Architizer: “Architects, We Need To Talk”
Architects, we need to talk.
We need to talk about being overworked, underpaid and undervalued.
We need to talk about how sacrificing your health, sanity and relationships at the altar of architecture and for the glory of good design is not okay. Burnout is like a dormant virus. It incubates in architecture school, spreads through architecture companies and slowly infects your entire life. It sounds grim. Because it is.
We need to talk about the “M” word. Yes, money, money, money. It seems no one wants to talk openly about money and *gasp* profit. Straight out of architecture school, we’re conditioned to believe it’s better to work for peanuts at a Starchitecture firm than to find a role that will help us pay off our student loans.
We need to talk about all the ways we get pigeonholed into exercising only a handful of skills — often the ones we don’t enjoy as much. It’s time we talk about all the skills we have and how they can be applied to roles outside of architecture.