Following last week’s write up on architects’ wages in the UK, word reaches Woobius HQ of retail behemoth Tesco’s policy of training Indian architects and QSs to work on their UK projects. According to Building magazine, our favourite supermarket flew in the workers to Britain where they were trained in UK architecture and QS skills.

I have worked with Tesco before, and they certainly aren’t the most obliging client when it comes to fees, but this development seems to be yet another kick up the backside for struggling UK architects. Tesco gaily dismiss any concerns by claiming they only use Indian architects at the initial design stage after which the work is transferred to UK architects for planning and construction.

This method of working raises a number of concerns. Firstly, initial concept design is the staple income source for many architects, especially at a time when little is actually being built and clients are tentatively testing the value of their holdings with masterplan concepts.

Secondly, it raises the question of quality. Tesco have turned on its head the common practice of established design firms developing a concept scheme (which is taken over at construction to be completed by a local/specialist contractor) using cost rather than skill and experience as the deciding influence. No one is suggesting that Indian architects are any less capable than UK architects, but a quick whistle stop training tour will do little to provide a professional understanding of the intricacies of UK planning law, and perhaps more importantly, local contextual issues. After all, an architect in the UK spends at least 12 months in practice whilst studying for his Part 3 professional exams which aim to ingrain a general understanding of our duty of care. Tesco are not famous for the quality of their design so perhaps it is their opinion that any old architect will do as long as they are cheap. This does not bode well for our architectural output, something that has been picked up on by one of my favourite blog sites Bad British Architecture. (Admittedly this was designed by a UK-based architect, but you get the idea.)

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, methods like this beg the question how far will Tesco go, and how soon will other retail giants begin operating in this way? A reader of Building, Peter Philips, makes an ominous assessment of the situation. Complaining about Tesco’s outsourcing of it’s suppliers, architects and surveyors, reminds him of the words of the German pastor Neimoller’s famous poem ‘First they came’ in which he tells how he failed to speak up when the Nazis took away communists, then trade unionists, and then the Jews because he was none of these, and that when they finally came for him there was no one left to speak up.

Britain has little left of its own industry. Outsourcing has reduced blue collar workers to the scrapheap and it is hard to believe Tesco will keep to their assurance that they will only use Indian trained architects for initial design stages. What can be done? As a tired architect finishing up his days work in the office I’m afraid I can’t really think of an answer. The omnipresent, bloated, juggernaut that is Tesco just seems untouchable. On the other hand, one thing I do know is I won’t be buying my dinner from them this evening.

One article in last weeks architectural press struck me as particularly depressing. Our friends at Building Design have reported that a London practice, Parritt Leng, have been advertising for part 2 and part 3 architects for a two week stint. Those who replied discovered the rate of pay to be 5.71 an hour, and the expected working hours from 8am to 10 pm. A quick calculation makes that 80 for a 14-hour day.

When you consider the minimum-working wage for adults in the UK over 22 is 5.80 an hour the whole affair seems downright disgraceful, if not potentially illegal. Architects pay is one of my major irritations in life. It is paltry in comparison to other professions, a nagging dissatisfaction compounded by an expensive, 7-year education, and perpetuated by the arrogance and presumption of practices like Parritt Leng evident when they make statements such as this: We are essentially a young practice with several projects of varying sizes. The hours and work ethic are going to be very intense indeed. We would expect you to start work at 8am and to finish work at 10pm.

Back in 1998 during the summer holidays I worked for a scaffolding company in Yeovil for 6.00 an hour. I was an unskilled labourer working outdoors in the sunshine. Work started at 8am and finished on the dot at 5pm without question – a similar working day to most workers in the country, presumably because it gives you time to relax in the evening and wake up fresh and prepared the next day.

How on earth, then, can architects working for below the minimum wage be in anyway creative or motivated when they are expected to endure a 14 hour day, six days a week? Commitment to one’s calling is admirable but this arrangement seems soul destroying in the extreme. Furthermore, I can’t understand how this sweatshop environment and disposable resource would actually benefit the quality of output, raising questions about the architects’ duty of care to their clients. (A quick look at Parritt Lengs website did little to ease my concern).

