Depressing

I heard from a colleague at work recently that Architects have the highest unemployment rate of any profession......We're Number 1!!!

I can't say that I'm suprised based on observation and, unfortunately, my own experience.  I spent a little over a year between  architecture jobs.  In the interim, I was a stay-at-home Dad, a Community College Instructor, a U.S. Census Enumerator, a Sonoma State Extended Education Green Building Certificate recipient, a California Architect's Board Supplemental Exam candidate, and all-around busy-body.

Then today, I read an article in Salon about the state of the architecture profession.  Let's just say...not good.  Perhaps the most depressing exerpt:

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.

Now I've got nothing against barista's, but I'm pretty sure anybody who went to the effort to go to architecture school and get their architecture license, did not envision a career fixing drinks for people, or scooping ice cream.  And they certainly wouldn't have considered themselves to have lucked out.

Another disturbing exerpt is a quote from Barbara Bestor:

The current uncertainty makes the old model – poverty in youth, payday sometime in middle age – harder to count on. She fears that after being a profession, architecture will return to the patronage system, in a day of dwindling patrons. Or a system where “only rich kids can do quirky stuff and everyone else has to work for corporate firms.”

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with corporate firms.  There is room in the marketplace for all kinds of firms doing all kinds of work.  However, it is certainly scary to think of the profession going the way of large international corporate monoplies with only a few small boutique design firms slogging along and trying to stay afloat.  We would be losing out on all the "middle class" firms that provide real, local, custom, innovative design services to communities around the world.