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0 - PRE-OBJECT ⓘ
This precedes the creation of the object. The data points sit individually, vested with mass by using time to show a sustained nature to what they assess, with a multiplicity of sources grounding that assessment.
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1 - DATA OBJECT ⓘ
The object amalgamates these data points. The combined weight creates a totalising mass. In inert form, it is a body of knowledge. In action, it is catalytic, the simplicity of the synthesised object capable of triggering (more) substantive change.
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2 - DATA OBJECT → ARCHITECTURE OBJECT ⓘ
Contained to the data object, time is a bulking agent, adding weight to the argument of change. When compared to other objects, however, this element gives the data object a form specific to it. It suggests the existence of another, shaping object. The data object, in its resting form, is a witness to this object. In its active form serves to audit it.
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3 - ARCHITECTURE OBJECT
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UK Revenue
Staffing
Profits
Architect Pay
Percentiles
Productivity and Pay
Productivity
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UK
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age
experience
Academia Revenue
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REVENUE
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1996
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Median pay progression for different age groups
Mapping Median Career (Example)
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Detail
In simple terms, a measure of the total amount of money brought in by architecture firms in the UK over the past 30 years. M&N and RIBA are sources specifically dedicated to the architecture sector. M&N defines practices as those ‘headed by at least one ARB registered architect’, while RIBA looks at ‘chartered practices’.
Though GVA is a slightly different measure, measuring the direct economic contribution of the sector, it has value as even though it uses an entirely different set of source data to make this calculation, it shows a similar trend to the two above sources,
Detail
How one measures the number of ‘people working in architecture’ is in reality very variable and different metrics may have different uses. Are you measuring the number of people in architecture practices irrespective of whether they have an architectural role (i.e. ‘support’ staff), are you measuring solely the number of ‘architectural’ staff (i.e. including architectural assistants) or are you measuring ‘architects’ (registered). There is also variability in what is defined as a ‘practice’; is it chartered or not, while other methods simply look for those defined as ‘architects’ irrespective of whether within an architectural practice or not or simply look at the number of architect registrations.
There are nonetheless general trends to be identified, where by all measures, compared to 2008, this ‘number of people working in architecture’ is either the same, or greater. By itself, this conclusion is not necessarily instructive if the sector can sustain this growth healthily. It is when these figures are tested alongside revenue or pay that they can be questionable.
Detail
Total profits as 1/3 of the 2008 figure. It should be noted with this figure that depending on the practice, directors pay/compensation may or may not be included in this figure hence a change in the structure of practices over time could create some distortions. With that said, the decline in profitability shows correlation to the increase in costs within practice where costs are higher than 2008 while profits are lower.
Detail
Pay is indexed from different start dates. The general downwards trend from the late 2000s observed throughout the data is reflected. The limitations of indexing, however, are shown, where by offering multiple dates from which to index, the choice of year may allow to draw different conclusions.
Detail
Another, potentially more interesting way of understanding pay/pay decline is in using earning percentiles. This is a method, for example, used by public sector pay review bodies. It situates architect pay in relation to the wider UK workforce by using data on earnings for percentiles from 1 to 100 in the UK (this is available every 5 or 10 percentile point between 1 and 90 and for every percentile point from 90 to 99 (20 points available in total). An interpolated curve is then drawn for each year, between each point, with the architect’s pay situated on it.
As a means of comparing UK architect to the rest of the UK workforce this is not affected by the year used as a reference point. It is interesting because if one is to compare, for example, the decline in pay for doctors since 2008, as a percentage, this is greater than the architect’s, but because in those highest percentiles the gap between each percentile point is so great, this decline in absolute pay is barely noticeable, whereas a slightly smaller decline for architect is more noticeable by virtue of the smaller gap in between percentiles lower down.
As a way forward, it shows an architect losing a previously dominant position extra-architecturally and opens onto questions as to whether of how this loss of power is perceived, how this effects the self-perception of architect, does this shift to within.
What is productivity?
