You can teach a man to draw a straight line … and to copy any number of given lines or forms with admirable speed and perfect precision … but if you ask him to think about any of those forms … he stops; his execution becomes hesitating … ; he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool … And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them … — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1853
In the space of twenty years, convergence technologies have virtually uprooted traditional modes of professional exchange and interaction. With paper no longer an essential support to the transfer of information, the Prometheus of architectural practice has been unchained from the tyranny of place and physical document delivery. Software-induced standardization and electronic access to digital transmission channels allow architectural firms to operate beyond the old territorial limits of service transactions, building bridges spanning previously unthinkable distances. The acquisition of geographic mobility gives architectural practice the chance to overcome the historical constraints of location and catch up with the more prosaic dynamics of manufacturing.
Rather than remaining fixed in place, architectural capital can disperse according to relative production advantages. These advantages can be substantial, considering that disparities in world wealth are indeed reflected in professional remuneration levels and that labor costs reach, on average, 50% of office budgets. The starting monthly salary for an architect in India is around 5,000 rupees, the equivalent of 185 Australian dollars. Graduates with up to three years of office experience earn between 60 cents and 2.60 dollars an hour, whereas draftspersons in practice for five years can expect between 0.4 and 1.7 dollars, depending on technical specialty and location of the office.1 By comparison, the official minimum pay for architectural graduates and newly registered architects in the Australian state of Victoria in 1999 was, respectively, twelve dollars and fifteen dollars an hour.2 In the same year, similar positions in the United States commanded, on average, hourly wages of twenty-nine and thirty-three Australian dollars.3 Given these gaps, strategic remote outsourcing could enhance firms’ competitiveness or profitability.
Needless to say, opinions on the feasibility of offshore collaborations diverge: some practitioners believe in the savings that can be obtained from the strategic decentralization of selected services, while others see insurmountable problems in the resulting chain of communication.4 For this latter group, the design process is still too densely defined by interpersonal transactions and subjective decisions to be spread geographically and culturally. Excessive resources would be wasted in interpreting, developing, and correcting unfamiliar information, especially now that computer drafting has increased office productivity.
Yet there is little doubt that the industrial atmosphere is becoming increasingly conducive to establishing distant collaborations. In 1999, Kermit Baker, the chief economist of the AIA, noted that US firms “effectively use an international workforce to supplement staffing needs.”5 And while the evidence of professional or business relationships involving firms from higher-wage and lower-wage regions mounts, the offer from lower-wage regions becomes more forthcoming, with whole lists of offices advertising the possibility for service collaboration on professional websites.
Regulating Department, courtesy Paolo Tombesi.The seeming development of a global market coincides with institutional acknowledgement and facilitation at an international level. The in-principle agreement for global service trade (GATS), negotiated by WTO member countries at the end of the Uruguay round in 1993, has recently come to concern, directly, the supply of professional services. Since 2000, over sixty countries have made commitments towards considering import-export collaborations in architecture, and more than forty in urban planning and landscape architecture.6
Perhaps inevitably, the type of exchange that the signed agreements are meant to assist or improve seems to follow a dual path: advanced economies export technical knowledge and conceptual decisions to developing (or lower-wage) ones. These, in turn, export data processing and document production activities to higher-wage countries. Such flow results in a marked geographic subdivision between conceptual work and production tasks: outsourcing firms from higher-wage areas tend to use remote offices as drafting bureaus while retaining most of the professional component at home.
In 1980, Folker Fröbel and others had articulated these traits in manufacturing, implicitly tying them to advanced economies’ structural advantages in generating and sustaining knowledge: this is why some regions of the world concentrate on low-paid, routine operations while others specialize in the high-value added part of the production process.7 In 1991, Robert Reich, then Harvard academic and future secretary of labor under the first Clinton administration, qualified this high and low value-adding distinction in the service sector by dividing mobile workers into ‘routine producers’ and ‘symbolic analysts.’ Routine producers are those who process data by following instructions. They perform repetitive tasks and respond to explicit procedures, no matter how articulate these are. Symbolic analysts, by contrast, intervene on reality by reducing it to abstract images, manipulating these images, communicating them to other specialists, and coordinating their work. They are involved with independent problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic-brokering activities, and they make decisions based on critical judgment sharpened by experience.8 When applied to architectural practice, symbolic analysis suggests an obvious affinity with design, while routine production connotes documentation tasks.9 If one accepts this association, offshore collaborations represent the geographic separation of symbolic analysis and routine production activities.
