Blog archdata

Every few years someone writes a critique of the architectural competition. The complaint is always the same: hundreds of teams, one winner, and a mountain of unpaid drawings. Those accounts are usually accurate about the competitions they describe, and the practices writing them have earned the right to make them. But the story is told from its worst case. Most competitions are not the Guggenheim Helsinki with 1,715 entries, and most practices do not live off competitions at all. It is worth asking first what a competition actually asks of a practice and what it returns. Seen that way, it is a bet whose costs and odds can be estimated, and the question is how to bet well. An economic reading is of course a partial one. It measures what can be counted, and part of what competitions are for cannot be.

A disclosure first. I have been running a practice for more than 35 years. Almost everything we have been commissioned to do came to us through winning invited competitions or direct appointment. One office's record proves nothing by itself, and the profession does not collect such records systematically. That is why I am wary of accounts based only on the experience of winners.

The first surprise is how few practices compete. The Architects' Council of Europe's 2024 sector study, based on roughly 28,000 architects in 29 countries, found that 18% of respondents had entered a design competition in 2023. About 40% of those entries were in open procedures and the rest invited or preselected.¹ Cost was the most common reason for staying out. That figure is a share of survey respondents rather than a census of practices. The sample, though large, is unevenly spread across countries, so the number is indicative rather than a European rate. It counts a single year, and so understates how many practices compete at some point over a decade. And for the minority who organise their work around competitions, often the younger and the more ambitious, competitions are close to the whole business rather than a sideline. That is why the same cost question looks existential from one desk and marginal from another. Even that minority mostly enters procedures where the field is limited, so the "everyone loses" picture describes a fraction of a fraction. That puts the cost problem at its true scale.

For the practices that do compete, an entry has a cost that is easy to underestimate and a reward that is easy to overestimate. The cost is not the registration fee and the printing. It is the weeks of reading the brief, testing options, coordinating consultants and producing the submission, including the evenings the principals do not invoice to anyone. The reward is not the announced fee of the winning commission, because most of a fee pays for delivering the services. What is left to recover competition costs is the surplus after delivery, overhead and normal remuneration.

To calculate an entry's expected value, start with any guaranteed payment and any expected prize. Add the commission's surplus, multiplied by both the chance of winning and the chance that a win becomes a real commission. Then subtract the full cost of entering.

Take three cases. Assume that the eventual commission leaves a surplus of €100,000 and that a win has an 80% chance of going ahead. In a large unpaid open competition with 80 entrants and an entry cost of €8,000, the €80,000 expected surplus divided by 80 competitors is €1,000 against €8,000 spent. This corresponds to an expected loss of about €7,000 per entry. In a smaller unpaid competition with ten entrants and the same €8,000 cost, the expected return is zero, a break-even on paper. In a paid final stage with five entrants, an entry cost of €20,000 and a guaranteed payment of €16,000, it is a gain of about €12,000, a reasonable piece of business. These are assumptions for comparison, not European averages. The difference between the first case and the third is not the talent of the entrants. It is the design of the procedure.

Those cases describe one entry, and a practice usually enters a sequence. In the ten-competitor case at an even 10% per entry, the chance of winning nothing over ten entries is about 35%. Put the other way round, that is a 65% chance of at least one win. That rises to roughly 88% over twenty entries. The expected wait for the first win is ten entries. That assumes chances equal and independent, which they are not, so 88% is the result of those assumptions, not a forecast. Kristian Kreiner's research describes outcomes as shaped by how teams read the brief and how juries read the entries, which is reason enough to treat one's own forecast cautiously.² Nor is winning the same as building. Guggenheim Helsinki was won by Moreau Kusunoki in 2015 and cancelled by the city council in 2016. This exceptional case does not establish a typical cancellation rate. It explains why the calculation keeps the chance of a win becoming a real commission as a separate factor.³

That is still the probability to plan around. A run of ten losses is not a sign of failure: it is the ordinary experience of one practice in three. So the consequence is not "stop entering" but "do not enter unless you can finance ten losses in a row". Expected value and cash in the bank are separate requirements, and it is the second that closes offices. This is a survival rule, not a defence of the arrangement that makes it necessary. Read honestly, it says that the capacity to absorb ten losses decides who may compete. In a profession where roughly seven practices in ten are micro-enterprises, that filter is applied long before any jury sees a drawing. It says nothing either about what a losing run costs in evenings, in staff who watch good work go nowhere, and in the appetite to start the next one. Expected values are calculated calmly. They are not lived that way.