Productivity – how much money each architect is bringing in/ how much value each architect is creating - should be one of the most important metrics in seeking to understand evolutions in pay within architecture. There are different ways of calculating it and it can be done from the scale of the individual project to the sector as a whole, but the broad principle is to take the amount of money coming in (in this case fees) and dividing by the amount of people or the number of hours worked to get that money in. For example, if 5 architects as working full-time on a project for 1 year for a fee of 300k, then each architect is producing 60k each year. A ’true’ productivity calculation will remove non-staff costs to revenue, which is the first graph shown. The others do not do this.
The gap between productivity and pay is, arguably, Marx’s surplus value and in architecture is particularly interesting. Within the broader economy (in the UK and other developed economies), one of the broad trends of the past forty years, has been a decoupling of productivity growth from wage growth; the increased value of the stuff produced by workers is not being reflected in their wages. (In the UK, for example, from 1981 and 2019 productivity rose by 87 per cent while median employee wages only rose by 62 per cent: a 25-percentage point “overall decoupling” between productivity growth and median wage growth.)
Why this is interesting within architecture is that this trend appears to have been reversed, where, in spite of wages being their lowest ever, as revenues have fallen by as much or an even greater amount, without an inversely proportional decrease in the number of architects/architectural staff to compensate for this, architects (employee or employer) have never taken home so much of what they produce. This is something reflected in the rise in revenue dedicated to salaries (~1/3 a few decades ago to more than ½ today).
Note
It should be noted that productivity would usually be deflated (adjusted for inflation) using a chain volume method however because CVM is not available for the M&N productivity calculation, to allow for comparison, a CPI deflator has been used throughout.
What is productivity?
Productivity – how much money each architect is bringing in/ how much value each architect is creating - should be one of the most important metrics in seeking to understand evolutions in pay within architecture. There are different ways of calculating it and it can be done from the scale of the individual project to the sector as a whole, but the broad principle is to take the amount of money coming in (in this case fees) and dividing by the amount of people or the number of hours worked to get that money in. For example, if 5 architects as working full-time on a project for 1 year for a fee of 300k, then each architect is producing 60k each year. A ’true’ productivity calculation will remove non-staff costs to revenue, which is the first graph shown. The others do not do this.
The gap between productivity and pay is, arguably, Marx’s surplus value and in architecture is particularly interesting. Within the broader economy (in the UK and other developed economies), one of the broad trends of the past forty years, has been a decoupling of productivity growth from wage growth; the increased value of the stuff produced by workers is not being reflected in their wages. (In the UK, for example, from 1981 and 2019 productivity rose by 87 per cent while median employee wages only rose by 62 per cent: a 25-percentage point “overall decoupling” between productivity growth and median wage growth.)
Why this is interesting within architecture is that this trend appears to have been reversed, where, in spite of wages being their lowest ever, as revenues have fallen by as much or an even greater amount, without an inversely proportional decrease in the number of architects/architectural staff to compensate for this, architects (employee or employer) have never taken home so much of what they produce. This is something reflected in the rise in revenue dedicated to salaries (~1/3 a few decades ago to more than ½ today).
Note
It should be noted that productivity would usually be deflated (adjusted for inflation) using a chain volume method however because CVM is not available for the M&N productivity calculation, to allow for comparison, a CPI deflator has been used throughout.
Location
Either pay in the UK as a whole or in London (where the majority (and this number continues to increase) of architectural revenue is produced). Though the AJ figures are for the UK as a whole, nearly all practices surveyed are London based so their figure, were it London-specific would likely be similar.
Position
M&N are splitting data according to the architect’s type of practice and, though not a perfect analogy, the ‘salaried architect’, ‘principal in partnership’, and ‘sole practitioners’ can be roughly thought of as ‘employee’, ‘employer’, ‘self-employed’. This is a preferred way of measuring earnings because a split by job title does not account for the number of people in each of those position; if salaries are increasing in a certain position but less people are reaching that position then that increase is less important. See ‘pay by age’, ‘pay by experience’, and ‘career pay growth’.
