I’ve been writing a piece on architecture as a profession, but all I keep coming across articles about how discriminatory the profession is if you’re not white middle class and male-which scares me because I’m a female minority and hoping to study architecture next year. Just wondering if anyone had some good links proving I’m not totally doomed?
I’m a white male, and I have no experience with architecture.
However, I once dated a woman who was a successful nurse practitioner, but had once aspired to become an architect. She ended up changing majors after a professor told her that it was hard to make it as an architect if you didn’t have financial resources to rely on between jobs and until you’re established (her family was lower middle class economically). She was my age, so the professor would have been claiming this around 1980.
Assuming this to (still) be true, gender and race would seem to be less important than finances.
I’ve also read that architecture as a career in the U.S. has been heavily impacted by foreign outsourcing.
There is a list of architects on Wikipedia, and indeed, there are few women:
Is your work about house architecture specifically or architecture in general? When it comes to structural planning and city architecture, my experience is that there are a few women in the field, but it is still very male dominated.
Study whatever you like, but don’t quit your day job. There are just not that many openings for architects.
Just a data point. We are bidding out a medium sized construction project (about $15m) and our procurement officer made us insert a woman & minority preference in the scoring criteria. All three architect-led bids claim that they are owned by women. None of the architects we have met are women.
This is the first time I’ve been involved with a public sector project. Certainly in my ten years of dealing with contractors in the private sector, female architects are rarer than hen’s teeth, more so in client facing roles. There is a fair representation of Arab, Iranian, Turkish and Armenian men in the profession. Not sure if they count as “white”.
Strangely enough, when I ws taking a course at a school of architecture (Virginia Tech) 25 years ago, there were many Asians and women in the student body and faculty. Far more than I have observed in the profession. Maybe all the women drop out of the profession. Maybe they work more in government or corporate staff jobs, rather than in architecture firms.
Not the link that the OP is after, but the architect who designed my office is a black woman.
I’ve worked with perhaps fifty to a hundred architects. I don’t remember any of them being women.
There WERE young women working their way up to it in the drafting and detailing departments, though. The times are changing.
Here in China at least there are many Asian architects 
And I know lots of architects so it’s still a big field here. That said, I’ve never met someone that said they were a drafter (or whatever the less well-known jobs around architect are called), so some of those people might be bigging up their role a smidge.
I dated an architecture (or architorture as they called it) major when I was in college. She had several female friends in the group. But most of them did not go on to be architects. Many of them got their degree and did something else. Even the girl I dated did interior design rather than architecture.
Don’t know why, specifically, but I do know that while she has her own design firm, she also worked as an office assistant to make ends meet because the design work wasn’t steady enough.
Maybe guys like building houses and girls like decorating houses…?
Yeah… I have several friends (8) who are architects, at least by training, and all have practiced at some point.
Interestingly enough, they’ve all been laid off more than most IT people I know, myself included. They seem to be really vulnerable to the economic boom/bust cycles, in that since they design buildings primarily, their work is very project-based, and when things are good, buildings get built, and when things aren’t so good, nobody starts new buildings.
Most of them have tried to transition into less volatile areas- a few do more interior-oriented architecture that allows them to work on things like renovations and improvements when things are down economically, and 3 have got out of architecture and construction entirely. I can only think of 2-3 of my architect friends who are still doing classic architect stuff.
Diversity wise, 2 are women, one’s a Mexican-American man, and another is a white Brazilian guy. The other 4 are as white male as you can get.
I know several female architects, but then again, my wife is one, so that certainly skews things. It’s very much an old boy’s club however, from what she talks about at work.
This will probably get a better response in the IMHO forum. It is not really a debate.
Sharonda, depending on what kind of minority you are, just about every technical field is going to feel exclusionary and “old boys networkish” to a certain extent. This doesn’t mean you’re doomed. It means you’ve got to hustle harder than your peers. And architects already have to hustle as it is.
