COUNTER CULTURE
Design is never done. This time-honoured adage exemplifies the passion and dedication needed to bring an architecture project to life. By the same token, it is often used to justify some of the industry’s most egregious labour practices. Behind the romantic facade of studio culture, problems like unpaid overtime, chronic overwork and immense personal sacrifice have become normalized as part and parcel of the profession. For decades, these issues went largely unchecked. While architects would lament their long hours or meager salaries among colleagues, these conversations rarely — if ever — moved beyond the context of the industry. But on December 21, 2021, this dialogue, heretofore confined to studio desks and post-deadline happy hours, was decisively thrust into the public eye. Employees of SHoP Architects, the design-driven New York City studio behind the Barclays Center and the Steinway Tower (111 West 57th Street), announced their intention to unionize with support from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). Had they succeeded, they would have been the first firm to do so since the 1940s.
Within weeks, their grassroots movement was gaining traction on social media. “It was a hot-button topic. I don’t think you could go into any architecture firm without hearing someone mention it,” a Toronto-based intern architect, who wished to remain unnamed, told me. (Azure has granted anonymity to industry professionals upon request throughout this article). The SHoP organizers’ Instagram page — @architectural.workers.united (AWU), which has now amassed over 13,000 followers — has seen an unprecedented show of solidarity from their industry counterparts at home and abroad. It has since become an authority on unionization in architecture and a platform to advocate for the industry as a whole. “We were cautiously hopeful,” Andrew Daley, a former SHoP employee and associate organizer with IAMAW, told me. “What was really heartening about the response was that everyone saw this as a forum to finally talk about these things in a public way.”
The AWU wasn’t the first group to open a dialogue about architecture work culture, nor was it the first to propose unionization as a solution. The Architecture Lobby, a North American advocacy group, has been campaigning for better working conditions since 2013. The Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW), a U.K.-based