AJ data is also shown for its longevity. RIBA data is not shown for a couple reasons (1) it is more widely available, (2) it does not go very far back, and our interest remains in looking at long term trends, and (3) they are not consistent in the positions analysed making a time-based analysis difficult.
Hypothetical
If pay had seen the same increases/decreases since 2008 as the average UK worker, then this is where it’d be today.
Location
Either pay in the UK as a whole or in London (where the majority (and this number continues to increase) of architectural revenue is produced). Though the AJ figures are for the UK as a whole, nearly all practices surveyed are London based so their figure, were it London-specific would likely be similar.
Position
M&N are splitting data according to the architect’s type of practice and, though not a perfect analogy, the ‘salaried architect’, ‘principal in partnership’, and ‘sole practitioners’ can be roughly thought of as ‘employee’, ‘employer’, ‘self-employed’. This is a preferred way of measuring earnings because a split by job title does not account for the number of people in each of those position; if salaries are increasing in a certain position but less people are reaching that position then that increase is less important. See ‘pay by age’, ‘pay by experience’, and ‘career pay growth’.
AJ data is also shown for its longevity. RIBA data is not shown for a couple reasons (1) it is more widely available, (2) it does not go very far back, and our interest remains in looking at long term trends, and (3) they are not consistent in the positions analysed making a time-based analysis difficult.
Hypothetical
If pay had seen the same increases/decreases since 2008 as the average UK worker, then this is where it’d be today.
Location
Either pay in the UK as a whole or in London (where the majority (and this number continues to increase) of architectural revenue is produced). Though the AJ figures are for the UK as a whole, nearly all practices surveyed are London based so their figure, were it London-specific would likely be similar.
Position
M&N are splitting data according to the architect’s type of practice and, though not a perfect analogy, the ‘salaried architect’, ‘principal in partnership’, and ‘sole practitioners’ can be roughly thought of as ‘employee’, ‘employer’, ‘self-employed’. This is a preferred way of measuring earnings because a split by job title does not account for the number of people in each of those position; if salaries are increasing in a certain position but less people are reaching that position then that increase is less important. See ‘pay by age’, ‘pay by experience’, and ‘career pay growth’.
AJ data is also shown for its longevity. RIBA data is not shown for a couple reasons (1) it is more widely available, (2) it does not go very far back, and our interest remains in looking at long term trends, and (3) they are not consistent in the positions analysed making a time-based analysis difficult.
Hypothetical
If pay had seen the same increases/decreases since 2008 as the average UK worker, then this is where it’d be today.
Detail
Some of the downsides of looking at pay according to positions are addressed in these three elements.
Pay by age looks at pay for different age groups since the early 90s. The blue shadow hugging the line is proportional to the percentage of architects that fall within that group, showing, for example, the rapid increase in young architects (under-30, 30-34 in particular). From the 2000s to 2018 under 30s consistently represent 5%-6% of the workforce and 30–34-year-old architects around 15%-16%. In 2022 these numbers were 9% and 23% respectively, roughly 50% increases, and not necessarily surprising given the increase in students on architecture courses.
This is important because it makes employers particularly reliant on lower paid workers which in turn raises questions as to the ability of practices to offer those architects pay progression later on, because to offer wage increases to those early career architects of the sort seen in the past comes at a significantly higher cost given their much greater number, and, this at a time where in spite of a turn to these lower cost workers practices are still dedicating increasing amounts of revenue to salaries.
Career Pay Growth
Career pay growth maps median pay progression for past generations of architects. For example, if looking at an architect born in the late 70s and entering into practice in the early 2000s, then we use data from 2003 for pay under 30, 2008 for pay between 30 and 34, 2013 for pay between 35 and 39, and so on… This has a use as a benchmark to compare to pay growth today. It is also interesting in seeing how career pay progression since 2008 has essentially stalled; the median architect’s pay is the same today as in 2008; promotions/pay rises having essentially having only been sufficient to make up for the decline in median pay.