Mark Shaw-Smith is one of many who are vigorous in their condemnation of such behaviour (see the comments section in the BD article, well worth a read). He recognises that times are admittedly hard, and a survivalist attitude understandable, but finds asking students to subsidise their ambition to be unforgivable. And quite right to – it demeans the profession entirely and will surely discourage genuine talent from following the architectural career path. The pay, the hours and the attitude stink of exploitation.

Unfortunately, most architects I know are masochists when it comes to working hard, and no doubt the vacancies will be filled by desperate job seekers. But this is still no excuse to abandon our ethics. In behaving like this, we are cheating young architects of the reward they deserve for their professional qualifications, we are de-valuing the profession as a whole by undercutting our neighbours, and we are tarnishing the professional image of the industry. (Does a client really want to think desperate graduates earning less than a burger flipper in McDonald’s are developing his multi-million pound scheme?)

My thanks to Building Design for publishing their article and highlighting this particular problem.

Last week gremlins hit my computer at work. Whilst I enjoyed a nice cup of tea and read the papers, my friends from IT worked their mysterious magic, re-jigged my profile, wiped half my personnel files and left me a machine that seems to run twice as fast with updated software and functions that confuse me daily. I should really be happy but my routine is broken, most notably by the loss of the automatic email predictor in Outlook.

Laziness

Now, I recognise it is a sign of my laziness that I rely on functions such as this for my contacts list, but in all honesty, it saves an awful lot of time and bother when communicating with the design team. In isolation, it’s not such a great problem, and it’s not beyond my powers of deduction to locate all the necessary emails. What it does highlight is the very powerful influence of routine and perceived control inherent in established methods of working, and the inability of professionals, who are focused on their particular jobs, to entertain the idea of change. For example, to a sane man, it is quite clear my new computer will increase productivity in the long run. Sanity, however, is often in short supply when impatient clients/consultants/contractors are on your back for information. To be honest, right now, I would prefer to have my dodgy computer back as it was before the gremlins took hold, regardless of how poorly it operated outside of my personnel requirements.

Clearly, this behaviour lacks a certain logic on my behalf. I ended up with a great new machine, no skin off my back, and in no way out of pocket financially. I wonder, however, how long it would have taken to fix the thing if I was required to pay for the repairs? How long would I have put the task off, and flogged the ailing machine into the ground until it became so damaged it was beyond repair?

Hard cash

When monetary concerns enter the mix very often logic is thrown right out of the window. Investment in information technology has the ability to increase productivity and reduce operating costs, but the Luddites amongst us have a different perception borne from the fear of losing the masterdom of their workflow (however antiquated) to an unknown technology. To someone who is successful at what they do and comfortable in the way they do it, the change can be scary and stubbornness is understandable. The fact that this change costs a certain amount becomes their weapon of choice in discouraging the logical decision to implement new technology.

The reality of cost therefore has the potential to sink or save a new technology. As a resident writer on the Woobius blog, and active member of their development team, I can’t help but wonder if our new pricing scheme will be attractive enough to the cynic in the office. The trouble is everything on the Internet seems to be increasingly free nowadays – we almost expect it to be free – and a massive psychological barrier must be hurdled to pay even the smallest amount for a service. On the other hand, when one considers what we pay up front, and without thought, for other things in life, the frailty of the human decision making process is shown clearly. Bizarrely it is often the case more we pay for something the more reassured we are the product will be of both quality and use.

Rationale

Bob Leung has displayed convincing rationale in his pricing structure and the options available appeal to a range of tastes. In theory it should work – the tool is a useful one and when used properly saves the user tenfold in time and cost – but everywhere around I see the illogical, cynical, technophobe raise his head to banish such devilry from his domain. It will be interesting to see how things work out for the Woobius team.

In the mean time it would be interesting to hear from other readers how they feel about paying for services on an increasingly cash free internet.

This week, we’d like to introduce our resident academic, Ben, to the world of Woobius Scribbles. An accomplished architect and theorist, Ben will be providing you, our readers, with snippets of his wisdom over the coming months.

Architecture’s visual bias

Architecture is designed and represented in a predominantly visual manner but it is itself not predominantly visual.