The division of international labor along such lines has been accepted—and in some cases actively supported—by local policy-makers and international agencies, including the World Bank. As the leanest and therefore ostensibly most viable form of geographic collaboration, distant data processing (traded through electronic links) is seen as an effective short-term strategy to promote, albeit in a limited way, the transfer of wealth and resources between developed and developing regions. Body-shopping and competitive wage advantages have been widely used in sectors such as IT to generate revenues and promote the inflow of foreign investment. Ireland, Korea, India, and Mexico, for example, resorted to the lending of data-entry workforce to other economies as a strategy to step a foot into the proverbial industrial door and work up the ‘labor/service/product’ ladder.10
A similar idea seems to prevail in professional services: drafting collaborations can contribute to the building of technical capacity in professionally developing economies (subject to strong urbanization trends and training pressures) through a market- induced trickle-down effect. Competitive wages attract work, work produces exposure to techniques, and exposure generates reusable training. The European Community, for example, funded CARIBCAD, a project that promoted drafting education in low-wage areas in Central America by setting the context for CAD production-intensive projects to be electronically dispatched to, documented in, and retrieved from the region.11
Undisputable good intentions and results notwithstanding, the actual composition of the offshore services market should be cause for pause and reflection. While technology transfer benefits may occur, and have indeed occurred under specific circumstances, the economics of the arrangement may be pulling the boat in a different direction.
At least in Australasia, we can distinguish five different ways of organizing and managing the remote supply of design routines: (1) through exclusive collaborations between vertically integrated units that belong in the same multinational organization; (2) through marketplace recruitment of remote, free-lancing professional subcontractors without any programmatic connection to the premises of their physical operation; (3) through project-based collaborations with an offshore executive architect that has a detailing subsidiary (possibly in an even lower-wage locale); (4) through international students who act as middle-persons for drafting shops located back home; and, finally (5) through IT companies specialized in the means rather than the ends of the work—generally image processing—and whose entry in the market reflects a horizontal expansion of the vocational and clerical skills available within the workforce they employ.
The passage from first to fifth category signals a change in the nature and scope of the collaboration, as well as in the cultural and economic agreements that underpin it: a social division of responsibilities progressively gives way to a detail division of production, where drawings are turned into (and turned out as) goods. Salaries and hourly rates tend to be replaced by drawing-size piecework prices and turnover time rates, while workforce training needs and profiles shift from spatial and technical understanding to workstation dexterity.
Paradoxically, it is their very detachment from architecture as a (long and cumbersome) process that makes commercial drafting and image processing enterprises theoretically more sustainable if not profitable in the short term: low entry barriers, quicker turnover, and larger horizontal economies of scale, stronger externalities in the use of workforce or equipment, shorter employment training and replacement paths give these enterprises an edge in a volatile market characterized by simple production challenges and driven by cost-cutting objectives. This does not make them necessarily successful. In fact, stories of malpractice, unprofessional behavior, and abused trust color the experience of many firms that have chosen to collaborate on such terms. Yet, it is easier to set up a drafting shop that may not last the light of the day than maintain a structure of true professional collaboration and exchange.
So, while low-wage regions’ concentration on generic routine work (such as data conversion, low-level drafting, and 3D simulation) may facilitate outsourcing from high-wage areas and spur international demand for these services, it may also end up rewarding economic subjects from encroaching sectors that have little to do with architecture or building (such as graphics, software, and drafting contractors involved in industrial manufacturing, advertising, and film and television), in turn limiting the scope, complexity, and (ultimately) transfer feasibility and relevance of the work obtained. If this were the case, global trade would be unlikely to promote, directly or indirectly—and contrary to much rhetoric—any qualitative development of building design workforce internationally.