The indirect benefits are the reason most practices give for entering, and they are real. What the evidence does not support is that these turn into commissions by themselves. The 2015 Architectural Record and Van Alen Institute survey covered more than 1,400 designers in 65 countries. Of those respondents, 67% said competitions had not directly produced commissions or paid work. More than 90% attributed no more than 5% of annual revenue to them.⁴ The survey is old and self-selected, so it cannot describe today's European market, but it is a useful caution. The safer reading is that competitions make an excellent research and marketing budget and a poor revenue budget, and belong in a budget line of their own. A practice that counts them as income cannot tell when it is losing money. One that sets the annual budget in advance, and treats a win as a bonus rather than expected income, is surprised less often.

The lack of evidence deserves attention. No current European survey of competition returns exists. Nothing published today follows an entry from what it cost to produce to what it eventually earned, and the last attempt of any size is the 2015 survey above. What does get measured is the procedure from the client's side: what it costs to run, how the winning scheme compares with the alternatives, how satisfied the commissioning body was. Measurement stops where the interesting question begins, which is what became of the practices that produced those alternatives. The profession argues energetically that competitions are good procurement, and may well be right, but has not put comparable effort into whether they are financially sustainable for practices. That is not a conspiracy: data is expensive, chambers are small, and nobody enjoys counting their own losses. It does mean competitions are being judged largely on figures from the client's side, and that the first useful reform may simply be to start counting.

For some architects competitions are not a bet at all but a steady line of business. Somebody writes the brief, advises the client, checks the submissions and sits on the jury, and those people are mostly architects too. The work is necessary, and the UIA guidance protects it: a jury should be mostly qualified professionals, independent of the entrants, and paid for its time.⁵ But notice the asymmetry. The jury is paid for judging whatever the outcome. The entrants are paid only if they win. The same expertise earns a fee on one side of the table and requires an unpaid investment on the other. No one designed this to be unfair. A good organiser prevents a vague brief, a careless assessment or an appointment that never happens, and much of that work is itself voluntary or poorly paid. But those who set the terms of a competition risk less than those who accept them. A profession that supplies both the judges and the judged should acknowledge that difference.

It is tempting, then, to see competitions as a transfer from architects to clients, and in a large open field that is roughly what they are. But the client's gain is real and worth naming, because it is the basis for asking clients to pay. The ARCH-E study of 40 competitions put procedural costs at around 0.7% of construction cost. The study models a saving of about 18% compared with the largest scheme submitted in each competition, the client's worst case. Compared with the average floor area of all entries, the modelled reduction is about 3.5% in aggregate, with 26 of the 40 winners beating that benchmark.⁶ These are modelled comparisons, not measured savings against projects procured without competition, so they are an argument rather than a guarantee. Still, if a competition can plausibly save a client several times what it costs to run, paying the shortlist properly is not charity. It is a modest share of a large gain, spent on keeping good entrants available for the next competition.

None of this requires new law. French public procurement provides that participants who submit compliant work receive a payment based on the estimated price of the studies, reduced by no more than 20%.⁷ The UIA guide calls for equal remuneration of second-stage participants and honoraria proportionate to the work in invited procedures.⁵ EU procurement law allows a fixed fee with competition on quality alone, and the follow-on contract to be negotiated with the winner. A competition therefore need not combine free design work with pressure on the fee.⁸

Put together, a well-designed competition asks for a small, cheap first submission so that an unknown practice can afford to be heard. It selects a short list transparently, pays properly for the shortlisted teams' developed proposals, and commits credibly to appointing the winner. The Helsinki Architecture and Design Museum competition limited first-stage submissions to twelve pages and paid each of five finalists €50,000 to develop their schemes.⁹ That does not prove every finalist recovered its costs, but it shows that paid final stages are already being used.

For architects, the advice is simple to state and hard to follow. Enter with a budget, not a hope. Prefer procedures with paid stages, small first submissions and a serious client. Estimate the odds by the size of the field, not by the quality of your own idea. Plan for the run of losses that a third of practices will experience, and stop when the budget is spent rather than when the next brief looks irresistible.