It is clear that architecture is designed and communicated mainly through visual means. Drawings, whether ‘working drawings’ or ‘visualisations’, communicate spaces or construction techniques by representing them visually. These are often augmented by explanatory text, either on the drawing or in a specification, but it is the drawing that remains primary. Models are less dominantly visual because they can be moved around and touched, but to some extent, the physical model is losing its place to the computer model, which is perhaps the ultimate visually dominated medium. It produces ‘photo-realistic’ perspectives that look like your building will really look.

But buildings are more than what they look like. And I don’t just mean that we neglect the other senses. We use buildings, things happen in them and these events can radically change the spaces without substantially changing their visual appearance (imagine a sports hall hosting a game of basketball one day and an examination on the next). Our experiences are spatial, not pictorial, and many of their aspects cannot be drawn (meaningfully) in terms only of what they look like. Our experience of buildings is as much organisational as visual.

A sense of perspective

A perspective drawings seems closer to representing what it’s like to be in a space than, say, a section. But a perspective gives us one view only. A fully rendered perspective presents us with a fait accompli; this may be useful (although still perhaps misleading) in representing a design to others but it is difficult to work with as a designer. There is little ambiguity in the image which can be inventively misread; we can only go back and change the ‘object’ and try and improve it, we rarely see other possibilities in the drawing itself.

Plan and section drawings are always thought to imply objectivity in representation – they describe the building from an objective, orthogonal standpoint. They are therefore thought not to describe the experience of being there. I think, though, that they do; it’s just that they don’t tell us what it will look like. If we know the conventions of a plan or section drawing we can walk through it in our mind and imagine what it is like to be there. This means it tends to open up possibilities when we are designing – we imagine things that maybe we hadn’t thought of before – in contrast to the fully rendered perspective which allows only one interpretation.

Site analysis

Another interesting case is that of ‘site analysis’ in an educational context. In most projects, students start with some kind of site or context analysis. In one particular module I taught recently, we encouraged them to go into considerable depth. The visual output for the portfolio was a series of diagrams that represented the understanding of the site they had developed. Marking this kind of work in a portfolio, when the student’s verbal explanation is missing, is deeply problematic, especially when it comes to moderation by external tutors. A good piece of analysis that demonstrates a highly sophisticated understanding of the site but which is drawn up poorly, perhaps because the student is graphically weak, gets treated, at least initially, like a poor piece of analysis because that is what it looks like. By contrast an indifferent piece of analysis which is drawn up really well gets treated, again at least initially, as a good piece of analysis. It is difficult to separate the content from the representation and we therefore are always in danger of marking graphic ability whereas in this particular case we were trying to mark analysis.

There is something unavoidably visual about designing because it is intimately linked with the act of drawing. But for me the new dominance of the 3-d computer visualisation pushes this too far. Because these forms of representation portray buildings as finished objects to be viewed, we can end up designing ‘finished’ objects to be viewed and eventually buildings that look like computer models rather than the other way round.

An amusing post from our friends at the Architects Journal was forwarded to me this week providing the only laugh in an otherwise sombre week at the office. Apparently, according to the extra-marital dating site illicitencounters.com, ‘As the economic crisis forces many construction projects to be put on hold, thousands of married architects and developers are seeking erections of a less industrial nature.’

With time now on their hands the number of married builders, architects, and developers seeking affairs has increased by a third to 8000 people. This got me thinking: other than mess around on the internet looking at unsuitable sites, what on earth would architects do in the event their job no longer exists?

I can think of numerous activities that currently sound very appealing: long afternoons in the pub, visiting the museums and galleries that always get missed, renovating the flat and so on. Great for a while, but not wholly sustainable in one of the most expensive cities on earth.

Tricks of the trade

What skills does a trained architect have that could transfer to another profession? On the face of it a good project architect has an admirable skill set: problem solving, client facing, managerial aptitude. What people on the outside won’t know is that, unlike most other comparable professionals, we rarely receive any formal training in anything other than specialized architectural skills. For example, I may be the project architect on a £10,000,000 project, run a team of 5 architects and be responsible for managing both the contract and the design team but never have had even an hour of managerial training.

How have we gotten away with this? Well one reason lies in our ability to bamboozle the client with specialised jargon and nonsense vocabulary. As irritating as it is, this is a real skill for the successful architect often superceding the fundamental requirement to be able to design proficiently. The problem now, of course, is there are no clients left with whom to maintain this charade. The curtains have fallen from our ivory tower exposing the ridiculous prattle that has been the foundation of many a spurious architectural debate put forward with complete sincerity.

