Retention of staff is a significant factor in an architecture firm’s ability to stay in business, yet the profession has long been known for fostering dysfunctional workplaces. Architecture school all-nighters, which for the student may wear a cloak of romance, lead to a practice model that undervalues people’s time. Long a white male enclave, the profession has been slow to admit women and minorities and even slower to advance them to positions of leadership. The past decade has seen the advent of several initiatives aimed at addressing these deficits. Among them are The Architecture Lobby, Just Design.US, and Equity by Design.
[Cover image: from Life of an Architect – Infographic by Ming Thompson, Atelier ChoThompson, for Equity by Design]
The Architecture Lobby, Inc. advocates for “the value of architecture in the general public and for architectural work within the discipline,” believing that, “As long as architecture tolerates abusive practices in the office and the construction site, it cannot insist on its role in and for the public good.” Writings by representatives of The Architecture Lobby include:
Peggy Deamer, “Contracts of Relation,” a historical and theoretical assessment of standard AIA contracts and the more recent development of IPD contracts, initiated by AIA California. “Contracts of Relation” appears in e-flux Architecture, an online platform for collaborative publishing projects. It is a component of Architecture and Representation, produced in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut and The Berlage.
Peggy Deamer, Quilian Riano, and Manuel Shvartzberg on behalf of The Architecture Lobby, “Identifying the Designer as Worker,” MAS Context, Fall 2015. MAS Context is the quarterly journal of MAS Studio, a Chicago-based collaborative architecture and urban design firm directed by Iker Gil.
The Architecture Lobby (Peggy Deamer, Keefer Dunn, and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió), “A Response to AIA Values,” in The Avery Review, an open access journal produced by the Office of Publications at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
. . . and Archinect hosts the podcast “Transparent Value: A Conversation with Architecture Lobby’s Peggy Deamer and Shota Vashakmadze.”
Early this year, The Architecture Lobby introduced Just Design.US, an initiative “to recognize fair labor practices in architecture [through a] nomination process seek[ing] to profile exemplary firms through an employee questionnaire and employer interviews. This initiative is described by Katie Okamoto in “The Architecture Lobby Launches Case Studies of Fair Labor Firms,” Metropolis, 14 January 2019.
Equity by Design [EQxD] emerged from a 2011 event, conceived and produced by the AIA San Francisco Communications Committee, which spotlighted a disturbing statistic: while roughly 50% of architecture school graduates are women, the number of women who are AIA members, licensed architects and senior leadership varies between 15% to 18% of the total. In October 2012, The Missing 32% Symposium initiated what has become a series of annual conferences addressing equitable practice in the profession. In 2015, The Missing 32% Project was renamed Equity by Design to better reflect this mission.
Beginning in 2014, Equity by Design has conducted biennial surveys of equity in architecture and talent retention. The third of these, the 2018 Equity in Architecture Survey, “was designed in partnership with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and over 50 volunteers from around the country with the goal of generating a comprehensive national data set detailing current positions and career experiences of architecture school graduates. With the assistance of architecture’s national collateral organizations, AIA components, firms, and academic institutions, survey invitations were sent out to a broad cross-section of the profession. The resulting data set—the largest ever collected on equity within the profession—documents the experiences of 14,360 individuals representing all 50 states and nations on six continents.”