Every figure above depends on the cost of entering, and that cost is collapsing. Using AI tools a practice can now generate plausible proposals in a fraction of the time the same output took a year ago, and some entrants already do. This could make competitions more accessible at little cost. If a submission costs a tenth of what it did, the cost filter loosens on its own. The small office that could never finance ten losses can suddenly afford twenty entries. The fall in entry costs could also overwhelm the procedure. Where entry is nearly free, entering everything becomes rational. Fields grow without limit and each entrant's chance of winning falls. The jury is left comparing more proposals in less time. Worse, the submission stops proving what it was meant to prove, which is whether an office can think a building through. When the artefact can be produced without the thinking, that test breaks down, and a jury risks selecting for the image rather than for the capability behind it. The authorship questions arrive at the same moment: whose work is inside the model, and what exactly a client has got when it chooses a winning design.

The changes that AI-powered proposals will bring to the competition landscape cannot be foreseen in detail, and that is itself the argument for adjusting the procedure. It points to two-stage competitions. The first stage should be small enough that a flood of entries costs nobody much. In a paid second stage, a named team has to explain its reasoning in person, with tool use declared and authorship stated. Artificial intelligence makes these changes to the procedure more urgent.

There is one argument this financial assessment does not reach. Architects do not enter only because the expected value is positive. They enter because a school or a library is worth thinking hard about, because architects debate their work in public through competitions, and because the chance to say something about a place has a value that a fee cannot measure. Several of the buildings Europe is proudest of came out of open procedures that a strict financial filter would have prevented. A profession that treated every hour as billable would be worse at the thing it exists to do.

The difficulty is not the vocation but what happens when a procurement system comes to depend on it. A gift that is expected stops being a gift. When unpaid design work becomes the ordinary condition of access, the capacity to make it belongs to those with reserves, other income, or a household that can carry them. The public interest is poorly served by a process that filters for private means before it filters for ideas. Calling the resulting shortfall a contribution to the public good also does something awkward to the conversation. It turns a question about payment terms into a question about how committed one is, and few architects will volunteer to be the person who cares less. The honest position is probably that the vocation is real and worth defending, but depends on a financially viable practice. A profession can afford to give more than it is paid for. It cannot be built on giving more than it is paid for. If society wants exploration before it commits to a building, that is a legitimate thing to want and to commission. Commissioning it rather than assuming it is what keeps the gift a gift.

The competition system is not a machine for grinding architects down. It is a procedure with settings, and most of its problems come from a few of them being left at their worst values: unlimited fields, developed proposals demanded for free, appointments that never arrive. Change the settings and the same procedure produces a fair bet for entrants and a good deal for clients. For the profession, that means pricing the risk of losing into the participation payments and commission fees it negotiates. The evidence supports no confident claim about average returns in either direction. It does support a practical conclusion: architecture can be viable in a market where work is won by competition. The condition is that the procedure lets practices recover the cost of both winning the work and doing it. Several countries already write that into their rules. A client who wants to can adopt it without waiting for anyone. But that means spending money at the stage where budgets are thinnest and the building is still only an idea. That is precisely why it has to be argued for rather than assumed.

Editor

Notes and references

1. Architects' Council of Europe, The Architectural Profession in Europe 2024, practice structure and competition participation, pp. 35 and 45–48 (the latest edition of the biennial sector study). ↩
2. Kristian Kreiner, Architectural Competitions – Empirical Observations and Strategic Implications for Architectural Firms, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 21(2–3), 2009. ↩
3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Guggenheim Helsinki, competition and project history. ↩
4. Architectural Record and Van Alen Institute, Design Competition Survey, 2015. ↩
5. International Union of Architects, UIA Competition Guide, 2020. ↩
6. ARCH-E, White Paper: Recommendations for Quality-Based Procurement Processes by Using Architectural Design Competitions, final version, December 2025, chapter 2. The cost comparisons are modelled estimates. ↩
7. France, Code de la commande publique, Article R2172-4. ↩
8. European Union, Directive 2014/24/EU on Public Procurement, Articles 32(4) and 67, consolidated version of 1 January 2026. ↩
9. Architecture and Design Museum, Helsinki, Reimagining Architectural Competitions. ↩

Vitruvius named all of it two thousand years ago – firmitas, utilitas, venustas – and Sir Henry Wotton turned it into playful English in 1624: firmness, commodity, and delight. The mystery of the profession is that the client happily pays for the first two and assumes the third comes free.

An architect works between two banks of the same river. On one bank are firmness and commodity – the structure and the use. On the other bank is the beyond – the horizon, the sublime, the transcendental. But which of the two banks is the architect actually commissioned for?

The question stayed with me after visiting the World Congress of Architects in Barcelona a few days ago. I found there a profession contemplating its role in a world full of contradictions, asking itself: what are we here for? Under the banner "Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition," it questioned most of the age-old truths about the trade. It was an honest message about the shifts and rifts the profession is facing. An attempt to cope with the loss of the modernist paradigm that has defined architecture for a hundred years.

