Why do architects work so many unpaid hours?

I've seen this question earlier today: Why do architects work so many unpaid hours? Why is it so hard to get paid fairly in a society where you easily pay thousands of kroner for an 8-minute visit to the dentist? (question of Hus Arkitekter)

I think we need more transparency in how we price our services among architects, and some standards that everyone will follow. You go to the dentist, and you know how much it will cost at the dentist next door. But you go to an architect, and you don't know how much it will end up costing because we don't have public references with how many hours and how much it costed to design each project on the market. It's like the closest secret to our hearts that nobody wants to talk about.

When I started out my office, it was so hard to price my services; nobody will tell you how to do it. So it was a lot of trial and error, a lot of free hours. We need a system that all architects should use and be as clear in our prices as possible. Display them with pride, and maybe have a public library of projects, amount of hours, and amount of money spent.

I imagine when it's per hour it doesn't matter since you are getting paid no matter what, but when you give estimates or fixed prices, we are ashamed to say sometimes it will take triple the amount of hours, so we overwork our fears of saying we made a mistake. We need more transparency, and we need to talk more about this among architects. If we talk per hours and estimates or fixed prices, there are different problems.

Let's take per hour. When the client asks how many hours you think it's going to take, this happens before the selling point, so you are trying to sell your services to your client. This makes one architect inclined to give as low an amount of numbers as possible just to take the task knowing they will ask other architects that can come up with a smaller number of hours.

So if we really need a project, we will go as low as possible to make sure we get it. Because you might have employees, and their salaries need to be paid every month. So it might push you to give a lower estimate just so you take the project if things go south.

Clients don't generally recognize the value of good architecture necessarily. It took us 5-6 years to learn it ourselves too, so it's understandable. So they think that another architect will do the same thing, for cheaper.

Some see us as commodities.

Especially the majority of architecture firms that don't really have their own signature, and let's be honest, if you are not Frank Gehry or someone with a strong signature, it's kind of hard even for architects to differentiate our work if we don't know who did it. I mean, all schools and apartment buildings look generally the same. Of course, there are nuances.

But I've realized it's very hard to not be seen as a commodity. Our value is standardized according to, let's say, the amount of hours we say we are going to use. And we kind of know that, so we go low with our hours.

It's not as clear why a building designed by LPO architects is better than a building designed by A-lab architects. Not even for me, as an architect; I will probably choose the one with the smaller estimate too.

I am going to simplify for the sake of making a point. Let's take lawyers; they also work per hour, but you can measure their success in terms of 'we saved x amount of people from going to prison'. Let's take surgeons, 'we have this rate of success after our surgeries'. They can measure their success. What do architects have? We have designed this building that it will give you a nice experience that you won't even know it's because of the design, or it makes you feel depressed but that it's hard to realize also that it is because of the architecture.

Most of the time, our own clients have opposing interests to ours. If a lawyer and the person they defend have the same goal, to escape being condemned, if a surgeon and a patient have a common clear goal, that the person is saved, a successful surgery, a tumor was eliminated, for example. For both lawyers and doctors, the other scenario is: disaster, there is a big contrast between a successful result and an unsuccessful result, you either have the disease still, or you go to prison. It's either heaven or hell.

Let's take developers; they generally have a thing with architects; they see us as an opposing force to their profit, we always want better quality, better design, expensive materials, because they're prettier.;-) Construction companies, the same, 'just keep the architect away'.

What is a successful result coming from an architect to their client? The building is built, is taken into its use, the apartments get sold anyway; if they don't, it's hardly because of the architecture, any building no matter how ugly gets sold eventually. Maybe slower, but it does. Unless it's 2024, when interest rate is very high, but generally, it eventually does get sold.

So how do the architects measure their success? Nobody can say with certainty that we sold all the apartments in a day because the architecture was so amazing; it's all about the market, a hungry market as we have in Norway generally, will buy anything. That I basically heard from developers' mouths. So it doesn't matter; it's a cube or a pretty cube. What matters is the price per m2.

And that's where developers try to push architects to do as small rooms as possible, in order to be cheaper to build. The less m2 you have in a bedroom, the better; I've had clients asking for 5m2 bedrooms. That's basically the minimum a storage room should have for a house or apartement.

And the way the clients measure success by how cheap it is to build goes against everything an architect has learned; aesthetics are not even a point here. All the rules that say minimum space on both sides of the bed, in front of the bed, for the wardrobe, etc. we have recommendations, not rules of course. So I've been asked in the past, but where does it say in the byggforsk that it has to be that way; it's just a recommendation, not a requirement. So the only rule I've found was the minimum amount of air in a room that says it should be at least 15 m3 of air, that brings us to around 6m2 depending on the height. Otherwise, developers will choose to make a bedroom of 4m2. You jump straight into the bed. As long as they make a bigger profit.

And don't get me wrong; we all do need to have a profit in our business, but at what price?A human being that doesn’t know the long term effects of living in a box of a bedroom upon our mental health, will have to live in it. But it won’t be the developers.

But of course, they need to pay all the salespeople that will make more than the architect will ever dream of for as little effort as possible. So much we are messed up as architects. We are pushed to go against our moral compass to make the developers achieve their profits to pay the people that work the least for it. While architects will happily work for free a bunch of hundreds hours because they feel guilty it takes so much time to design these rooms that will feel like a prison for those that will live in them.

So in conclusion, for the typical developer, the architects that will design smaller rooms and cheaper will actually get rewarded with the project, to getting the job above others that have a stronger moral compass. So it is a losing game. The hope is to work on projects that are owned by private persons, that do care about quality since they will live in that place themselves, or maybe also the state projects that I haven't been involved in but I imagine it should be better since there is no interest from the state to gain huge profits, as long as the construction company doesn't take full control.

So, why are architects overworked and underpaid? We can't measure the value we bring to the table clearly. If it is measurable for developers, it goes against everything we think is valuable, so we have resistance to make it 'successful' from a developer's point of view. The developers will happily choose someone that can comply with their measure of success (less m2 per room, less design, a cube form).

The gap between the standard of design we can do and we thought was the norm when we were in architecture school, and between what some of our clients see as good design is huge. The gap between our skills and the practicality of designing a building is again, huge.

This is a conversation, where I am also trying to figure things out; they're not fixed opinions; please help me change my mind if you disagree with something.

I would love to hear your opinion on this.

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