This trend has had its effects on architecture practices as well. Is there a way out of the neoliberal utility paradigm that takes economic profit as its sole objective? Is it possible to counter it with new economic and architectural models? A conversation with Vienna-based architect, urban planner, and author Gabu Heindl.