I think the old Roman triad still holds the answer. But to grasp it, we have to look at the far bank first.

Philosophers have been staring at that far bank for millennia. For Kant, the transcendental is not the beyond; it is the frame that makes experience possible at all. Space itself. Beauty, he says, is purposiveness without a purpose. It looks designed for a purpose while serving none. Which seems an elegant way of saying that usually the most beautiful part of a building is the part nobody asked for. Schopenhauer took it one step further. Architecture's real theme, he thought, is the silent battle between gravity and rigidity. The load that wants to fall and the structure that refuses to let it. Beauty happens in the moment we stop wanting anything from the building – no shelter, no profit, no use – and simply lose ourselves in watching that struggle.

Think about the ruin of the Acropolis. Its usefulness has weathered off, and what's left is pure delight. A temple that shelters no one. A hall that holds nothing. And no one paid for it. You cannot commission a ruin. You can only commission a working building and then wait for one of the most transcendent objects the profession ever produced.

So, what is the architect actually hired for? Strip away the prejudice and it comes to this: she runs the ferry between the two banks, the process without which nothing beyond the horizon gets built at all. That process is hard in many ways. A building has to satisfy everything at once, and someone has to own the sequence. The structure must hold. The cost must fit the budget, the rooms the program, the height the zoning, the doors the fire code. Each rule shrinks what is still possible. The road to the other bank is as long as the longest chain of things that must wait for each other. And it cannot be rushed by adding hands.

There is no shortcut to a building. You cannot know what a space will be until it is built, glazed, lived in, and lit by a moving sun. The design is the recipe. The building is the only place it actually exists. The architect runs reality's most expensive experiment on schedule, without the answer key.

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona has been running Gaudí's experiment for fourteen decades. The architect gone a hundred years before his building's answer arrives, and the world already queuing to see a church that is not yet finished. The delight did not wait for the commodity. The UIA Triennial award ceremony, held there inside the basilica, was a rare chance to understand this truth firsthand.

Constraints, sequence, patience. The architect's task is proving that something is left inside the overlap. Paradigms decide which rules shrink the overlap. Yesterday the free plan, today the carbon budget, tomorrow the right of a building to be dismantled and reborn. The rules will keep changing, and on a planet in transition they will change faster than ever. But the craft underneath, proving a possible world exists, holding it together, waiting out the experiment, survives every one of them. So does the far bank it serves.

And now for the speculative part. If the programs of buildings now change faster than the buildings themselves – offices becoming housing, churches becoming libraries, factories becoming anything – then usefulness is the perishable part of architecture. And it always was. A building whose only virtue is its function dies with its function. What lets a structure be adopted by the next use, and the next, is precisely the part that was never tied to any use: the light, the proportion, the generosity of the frame. The transcendental part is not the luxury of architecture. It's what makes it last. The delight is simply what remains when all the programs have expired.

So the profession asking "what are we here for" already carries an answer older than its anxiety. Run the ferry well. Check every rule, own the sequence, keep one degree of freedom open for venustas, and smuggle the delight across in the hull. Every well-run project leaves behind a small surplus of beauty on no one's demand, and the surpluses add up into skylines, squares, and ruins still worth crossing the world to see. A planet in transition will need buildings that can outlive their first purpose. Which means it needs the far bank more, not less.

Nobody paid for the ruin of the Acropolis. And that's the point.

Editor

There are two ways to genuinely order human life. By rules written down and enforced by laws, courts, and codes. By form, which orders life not by ruling it but by being made well. Good bread is not made by lawyers; it is made by flour, fire, time, and taste. No statute can author its goodness. The medieval Assize of Bread could fix a loaf's weight and price, but it could only police the cheat, never produce the craft. Law guards the commons, it does not bake it.

Architecture is stranger still, because architecture does not merely obey the law, it creates it. A wall is a rule you cannot appeal. Form commands more reliably than any ordinance, and without a court. Haussmann widened the boulevards of Paris partly so that barricades could not hold and troops could move, policing cast in stone. The building sets the constitution of daily action.

Architecture's law is silent and hard to repeal. And yet the relationship runs both ways. If architecture creates the law, the law in turn creates the environment in which architecture is baked. Bad law is a bad oven: even a fine baker cannot make good bread rise in it.

