Topics: Art in Crisis, Editor's Picks, Design, Life News
An unfinished residential building (left) is seen on a mountain in Estepona, near Malaga, southern Spain, Jan. 31, 2012. (Credit: Jon Nazca / Reuters)When the Great Recession dawned, architecture was the glamour profession of the creative class. Extravagant, signature buildings – Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Spain’s Basque Country, Richard Meier’s white-travertine Getty Center in Los Angeles, and multimillion-dollar concert halls in seemingly every city in the U.S. – drew not only press attention but the kind of architectural tourists who once visited Italian duomos.
Brash, individualistic “starchitects” – cerebral urbanist Rem Koolhaas, Iraq-born diva Zaha Hadid, gracious, serene Renzo Piano and others hailed in the press as visionaries – became the new rock stars. Though much of the cast was international, the image built on a long-standing heroism of the architect in the United States, dating back to the magnetic Frank Lloyd Wright and the valiant, uncompromising Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” New shelter magazines like Dwell brought sustainable and modernist design to a wider public, and websites reveled in the eye candy. Graduate programs in architecture and design swelled with applicants.
For an era supposedly defined by bourgeois bohemianism, architecture – a synthesis of aesthetics with hardheaded pragmatism — was the perfect field.
But for all its soaring lines and innovative solutions, architecture is exposed to the realities of the marketplace like few other fields: The surging sense of possibility that lasted through the ‘90s and the early 2000s flagged when the housing market crashed and turned the U.S. economy upside-down. Gehry, whose Walt Disney Concert Hall has become an iconic part of downtown Los Angeles and whose widespread fame led him to a gig designing jewelry for Tiffany, complained recently about the lack of work in the States and grumbled that he wishes he could move his staff to China, where there are more opportunities. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect (the field’s top prize) who has gone from one of the field’s rebels to one of its most successful, joked grimly about the need for a party for depressed architects.
It isn’t just the celebrity figures who are frustrated, however. A once-thriving profession, one that requires considerable education and work ethic, and which has traditionally served a wide range of functions — designing mansions for the 1 percent as well as public libraries — is in trouble.
The ups and downs became very tangible for Guy Horton, a Boston native who dropped out of an academic program studying Chinese history and literature to become an architect, entranced by both the field’s energy and seeming stability. “I thought I was being pragmatic,” he says now. “Architecture was booming, the starchitects were getting a lot of attention. I was taken by the excitement of the field,” especially the study of urbanism. “Travels in China and around Asia, and stints living over there, got me more interested in cities and how they transform.”
After graduating from the cutting-edge Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles, he was scooped up by the L.A. offices of Perkins + Will, the large Chicago-based firm with a track record for sustainable projects. In 2008, as the market was crashing, he was laid off.
He bounced checks. He strained to pay student loans. Most of his income went to cover a health plan, but he avoided doctors or dentists because of high deductibles. He was pulled over by the police for his car’s expired tags. He was demoralized and frightened for his family, which included a 1-year-old daughter. After working hard to break into what seemed to be a burgeoning profession, unemployment was like being buried alive.
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Horton wasn’t alone: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, employment at architectural firms nationwide dropped from 224,500 to 184,600 between July and November of 2009, and the numbers have kept falling. In some cases, firms went dormant while remaining open. Gensler, the nation’s biggest firm, laid off 750 of a staff of about 3,000; British Pritzker-winner Norman Foster laid off a quarter of his. Gehry – whose Brooklyn Yards project and condo/shopping hybrid in downtown Los Angeles wilted – cut Gehry Partners to ribbons, slicing more than half his staff of 250. All over the world, even in once-vigorous regions, ambitious projects stalled. That process has continued: In November, Gehry saw the projected Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum go into deep freeze.
Many architects running smaller firms were lucky enough to keep their jobs but saw their fees – linked to falling construction costs – decline. Numbers are hard to come by and the upbeat American Institute of Architects does not track unemployment, but many thousands certainly left the field altogether. Sometimes they luck out: A former architect has become one of the best-loved baristas in Los Angeles; another runs the Coolhaus ice cream truck. Others have lost their homes and their medical insurance. “It’s the new English major,” says Horton.
