The Architect's Journal: The Latest Architecture and News

American architect, educator, critic, historian, curator and co-founder of The Architect’s Newspaper has passed away after a long battle with cancer in Manhattan at 72 years old.

Around 1 in 7 women in UK architecture practices has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace in the past year alone, according to the results of the annual Women in Architecture survey conducted by The Architects' Journal. The poll of nearly 1,500 architects also found that more than half of women have experienced some form of discrimination ranging from bullying to workplace rules that leave them disadvantaged in the same period. The AJ's survey, which in previous years has largely focused on issues such as pay disparity between men and women, focuses this year more broadly on gender discrimination and sexual harassment—a response to the global shift in awareness organized around movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp.

Now in its fourth year, the Architects' Journal's Women in Architecture survey is firmly embedded into the discussion of gender roles within the architecture profession. Collected from an anonymous cross-section of practitioners, clients, consultants, engineers, developers, PRs, and academics, the 2015 survey focused on the UK alone, and saw the number of participants soar to an unprecedented high of 1,104 respondents, 20% of whom were male.

Results from previous years' surveys have sparked discussion amidst the architectural and mainstream media alike, and have been cited by RIBA and the UK government. The survey covers four main topics -- pay, practice, education, and children -- commencing with broader questions about discrimination before narrowing its aperture to more specific issues. View the results of the 2015 survey after the break.

Maria Smith, shortlisted for The Architect's Journal's Emerging Woman Architect of the Year, has just published an article in The Architectural Review titled "Why do Women Really Leave Architecture?" - an article that, like many over the last year, attempts to tackle the tricky question of why women (who make up over 40% of architecture students in the US but only 23% of the profession) leave architecture. For the first few paragraphs, I was nodding in agreement, eagerly reading something that - finally - promised to offer a different perspective on the "women in architecture" question.

Unfortunately, a few paragraphs later, all that promise falls terribly flat. Smith spends a good amount of time setting up a fabulous argument, and then - disappointingly - falls into the very traps she was hoping to break wide open. By the article's conclusion, I was less satisfied than when I started, wondering: is this even the right question we should be asking? 

The Architects' Journal recently published an article pitting five competing views of teaching sustainability against one another. The opinions come from a range of backgrounds, including engineers, tutors and landscape architects, and discuss how architecture students should be taught to design in a sustainable way - or if they should be taught this at all.

The competing opinions are telling in the issues that they highlight, demonstrating how complex the issue of sustainability has become, and how it fits into the wider context of architectural education.

Read the different reactions to the issue of sustainability in education after the break