That is the failure of codes drafted by lawyers alone. They optimize for the perfectly squeezed constraint, for what is provable, enforceable, and litigation-proof, rather than for what is good. Law prizes certainty, uniformity, defensibility; good architecture needs latitude, judgment, and the local exception. Squeeze the dough too tightly and every loaf comes out the same shape: value-engineered mediocrity, "compliant" and dead. The lawyer's virtues become the city's blight.

The corrective lies in drafting law more like a recipe than a mould. Writing building and planning law with the profession in the room, not for it. Legislating the value sought (life, durability, delight) rather than the measure mandated. Seeking performance, not box-ticking. Leaving the deliberate gap where craft decides, instead of pre-deciding every case. Good law sets conditions for goodness, bad law sets specifications for sameness.

Good architecture creates the law. The only question left is whether we will let it create a good one.

Editor

The way the architectural profession is practised today did not simply happen; it was built, slowly, out of a handful of developments, each a genuine advance – the rise of the professional institutes, the arrival of public procurement, a series of consequential court rulings. Each was a reasonable answer to the problem of its day. Taken together, over more than a century, they have produced the fragile, atomised practice we now treat as natural. The profession's priorities took shape inside that same frame: the enforcement of standards, the culture of the competition, the turn toward sustainability – all more a response to pressure than a choice of its own.¹

The profession has accepted the rules of the game, and now spends much of its effort adapting to the consequences of how the legal and political environment has opened up over the last fifty years – a shift that has quietly reshaped it.² But the "maths" underneath is indifferent, and tends to pull the field into a spiral toward the bottom.³ The proposed measures are fine as far as they go, but they treat symptoms rather than causes – partly because institutional memory is short, and the status quo has every reason not to let go. The spiral is not bad luck on individual commissions. In an unprotected market the hard project is a statistical certainty – a fat-tail event, heavier and likelier than anyone expects. When it lands, it is the architect exposed in open competition who absorbs the unpriced risk of the developed, technical design. The rational move is to step out before that risk falls due.

The retreat is only one symptom, and a spreading one, while the landscape overburdens those who stay and try hardest. But their good intentions alone never fix it. That it is structural is worth showing precisely – even if it means applying a little classical mathematics. When architects and civil engineers work on design, planning, permitting, and construction together, their decisions become the variables of a single objective function – one that is non-separable, because the mixed partial derivatives (the mutual couplings between decisions) are very large in today's world, and non-convex, because the resulting landscape is rugged, full of false peaks and dead ends rather than a single smooth slope to the best answer.⁴ Under those conditions, coordinate descent – each profession optimising mainly its own part – is provably liable to get stuck in a local minimum that can be arbitrarily worse than the global optimum.⁵ From there, no single participant can improve things by adjusting their own decisions alone.⁶ The only way out is a simultaneous, coordinated change of several of these variables at once, sustained as iterative coordination, re-optimised over time, not a one-off settlement. The current structure of practice, and its contractual basis, are ill-suited to that – and it is precisely the architect, as the responsible coordinator, who eats the consequences. Put simply, the problem is not failure of effort. It is systemic.

Editor

Notes and references

1. Abbott, A. (1988). The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. University of Chicago Press; and Larson, M. S. (1977). The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. University of California Press — on professions securing their standing by walling expert work off from open price competition. ↩
2. On competition law dismantling mandatory fee scales, the last of them Germany's HOAI in 2019: Court of Justice of the EU, Commission v Germany, C-377/17. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62017CJ0377; and RIBA's abandonment of its mandatory fee scale. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/archive/riba-to-bin-outdated-fee-scale-graphs ↩
3. Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500 — markets selecting on price under quality uncertainty tend to drive quality down. ↩
4. Boyd, S., & Vandenberghe, L. (2004). Convex Optimization. Cambridge University Press — on non-convexity and the existence of local optima arbitrarily far from the global one. ↩
5. Tseng, P. (2001). Convergence of a Block Coordinate Descent Method for Nondifferentiable Minimization. Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 109(3), 475–494 — coordinate descent need not reach a global, or even stationary, point when the objective is non-separable. ↩
6. Nash, J. (1951). Non-Cooperative Games. Annals of Mathematics, 54(2), 286–295 — the equilibrium in which no participant can improve by changing their own decision alone; the familiar Prisoner's Dilemma is the case where that equilibrium is jointly worse than an outcome reachable only together. See also Schelling, T. C. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press, on coordination and the strategic limits of unilateral moves. ↩

Picture a dinner. Everyone at the table ordered from the average. The client budgeted the expected figure, the bank lent against it, the planning office approved it. But the kitchen never serves the average. It serves the whole spread. The delays, the price spikes, the late change to a regulation, the municipality that cannot make up its mind. Someone has to swallow the gap between the tidy number on the menu and the messy plate that actually arrives. The contract decides who, and most contracts seat the architect at the head of the table and leave them to eat whatever the kitchen sends out. The pleasant surprises drift off towards the developer. The unpleasant ones land on the plate of the party who promised a fixed outcome in a world that only ever delivers a range.