Detail
Some of the downsides of looking at pay according to positions are addressed in these three elements.
Pay by age looks at pay for different age groups since the early 90s. The blue shadow hugging the line is proportional to the percentage of architects that fall within that group, showing, for example, the rapid increase in young architects (under-30, 30-34 in particular). From the 2000s to 2018 under 30s consistently represent 5%-6% of the workforce and 30–34-year-old architects around 15%-16%. In 2022 these numbers were 9% and 23% respectively, roughly 50% increases, and not necessarily surprising given the increase in students on architecture courses.
This is important because it makes employers particularly reliant on lower paid workers which in turn raises questions as to the ability of practices to offer those architects pay progression later on, because to offer wage increases to those early career architects of the sort seen in the past comes at a significantly higher cost given their much greater number, and, this at a time where in spite of a turn to these lower cost workers practices are still dedicating increasing amounts of revenue to salaries.
Career Pay Growth
Career pay growth maps median pay progression for past generations of architects. For example, if looking at an architect born in the late 70s and entering into practice in the early 2000s, then we use data from 2003 for pay under 30, 2008 for pay between 30 and 34, 2013 for pay between 35 and 39, and so on… This has a use as a benchmark to compare to pay growth today. It is also interesting in seeing how career pay progression since 2008 has essentially stalled; the median architect’s pay is the same today as in 2008; promotions/pay rises having essentially having only been sufficient to make up for the decline in median pay.
Detail
Two sources can be used to measures the number of students ‘doing architecture’. RIBA measures the number of new entrants on RIBA validated architecture courses, which has risen continually over the past 15 years. HESA captures ‘architecture courses’ and the total number of student in the year of study is shown. (Note that HESA ‘architecture courses’ are not necessarily RIBA validated)
This rise is reflected in the rapid rise of young people in practice. How this, in a period of sustained decline in practice, affects architecture and the incentives within is one to be understood.
Detail
Fee income is calculated by using data on the fee status of student, tuition fees rates, and teaching grants amounts for each year. As a whole, total revenue in the sector has risen. This means that within architecture, if the size of the academic sector is calculated using this figure, it is now twice as big as practice relative to 2008: today, fee income in academia is roughly 6% of fee income in practice while in 2008 this number was 3%. At the same time, fee income per student, adjusted for inflation, is relatively flat as compared to 2008.
Detail
Changes in earnings of the median UK and US Architect, relative to earnings growth, in their respective economies is compared. As a search for particularities, what is specific to the UK Architect, as opposed to the US Architect, which causes its performance to be so poor relative to its home economy.
Detail
Some of the downsides of looking at pay according to positions are addressed in these three elements.
Pay by age looks at pay for different age groups since the early 90s. The blue shadow hugging the line is proportional to the percentage of architects that fall within that group, showing, for example, the rapid increase in young architects (under-30, 30-34 in particular). From the 2000s to 2018 under 30s consistently represent 5%-6% of the workforce and 30–34-year-old architects around 15%-16%. In 2022 these numbers were 9% and 23% respectively, roughly 50% increases, and not necessarily surprising given the increase in students on architecture courses.
This is important because it makes employers particularly reliant on lower paid workers which in turn raises questions as to the ability of practices to offer those architects pay progression later on, because to offer wage increases to those early career architects of the sort seen in the past comes at a significantly higher cost given their much greater number, and, this at a time where in spite of a turn to these lower cost workers practices are still dedicating increasing amounts of revenue to salaries.
Career Pay Growth
Career pay growth maps median pay progression for past generations of architects. For example, if looking at an architect born in the late 70s and entering into practice in the early 2000s, then we use data from 2003 for pay under 30, 2008 for pay between 30 and 34, 2013 for pay between 35 and 39, and so on… This has a use as a benchmark to compare to pay growth today. It is also interesting in seeing how career pay progression since 2008 has essentially stalled; the median architect’s pay is the same today as in 2008; promotions/pay rises having essentially having only been sufficient to make up for the decline in median pay.
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