One of the idiosyncrasies I find in the profession is the inversion of responsibility. It seems the more senior one gets, the less fun one is allowed to have. Even for a profession hellbent on sucking joy out of people’s lives, the process of joy extraction is alas not instantaneous and it gets even crueler with time. When you are a young graduate, you get to draw and design and experiment and optioneer and imagine to a degree (but your opinion is dismissed off the cuff). When you are a more established senior architect or associate, you get to quibble over emails, trawl standards, draft trackers, pretend to be awake in boring CPDs that hijack your lunch break, and play petty politics. Many would argue you become far too expensive to draw. I became an architect because I enjoy drawing and I enjoy the process of creating not because I wanted to fester in and be consumed by taxing responsibilities I had not signed up for in the first place (or at least I thought I hadn’t).
I am not saying that management and admin are not essential parcels of a senior architect’s role or that they should never be done; however, I do genuinely feel that they have been inflated to mask some insecurities in the profession about design prowess. It is far too facile to seek comfort in the non-judgmental world of admin as an antidote to impostor syndrome: I am not designing, not because I am shit, but because I am far too important to. Think Harry Enfield’s very important man. Not only that but those who have latched on to admin as their calling have set a template for the profession as a whole, pressuring even those who have no qualms about desiging and drawing to toe the joyless admin line.
It also does a disservice to design. It reduces it from a process to a moment. An epiphany. A sketch. A fleeting brilliance. A lip service. Many architects have fallen prey to their own propaganda in cinema. A great design is a design that doesn’t know yet exactly what it will look like after going through a rigorous process of exploration and refinement. A great design is also predicated on sophisticated details not on inadvertent gaudy ostentations. When I start a drawing, I may have an idea of it is I may want to realise but need to go on the drawing journey to actually come up with a design which may conform to where I started or go somewhere else entirely. A master sketch holds great ideas and talents to ransom because it has shut the door on experimenting and questioning and going on the journey. It the same with renders and photoshop. They are not street portraits in tourist hotspot intent on faithful facsimiles of subject matters but rather templates to try on different guises, colours and material finishes.
Actually addressing this inversion of responsibility would also make good business sense, especially with Part 1 placements. At the moment, Part 1 graduates seem to cost practices money to keep because of the how the profession is structured. Part 1 graduates are left to do the drudge work that is neither essential nor needed. Rather than viewed as young professionals with a university qualification, they are perceived as glorified summer placement teenage students. Part 1 graduates make models and pick up unnecessary drawings, basically largely superfluous jobs that are only created to keep them busy. Conversely, these Part 1 graduates do not seem to learn a lot, if anything at all, and get the wrong impression that the profession is an extension of their university experience and studio culture. By not being shown the full breadth of the professional culture, they are unable to fully appraise whether they would want to continue on the path of studying architecture or whether professional practice in architecture is the only path in which they can avail themselves of their degree.
Instead, how about the administrative tasks being assigned to Part 1 graduates? Meeting minutes, trackers, searching code books,..etc? Not only will more experienced members of staff be freed up to spend more time on things that are actually enjoyable and that would make them less bitter, it will also open a window into the inner workings of practice to Part 1 graduates, providing them with complementary knowledge they cannot acquire at university instead of redundant tasks. They will gain an understanding of how the business works, be respected as university degree holders and perhaps discover avenues they can explore in due course with their architecture education.
Win-Win.
Nobody should be too expensive to draw. Really.