Those who remain in the profession find design work scarce and are teaching, lecturing, entering competitions and moving into Hollywood production design. These gigs have always been part of the field, which revels in its synthesis of theory and practice, but the balance has shifted in a way that leads to architects doing less and less architecture.
“The recession has affected everyone, for sure,” says Kevin Daly, an established Santa Monica architect whose firm, Daly Genik, employs 10 people when at full strength. “Generally there’s a lot less work than people are accustomed to having. Clients are doing feasibility studies and then keeping their options open.”
Architect Marcelo Spina is a member of the creative class who serves the creative class: His boutique firm, Patterns, aims to design art galleries and small museums, and saw some early success. But many of those projects are drying up.
These days, he can only keep himself afloat through university teaching, and it’s the same for his architect wife, Georgina Huljich. “It’s a hugely important factor for us financially,” he says. “We’re proud academics, but we don’t want to be purely academics – we don’t want to be part of the paper architecture world. My colleagues are struggling the same way. Right now what you have is full-time employment with internship wages. There is much less meat for the same amount of animals. You see a whole lot of talented people not getting jobs.”
Spina is one of the lucky ones: He has strong connections in his native Argentina, where residential and civic projects have not died off. Because of a recent history of runaway and credit busts, designers are usually paid with real money. “You know someone is going to show up with a bag of cash.”
But those stuck working in the States are in a tight spot. In January, the New York Times ran a piece called “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture.” The article charted a report by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce that showed architecture graduates, of all college majors, the most likely to be out of work. The survey reported that a whopping 13.9 percent of architecture students between 22 and 26 were unemployed. Experience helped only a little bit: Among experienced architects between 30 and 54, a full 9.2 percent remained out of work. Even humanities and arts majors – often the least career-obsessed of students – fared better.
The Times story, Horton says, angered many of the architects he knew. “People were getting defensive about it. ‘It’s not about that – it’s about the passion!’ People were irate!” He knows architects who’ve left the state, closed their firms, moved back in with their parents. “People don’t want to talk about unemployment anymore … we are supposed to be in recovery optimistic power mode.”
It’s part of a professional ethos, he says, that stresses idealism, dues paying, hierarchy, optimism and a heroic self-image while ignoring financial realities. It’s something he’s become intimately familiar with as he tries to chronicle the damage the recession has exacted on the field. “I’m trying to talk to architects about the economy,” Horton says. “Forget it! It’s hard to get real information. They’re so conscious of P.R. – they’re worried about what’s going to get tweeted.”
A lot of the profession, he says, has spent years in denial.
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Part of the problem with tracking the state of any creative class employment is that the numbers don’t tell the real story. Nor do the Horatio Alger stories that newspapers and magazines love running about the tiny minority of laid-off creatives who manage to “reinvent” themselves and turn their misfortune into an opportunity.
Not everyone is suffering. Eric Owen Moss and Barbara Bestor are very different kinds of designers, with sharply different lists of clients, but they show what is possible when talent and good fortune line up.
Moss has some major advantages over even the typical successful architect: He is the director of an architecture school, which provides him with a hefty salary. He has connections in China and has several projects cooking in a country that considers a redesign of the coastline within the art of the possible. And he has an architectural patron who has financed a daring series of design projects – asymmetric office buildings and an “art tower” in Culver City — that earned a 2011 rave in the New Yorker.
Though he calls himself “temperamentally optimistic,” Moss knows what’s happening around him. “If you look at the numbers, architecture graduates are looking for opportunities in other fields. Overall, commercial building has slowed to almost nothing.”
Bestor, whose hair is cut in a kind of ‘70s shag, has for years been the indie queen of Silverlake, the bohemian neighborhood on L.A.’s east side. Sitting in her retro-cool Airstream trailer, parked outside an open-plan plywood office that buzzes with activity, she compares herself to a culinary locavore: She’s tapped into the neighborhood – its boutique small businesses and pop-culture spirit — and is the first call for cool coffee shops (Intelligentsia), wine bars (Lou) and record label offices (Dangerbird) in Hollywood and points east. “People know me; they know what I do.”
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