What will we do when our jobs cease to exist? The answer to my question is now blindingly obvious: become a politician. A political lifestyle is surely a perfect replacement for the type of architect described here. In fact, I think the shrewder architects already know this and are canvassing for jobs. Where to meet those in government? illicitencounters.com, of course!

I never intended to be an architect.

I went to University to study social anthropology. Three weeks in and very bored, the tutor threatened us with out first essay — natural childbirth in sub-Saharan tribal regions. My friends at the time were studying architecture and their first piece of work was to build a model of their favourite building. I saw them with glue, scissors and cardboard making a mess in their rooms and had a Blue Peter moment: I was going to be an architect.

Making a mess

Models have come on a bit from those days. We still use glue and cardboard, we still make a mess, but we are aided by computers and pre-fabrication techniques. Our office, for instance, has a laser cutter in the model shop. Pretty serious technology for a medium sized architectural practice. It’s an amazing machine that allows your 2D CAD drawings to be neatly cut out from any material of your choice. It saves a huge amount of time and produces beautiful models.

Recently I’ve been getting excited by a process that takes the laser cutter into the 3rd dimension: 3D printing. It’s been around for a while but is now becoming affordable for everyday use. The process essentially works by creating a 3D physical model directly from digital data, layer by layer. Specialized software slices the file into thin cross-sectional slices which are fed into a 3D printer. The 3D printer creates the model one layer at a time by spreading a layer of powder and inkjet printing a binder in the cross section of the part. The process is repeated until every layer is printed and the model is complete and ready for removal.

Modifying existing technology

It’s really very simple and at a basic level is merely a modified inkjet printer. The results, however, are amazing, producing detailed scale models of an entire site within an afternoon. What’s more the cost is next to nothing when you compare it to the man-hours required to build the model in a more traditional manner.

There are limits of course. The size of the model is restricted to the size of the printer bed, there are very few choices of material, and the architect has to build the 3D CAD model himself.

The future

This technology is in its infancy but I cant help thinking about where it could lead and the opportunities that exist with hybrid performance, linking numerous machines, sensing devices, and computers streamlined to operate under the same language. The future lies in the constant layering of techniques and purposes. Other disciplines are finding novel uses: artists are pushing back sculptural boundaries with unique forms, doctors reconstructing bone samples, archaeologists replicating and archiving fragile artifacts.

The only real barrier to the continued evolution in the production of these unique items is a lack of imagination. Combined with the ability to transfer source information through airwaves or down telephone lines the arena is wide open. Nick Callicott predicts in his book, ‘Computer aided manufacture in Architecture: The Pursuit of Happiness,’ the advent of home shopping over the internet, whereby 3-Dimensional geometric data is downloaded to a personal free-form fabricating unit in your home and generated in front of you.

Endless possibilities

This automatic process will be used to manufacture objects, products, and systems of every description and kind with no limit to complexity. The inputs will simply be raw material and data and the technology reminiscent of desktop publishing but instead of documents and printed matter, the diverse products that we need or desire to use in our lives will be manufactured for us on the spot. We will be able to efficiently make complex things in small volumes without tooling, and with material properties that we can only dream about. With such a mindset it’s easier now to predict the transfer of this technology to the building form itself. How long until we have self regulating buildings with the ability to alter their form in response to environmental stimulus?

In the short term, more realistic uses for such thinking might perhaps be associated with research stations and navel vessels or any inaccessible area where unique tools or parts are required that cannot be delivered by conventional means.

I don’t see these ideas as too far-fetched. I’d love to hear what others think — perhaps you have a specialism in this area and could continue the discussion?

Back to reality

Bringing things back down to earth I’m going to finish where I started. Technology like this may well be extraordinary and open up endless new fabrication techniques, but when designing a building nothing will ever beat the tangible, headache-inducing, finger-cutting thrills of spraymount, scalpels and cardboard.

There’s an old joke in this industry that the only professionals with ‘clients’ are architects, lawyers, and prostitutes. The punch line, of course, is we all have the reputation that we’re out to screw you but only the prostitute is honest about it.