Which is why the invisible hand of the market should not be left entirely on its own. The profession is fully entitled to pursue paths easing economic sustenance under conditions of increased competition and diminishing returns. But the opportunity for a fruitful exchange should not be lost in the process. If capacity building is indeed an objective in the world trading of architectural services, then symbolic analysis and drafting routines cannot be separated. ‘Critical Internationalism’ requires at least three things: (1) planning at an architects’ institutional level; (2) serious attempts at establishing proper environmental (rather than just official qualification) equivalence between professional counterparts from distant locales; and (3) willingness to define the appropriate content of these collaborations—not just in order to reduce risk or transaction costs, but rather to plant seeds which can and should be allowed to grow. The risk, otherwise, is that ‘foreign’ will apply not only to the geographic boundaries of the contract but also to the work shipped back and forth across the world.
- Tombesi P, Dave B, Scriver P, “Routine Production or Symbolic Analysis? India and the Globalization of Architectural Services,“ The Journal of Architecture, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
- APESMA, Architects Remuneration Survey Report 1998–99 (Melbourne: Association of Professional Engineers Scientists and Managers Australia, Architects Branch, 1998).
- American Institute of Architects, Compensation at U.S. Architecture Firms (Washington: AIA Press, 1999).
- F. Housley Carr and W. Krizan, “Offshore Design Soaring?“ Engineering News Record (January 21, 1988), pp. 20-22; R. Korman, “Shifting Jobs Where Pay Is Low,“ Engineering News Record (December 18, 1995), p. 15.
- K. Baker, “Architects and the ‘New Economy,’“ AIArchitect ( September 1999).
- World Trade Organization. Architectural and Engineering Services: Background Note by the Secretariat (Geneva: WTO, 1998); Government of Canada, Canadian Architectural Services: A Consultation Paper in preparation for the World Trade Organization General Agreement on Trade in Services (2001); WTO Services Database, Opening World Markets for Services (2002).
- F. Frobel, J. Heinrichs, and O. Kreye, The New International Division of Labour, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The book describes the relocation of manufacturing operations to Third World countries, which gathered momentum in the 1970s and was facilitated by new technologies and better transport. According to its authors, multinationals used the shift to respond to intensified competition in world markets, reduced rates of economic growth, and lower profitability. Relocation, however, only affected basic manufacturing processes involving low level of skill.
- R.B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
- The simplification must of course be taken with a grain of salt. There can be no clear-cut distinction between design and design documentation tasks. Yet, it is still possible to separate architectural workers into those who prevalently make decisions and those who prevalently document them. For an expanded discussion, see P. Tombesi, “The Carriage in the Needle: Building Design and Flexible Specialization Systems,“ Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 52, no. 3 (1999), pp. 134-142. Hillier and Hanson make a similar distinction between what they call ‘professional’ versus ‘procedural’ knowledge in bureaucratic organizations, but with a view to the programmatic organization of architectural space rather than the structure of architectural work that we discuss here. See B. Hillier and J. Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
- R. Heeks and B. Nicholson, “Software Export Success Factors and Strategies in Developing and Transitional Economies,“ Development Informatics Working Paper Series (Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management, 2002). See also S. O’Riain, “The Flexible Developmental State: Globalization, Information Technology and the Celtic Tiger,“ paper presented at the “Global Network, Information and Regional Development: the Informational Region as Development Strategy“ Conference (Santa Cruz: University of California, 1999).
- CaribCAD, Cooperative Approach to the Realization of Internet Based CAD (CaribCAD: The Netherlands, 2000). See also G. Augenbroe and S. Lockley, “CaribCAD: a technology to outsource CAD production work,” in R. Amor, editor, ECPPM 1998 Proceeding: Product and Process Modelling in the Building Industry (Watford: Building Research Establishment, 1998), pp. 29-36. G. Augenbroe and S. Lockley, “Workflow Managed Remote Design Collaboration,“ INCITE 2000: Implementing IT to Obtain a Competitive Advantage in the 21st Century (Hong Kong).
Author Paolo Tombesi holds a PhD in Architecture from UCLA and teaches architectural design and practice and political economy of design at the University of Melbourne. He was the Los Angeles correspondent for Casabella between 1990 and 1996. He is widely published internationally and is doing funded research on the changing geography of design labor in Australasia.
Photo illustrations by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2003, in arcCA 03.2, “Global Practice.”
