Architects Becoming a Rare Breed in Their Own Field

Has anyone seen an architect lately? At least one who wants a job in architecture?

The ranks of architects practicing in the profession are getting thin, according to design firm officials.

“Recruiting by other industries has made it almost impossible to find any good people in the field,” said Michael Bobrow, principal designer of Bobrow Thomas Architects, based in Westwood.

“There is a dearth of architects, which is being felt keenly by both small and large firms,” said Nick Seierup, design director of the Santa Monica office of Perkins & Will.

If designers are disappearing from the architectural labor pool, it is no mystery where they have gone. The “dot-coms” and entertainment companies have snatched up many new architects, at least in greater Los Angeles.

Architectural training provides several skills sought by Internet-related and film production companies. Three-dimensional design and computer graphics, for instance, can easily be adapted to such tasks as Web design and 3-D computer animation. As a result, newly minted architects are finding themselves vigorously recruited, almost straight out of school.

“Graduates are being run after with two, three, four job offers,” Bobrow said.

Taking the trend one step further was Richard Lin, a graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture who now heads his own computer animation and video company, ESP, in Culver City.

Design school “prepared me to be a critical thinker,” Lin said. “I learned to design not just for the sake of design, but to communicate an idea.”

Lin, who is 29, labored for several years in a succession of firms, doing mostly computer-related design tasks. At his most recent job, he became frustrated with how he was spending his time. “I was hired to run a computer graphics department, but found myself setting up the computer network and the Web site” and doing other non-design-related tasks.

The intense work ethic of design school makes architecture graduates a good match for demanding Internet and entertainment jobs.

“We have to work so hard to survive in architecture school that working 20 hours [a day] in an Internet company isn’t that bad,” Lin said.

Lin quit four years ago and began working full time at ESP, which he founded while still in college. “I would work until 8 or 9 o’clock at my job, then go home and work until 4 o’clock in the morning at my own company,” he said.

In addition to the shortage of recent graduates like Lin, firms are also having a hard time finding architects with 10 or 20 years’ experience to serve as middle managers.

What is missing is “the person who is around 45, who can be taking on responsibility in the office as an upper-middle-level person, like a project manager or a project architect,” said Thom Mayne, principal of Morphosis Architects in Santa Monica.

“The profession is in a crisis because we can’t find enough experienced people for the amount of work that is being generated,” said Andrew Cohen, managing principal at the Santa Monica office of Gensler, an international architectural firm based in San Francisco.

In the case of the missing experienced architects, history is more often the culprit than the Internet, according to Seierup, who is also president-elect of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Many people who graduated in the 1980s left the profession in the early ‘90s, because new construction was almost at a standstill.

“A lot of people migrated sideways into peripheral professions, like property management, construction management and contracting,” Seierup said.

The sudden scarcity of architects is a jarring change for design firms, which have been accustomed to picking new hires from a large labor pool of unemployed or under-employed architects. Prior to the current construction boom, architecture jobs were often hard to get.

In the past, many architects believed themselves lucky to find work. They often were expected to pay dues by working long hours at low-level tasks, such as drafting or building models, on short deadlines. The expectation in the profession was that junior architects slowly would work their way up the pecking order and eventually take leadership roles on the upper-middle-management level, such as serving as project architects or project managers.

Now architectural firms are finding themselves in competition with firms in industries that are willing to pay more--sometimes twice as much--for young designers and graphic artists.

The higher salaries are raising expectations on the part of new graduates about their earning power and the opportunity for rapid promotion. The starting salary for newly graduated architects is about $28,000 to $35,000 annually, whereas entertainment or Internet firms may pay up to $70,000 for people at the same skill level.

The scarcity of architects has driven up salaries in the field. The Jerde Partnership, for example, has raised salaries 10% to 15% in the last five years, according to President Eddie Wang.

Gensler has taken the rare step of actively recruiting architectural graduates with brochures and design school visits. That sort of marketing is common in business schools but rare in the design profession. The firm also pays existing employees $500 for successfully recruiting a new hire.

Yet few architectural firms are able to compete with entertainment and technology companies in salary, Seierup said. “Firms are being squeezed to lure the best talent,” he said. “We are being forced to offer more pay and more benefits, but we don’t have the profit margins to support those things,” he said.

If architectural firms cannot always compete in salary, sometimes they can compete with prestige. Jerde’s Wang, for example, said his firm is able to attract new hires because Venice-based Jerde is one of the nation’s best-known shopping-center architects.

The opportunity to work with a “name” architect sometimes is incentive enough to supply a firm with fresh design talent. Morphosis, a high-profile design firm, gets “fairly long lists” of job seekers, Mayne said.

“This office is somewhere [young architects] can pursue their interests in design and move forward on their learning curve,” Mayne said. “They are not coming here for the health insurance or the retirement benefits.”