This is amusing, I suppose, if you have had a nasty experience with an arrogant and unskilled architect but it is far from the truth. In the current climate especially, architects are most definitely the ones being screwed. There are two reasons for this: the way we charge for our services (which I’ll come to in a minute) and the wholly illogical tradition within architecture to expect to work for nothing on competition work which has a minimal chance of being won.

Hard times

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, it occurred to me last week that despite there being a recession (depression?) and virtually no projects being taken forward I am still working as hard and for as many hours as I was during the peak of last year. One would think that perhaps now would be a time to live life a little, relax, not stay in the office until the early hours, and take advantage of all the amazing things the city has to offer.

Not a chance. Years of architectural education and high pressured office time has instilled in the average architect a sense of guilt when not working that obliges them to stay chained to their desks regardless of the situation. Now, of course, the guilt is compounded by the fear of appearing idle and being the most obvious candidate for redundancy. What really grinds is knowing I’ve been working without a fee for 5 months on competitions with really very little to show. I can’t quite believe that either the lawyer or the prostitute would work for this long without payment.

We’ll pay you whenever

Which brings us nicely on to the method by which we get paid. Lawyers and prostitutes traditionally work on a time-based charge. That’s fine: you do your business, and you get paid. Should the client not pay then you’ve lost a quantifiable amount of cash and time, you cease work, sue the defaulter, (or get your pimp to give them a good beating) and move on.

Architecture is less structured. There is no fixed conclusion to a piece of work in the design stages and the most practical method of payment is monthly, setting a reasonable benchmark of deliverables along the way. Usually this works fine if you have a competent accountant and credit is flowing easily between banks and customers. Of course things are different nowadays and even a competent accountant is powerless, in the short term, to squeeze money out of clients that are not inclined to pay. It’s a cash flow question that’s easily explained when one looks at the figures.

… if we pay you

Lets imagine the most extreme example: a practice employs 100 people, 70 of whom are fee earners charged out at around £15000 a month. One month’s work is billed for each employee at the end of the month – the company is owed £1 million, due within the next 28 days.

There is an element of professional trust between the client and architect that makes it unreasonable to stop work for the next month if payment is not received. At this point the company is owed £2 million and alarm bells should start to ring if there is no payment. But, because we need the work and we don’t wish to sour our relationship with the client we will work for another month, be owed £3 million, and leave ourselves at huge risk. It is only now we begin to establish that the client is either broke, or a crook, and we call a halt to the work.

In the long run we may be able to claw back some of the fees after lengthy legal proceedings but it leaves a gaping hole in the company cash flow. It is, of course, hugely unlikely that every job in the office will end up in a scenario like this. Unfortunately though, this is becoming a reality, not because the clients are dishonest, but because they genuinely cannot source the finance to pay the fees.

My point, I suppose, is that architects really do not have much opportunity to screw people over. I hope I’ve made the point that more often than not we are the ones on the receiving end. If you are an architect or consultant Id be interested to hear how your firms are dealing with what is becoming a more serious problem by the day.

What would you say if I told you that from tomorrow onwards, your desk area will be reduced by half? In a recession, everyone is always trying to cut costs. One of the most obvious costs for any businesses is the money it pays to rent space. Especially where larger businesses are concerned, reducing the amount of physical space you need to allocate to each employee is seen as a very profitable area for consideration.

We spend most of our lives in the office, so understandably, any encroachment on our personal space at work is seen as a mortal offence, and most of us react quite nervously to the idea that someone is trying to optimise our use of office space. After all, the traditional way of doing this has been to decrease personal space, first from individual offices to cubicles, then from cubicles to smaller cubicles, open plan offices, and then finally open plan offices with tiny desks.

Open plan offices do have their advantages. Quite apart from being more economical with space, they’re more dynamic to work in, and encourage more communication within teams. This has many benefits for professions like architecture, where teamwork is of paramount importance. They’re quite configurable, too. If the patterns of work change (such as a job moving from design to the construction phase), we can rearrange the desks to match them. Unfortunately, the only way to make open plan offices more space-efficient, in their current form, is to further reduce the space per desk. This leads to disturbing visions of the future of office spaces. Who knows what next step they have in mind. I’m sure someone, somewhere, is dreaming of stacking employees vertically.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At my workplace, we’ve experimented with some much better ways to organise our working spaces. More on that further down, but first…

Hot Desk Communism

One radically different approach is, of course, hot-desking. It’s not popular in all industries (most architects that I know hate it), but it takes a new perspective on personal space in the office, by eradicating the idea of personal space altogether.