And it will also mean that you’ve got to leverage your support network harder than your friends will. Like, let’s say your friend is majoring in electrical engineering. She is presented a choice between taking an unpaid internship for the summer or high-paying seasonal sales job. You, the architect major, are presented with the same two choices (except your internship would be with an architect firm). Your friend can take a break from being an engineer. But you can’t. To compete against other architects, you’re going to need to tap into certain assets–like rent-free parental basement dwellings–because this is what they will be doing. Your family needs to know that when the summer comes, your priority will be internships, not jobs behind cash registers. If your family isn’t supportive of this, you will have a hard time after graduation.
A lot of your struggles with be psychological. Constant self-doubt and “imposter syndrome”. The loneliness and alienation of being the “only one”. Surrounding yourself with positive, supportive people will be crucial. Early on, I’d try to find a professor who will mentor you–someone who will give you honest, constructive feedback but also help build you up. They don’t have to be anything like you to be a good mentor. Behind every successful person is another successful person who was more than happy to write a glowing letter of recommendation.
Good luck!
yellowjacketcoder, you’ve reminded me of another Technism–architorture. I would walk past the architecture building late at night and see those sad students pulling all-nighters. You could see them sitting at their little cubicles through the buildings’ big-ass windows. It was almost like the school wanted everyone to gawk at those kids so we’d feel better about ourselves. But really, what we’d see was our own pain. Our own misery.
Those weren’t windows. They were mirrors.
No kidding. And it was right next to Van Leer, where you could see the poor EEs in their lounge all night too.
Although, I went to visit my girlfriend at 2AM once (hey, I was a CS major, we always worked at night) and noticed that the people there in the wee hours were spending about 55 minutes chatting to every 5 minutes getting something done. She complained constantly about the guy she only saw in lab for a couple of hours always getting 'A’s when he put in a tenth as many hours as she did. She didn’t appreciate it when I pointed out that he probably did as much actual work as she did and just didn’t stick around to chat.
At least the room was brightly lit. All the CS labs were always lit like dungeons.
You guys were making me think you were talking about Carnegie Mellon, what with the architorture, the EEs, and the CS majors staying up all night.
I guess one tech school is like another, eh?
Howard Dork laughed.
What would IM Pei think?
Things are changing. When I went to undergrad on the early 90’s, there were four women in architecture, myself included. When I returned for grad school, I’d say a little over half were women.
A few things to ponder, randomly:
- You’ll have at least 6-7 years of schooling, as a graduate degree is mandatory.
- You’ll have at least 3 years of internship. The AREs seem to change more and more often. I’m not quite sure what it is currently.
- The pay isn’t the best. Unless you work for a large corporate office, benefits are slim.
- You’ll be putting in regular overtime, without pay. We tend to work on salary.
- Most people going into architecture really have no idea what it’s about. Most seem to think its about residential. Get it out of your head. There’s not much work in residential. The few times I have worked residential it was terrible because of the clients. There is a tremendous amount of hand holding. The budgets are easily blown.
- I’ve only worked at one firm that had college interns for a summer. Smaller firms can’t afford this in that it takes a lot of training for the amount of work/time. Everyone I knew went to school in the summer to finish sooner. At one point, you’ll want to take the Rome trip.
- In undergrad, we were there 24/7. It was awful but at the same time it was a great to be with your friends. When I was back for grad school, that wasn’t true at all. Studios were ghost towns. The kids all worked at home alone (a terrible idea).
- The layoffs. I’ve been through two serious downturns. The second one, a lot of my friends left the business entirely. The more stable jobs were in Interior Design. Ask yourself what your plan b is for your career.
- I have never worked for an architecture firm that hired drafters. I have never heard of “drafting departments” nor of an architecture firm hiring a non-architecture degreed person outside of admin. This is because jobs are typically 15-20% design and the rest is drafting and paperwork. We all are drafting, so no need to hire someone not in the field. If the job is commercial (such as a franchise) the percentage of design goes way down.
- In school, your crits will be very hard. You’ll have a thick skin in no time!
- Where do you plan on working? Some states add so much more work (looking at you, California!) A lot of people are not fond of Texas, but here in DFw, its booming. We have so many jobs piling up! Anyone looking for a job?
In the end, don’t worry about it being a “white man thing”. That’s the least of your problems. Ask yourself if this job is a passion for you. Your passion is what will push you through the hard times.
Best of luck!