Ethical practice spans all parts of architecture. From intersectionality and labor to the climate crisis, a designer must work with a range of conditions and contexts that inform the built environment and the process of its creation. Across cultures, policies and climates, architecture is as much functional and aesthetic as it is political, social, economic, and ecological. By addressing the ethics of practice, designers can reimagine the discipline's impact and who it serves.
Most of the practicing architecture is drudgery, and this is rather unfair. As students, architects are given thoughtful prompts about the built environment and its big questions, as well as sole creative reign to answer those questions. That is the only time in the architect’s life when this is the case, and in many ways, this does not adequately prepare the architecture student for the world of architecture, which is a world of drudgery. In reality, architects are not heroes.
The inertia of politics and governance in a time when major societal changes occur at an increasingly faster pace and the dissatisfaction with the decision process makes room for bottom-up actions, activism and bold endeavours. In the light of so many examples of social activism, do architects have the tools to make their own stand? Does architecture have the power to disrupt the status quo?
Labor gives rise to design. As the aggregate of physical and mental effort used in the creation of goods and services, labor is tied to both what we create and our process. In a field shaped by production, architecture and design depend on labor from a broad range of professionals. But as workers increasingly put in longer hours and traditional measures of security change, questions of labor practices have arisen amid broader conditions of contemporary work culture.
Nearly three weeks ago, the editors at ArchDaily reached out to our readers to help us investigate one of the most difficult challenges of architecture education: what do students and teachers think of the 24-hour studio culture that has come to pervade the architecture profession? As we mentioned in our original post, the idea that all-nighters are simply an unavoidable part of an education in architecture has come under fire recently, with some schools attempting to combat them by closing their studios overnight. Is this the right approach to reducing the hours that students are (over)working? If not, what should be done instead? Perhaps there are some people that still think a 24-hour culture can be beneficial to young architects?
The response we got to our question was astonishing, with 141 comments on the article itself and over 100 more on our Facebook post. From this discussion, two overriding themes emerged: firstly, many commenters seemed to believe that architecture students have too much work in the first place; secondly, there was almost complete consensus that closing the studios achieves nothing but moving the problem of all-nighters from the studio to students' homes. For the sake of brevity we've chosen not to include the many responses that mention these themes ideas in this post, but for anyone interested in seeing the evidence of these opinions, we encourage you to visit the original article.
As for the remainder of the comments, we've rounded up some of the most interesting contributions. Find out what 15 commenters had to say about the 24-hour studio culture - taking in arguments for and against it as well as discussing its wider consequences and ways to avoid it - after the break.
Among the Venice Biennale's two-pronged approach of hype and glamour on one hand, and artistry and theory on the other, it's easy to forget that the event is one of the biggest gatherings of architects around - and as such represents a great opportunity to put the more prosaic concerns of the profession out in the open.
The New York-based Architecture Lobby took full advantage of the opportunity however, holding a protest outside the Giardini on June 7th, the Biennale's opening weekend. Through their protest, they aim to draw attention to declining working conditions in the profession, including low pay, long hours and insecure unemployment - particularly for young architects, who are the most precarious of all.
We reached out to Architecture Lobby member Tyler Survant to find out more about the Architecture Lobby's presence in Venice, and the problems facing the profession. Read on after the break for the interview.
The Architecture Lobby has released a seventy-question survey that seeks to gather a broad range of data about architectural work--from firm standards and policies to worker satisfaction--which will provide open-source information about the realities of architectural labor in the US. We will publish the results in the coming months; in the meantime you can aid in the project by taking The Architecture Lobby survey here (open through April).