Whereas traditional office arrangements might be seen as a kind of dictatorial feudalism, where your personal space depends on your rank and the mandate of heaven (or the practice owner), hot desking is like communism for office space. Suddenly, no specific space belongs to anyone in particular. It all belongs to the commune. We sit wherever we happen to find some space, do our work there, and leave the desk intact, clean and impersonal when we leave to go back home in the evening.

Despite how unfriendly it seems at first, this does have some advantages. First, by decoupling the working space form the individual worker, we can take advantage of the fact that on any given day, ten to twenty percent of any large workforce will probably be away from their desks due to meetings or holidays. That’s the obvious, quantitative benefit. The less immediate gain is that it changes the way we relate to our work. With no formal desk, we really can work from anywhere, next to whoever we choose, whether in the office, at home, or in a coffee shop, and this can also loosen our mental rigidity and make us more accommodating to other changes.

A game of musical chairs

It also has its disadvantages. Much like the other kind of communism (the political one), it seems to go against many people’s instincts – nesting instincts, in this case. We humans are creatures of habit and we like to create a familiar, comforting space around us to support us in our daily endeavours. Because of this, most people are instinctively unsympathetic to the idea of not having their own office space. When I stick a post-it note to my desk one day, I like it to still be there the next morning.

Another reason people love to hate hot-desking is the first-come-first-served nature of it. Of course, if you’re the first one in, you’ll have the desk you want. But if you’re the last one in, you may not get a desk at all! Finally, hot desking is not always acceptable to architects, since we also have requirements to work in teams (and sitting next to each other helps!), as well as the space needed for masses of printouts, sketches, folders, models, samples and other physical artefacts that necessarily accumulate around us during the construction of a building.

A table with no legs

Is there a way to marry the advantages of hot-desking (the flexibility and efficiency) with those of fixed desks (the personally tailored, useful space that welcomes us every morning when we walk into the office)? I think so. At the architectural practice where I work in addition to Woobius, we’re experimenting with a more dynamic way to re-arrange the open plan office.

Here’s a diagram of its configuration principle. Our set up sits up to 10 people in a space that normally occupies 6 desks. I call it The Bench:

The Bench’s legs are arranged in the centre of the table, so that over time people can freely move around the table, close to or farther away from each other. Extra screens can be added, moved or removed as needed. The key principles that we’ve applied are the following:

1. Personal space – Each person has their own space that they come back to each day, where they can place whatever items make that part of the Bench their own.
2. Flexible space – Rather than the rigid limits of traditional desks, the Bench system lets people arrange themselves dynamically, occupying as much or as little space as they need.
3. Evolving space – The Bench also lets those personal spaces evolve continuously through time. As our project and our needs for space grow, we can slowly expand our area of the desk to take the space that we need. This is leaving desk allocations to the internal market forces of need rather than the rigid feudalism of corporate desk allocations.

Getting legless

Since we started this experiment 8 months ago, the use of the space on our Bench has changed many times, to adapt both to changing jobs and to the presence and absence of people. So far, it has kept up with our demands of it and proved to be a more enjoyable personal working space than traditional fixed desks, while at the same time keeping our team together and communicating, and it is so far the densest way we’ve found to fit ten people (in a space normally occupied by just six desks).

There’s not enough space in a single article to go into much more detail about this, but we’ll be sure to write about it some more in a later article. In the meantime, what do you think? Is this something you would want to try in your own office?

In October last year a tangible sense of panic crept through the architectural practice where I work. 4 years of growth shuddered to a halt, a regional office closed, and pockets of empty desks were conspicuous with their lack of activity. ‘Cut deep and cut hard’ our financial director was overheard saying. He certainly kept to his word and by Christmas one in three of my colleagues had left. At the time I thought it really quite cruel — the national recession hadn’t fully kicked in, money was saved from a superb year of trading and the architectural press hadn’t started publicising other companies losses.

To put this in context, that very week the UK’s most famous architect, Norman Foster, was quoted as saying ‘I don’t foresee job cuts at Foster + Partners. Not at all.’ He went on to advise fellow members of the British profession to stay mean and stay keen to get through the credit crunch. Reassuring words from the man himself. Were we overacting? Had the emerging economic gloom blurred the reality of the situation?

Today the office is smaller, but still busy. Our fee income is adequate and competition wins are finally filtering through. I’d say most people have relaxed a little and are starting to again enjoy the whole process of designing (which is what we like to think we are good at) without worrying about mortgages, interest rates, and fee income.

Foster + Partners, on the other hand have just announced a huge swathe of redundancies 3 ½ months after reassuring the profession there would not be a problem. Why was Lord Foster’s prediction so wayward? Hubris? Ignorance? Spin? I suspect a little of each. Hubris is almost a requirement for many of the really great architects. Ignorance seems endemic within our financial and governmental systems so why not the architectural industry? Finally, the suggestion that spin held some sway over the decision gains weight when one understands that in May 2007 a minority holding in Foster and Partners was acquired by the private equity firm 3i. Their online literature proudly lauds the opportunities created through this relationship and boasts that “as Foster + Partners and 3i work together to seize these opportunities, new landmark structures will appear across the globe — doubling the size of the business and helping to make the second 40 years as inspiring as the first.” I can’t pretend to know a great deal about private equity firms but Id assume that any revelation that directly contradicts their own growth projections and risks denting their share price would be closely managed.

It is a sad fact but jobs must go. If our clients can’t source the finance to develop their schemes then our services are redundant. ‘Cut deep and cut hard’ may appear ruthless but the logic is strong. Financially the firm in question becomes a more agile beast, not lumbered with the burden of non-fee earners. Darwinian logic suggests it will survive where others fail.

Important, though, is its effect on the mental well being of the staff, which in my experience directly correlates with office productivity. An initial cull results in resentment but soon people are relieved their positions are safe and play resumes as normal. Uncertainty over a sustained period, however, generates a collective level of stress that will compromise the demanding standards we aim to achieve. Some might argue that the competition generated by the prospect of redundancies improves productivity. For a week or two this may be true but the sugar rush of activity soon crashes and the workforce is left tired, despondent, and unmotivated.

Has the downturn affected you or people you know? Share your story below.

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the practice
Not a pencil was stirring, for art or for justice.
The printers were quiet, and the heaters switched off
(To cut costs in this economical trough).

The drawings were nestled, all snug in their sleeves,
In great stacks of binders, in quite messy sheaves,
And models were piled next to samples and scrap,
And I, fast asleep at my desk, took a nap.

When out on the street, there arose such a clatter!
I sprang from my chair, and my dreams did all scatter.
Back into my project I flew like a flash,
Started up Microstation, but it promptly crashed.

The deadline looming, the final submission
Was due on the morrow, impossible mission.
Why, who, in their mad, ignoble delusion
Would plan out this work with such foolish ambition?

With a small painful shrug, neither lively nor quick,
I resumed my work, cursing good old Sir Nick,
Who, before taking off to sunnier parts
Had this horrible deadline, chosen to impart.

And why did he do it? Why'd an honest good man
Saddle my poor team with this terrible plan?
"Thou shalt work until Christmas. Early Break? Don't forget
I need it by Christmas, through pain or through sweat."

So it is every year, if not Nick, then it's Beatty,
Or Hovis, or Saint Hope, or Sweety and Sweety.
Every christmas some clients demand their ideas,
All packaged, delivered, drawn up, made to please...

So that they can rest, in a mailbox somewhere
Locked up in a cupboard, stuffed under the stairs
While the client enjoys a well earned vacation
Without any thought for our cruel deprivation.

Thus, then, is the life of us poor architects,
Who dream of tall towers and who knows what next
In the deep of the night, while other men quaff
The clear bubbly draught, and enjoy hearty laughs.

Thus, then, is the life, but if such is the cost
Of great architecture, should we really be cross?
When it's all said and done, and built of stone and glass,
Was it not all worth that one last midnight pass?

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the practice,
Architects were working, hard, all night, without cease.

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to our readers, our users, and everyone else, from the whole woobius team.