It is tempting to read this as a profession complaining about its fate. But it is far more a diagnosis. For most of the last century, certainty in planning and building was real. But it was a purchased good, not a natural one. Stable material prices, slack in the supply chain, unhurried regulation, and a fee structure that kept architects from undercutting one another. These were all buffers, and buffers absorb variance. They have been deliberately removed in the name of efficiency that let everyone pretend the future was fixed. The cushions that disguised the distribution are simply gone. So when a project overruns or stumbles, the problem is rarely a hidden incompetence finally exposed. It is variance that was always present in the work, becoming visible now that nothing softens it.

When a building misses its goals, the instinct is to find the party who got it wrong and make them carry the difference. But chasing indemnity does not shrink the gap. It only relocates it and, by the logic of how the industry is now built, it relocates it onto the smallest balance sheets in the room. Small studios cannot pool a bad outcome the way a large firm can. For a two-person studio, one project is the whole portfolio, and one tail event is existential. Pushing the variance there simply loads the risk onto the party least able to absorb it, who then does the only thing they can – competes on price and sheds whatever risk they can in turn. That is a spiral dressed up as prudence. Offloading the risk that way is like bailing water into the other end of the boat – it never actually leaves.

None of this fell from the sky. For almost the whole of the profession's existence, the duty and the protection arrived together. The duty itself is ancient. Hammurabi already had it almost four thousand years ago, in the form of a builder put to death if the house collapsed on its owner – back then there was no profession at all, only a master builder and a frightening liability. In the Middle Ages the protection was collective. The masons' guilds fixed prices, set the standards, and capped competition, so no member had to undercut another to win work. The guild protected the cathedral and the mason's living at the same time.¹ The figure we would now call an architect – the designer set apart from the trades, owing something to the city as well as to the client – is a Renaissance idea, but it grew up under patronage. You served a prince or a pope, not a market. The modern shape was set in the nineteenth century, when the new institutes (RIBA in 1834, the AIA in 1857) codified a conscience and, in the same breath, a commercial wall. Architects were barred from profiting from the building work and forbidden, by mandatory minimum fee scales, to compete on price. That wall quietly did something useful. It meant the work of getting a building right was underwritten – the care was subsidised by the protection. Then, within living memory, two things happened at once. Competition law dismantled the fee floors across Europe and America (the last of them, Germany's, as recently as 2019)^{2, 3, 4, 5}, and a heavy new obligation landed – energy, carbon, together with the thickening rulebook of the past fifty years. Society kept the first half of the old sentence – we will load you with duties to people who do not pay you – and deleted the second – and wall you off from the price war so you can afford them. The duties are heavier than ever. The wall that made the whole thing bearable is gone.

Yet it would be too tidy to cast the architect purely as the party things were done to. Much of the load is carried voluntarily, and on purpose. A profession that measured itself in money alone might have rebuilt some wall of its own – consolidated, specialised, priced the risk, declined the unpaid competition, stepped back from scope it is not paid to cover. Architecture, by and large, chooses otherwise, because it does not run on money alone. It runs on craft, on the award, the publication, the regard of peers, the authorship of something that may outlive its makers. The one who undercharges and overdelivers and gives everything to the good idea is not losing the game – they are playing a different one, whose rewards are largely symbolic and whose entry is paid in unbilled hours. This is the genuinely delicate part, because the generous reading and the sceptical reading describe the same fact. The refusal to treat a building as merely a product is the discipline's dignity – and it is also the very thing that lets the field draw unbilled hours and unpriced risk from its own members under a banner everybody salutes. The ideal is real, and it is bound up with the cost. Both halves have to be held at once.

If blame cannot shrink the variance and vocation cannot be legislated away, what is left is the only thing that actually works – managing the spread together. You cannot sue the weather. You can only dress for it and agree in advance who carries the umbrella. Simple in theory, difficult in practice.⁶

The first is to buy back a little slack on purpose – generous tolerances, a loose-fit plan, structural and systems margin – and to recognise that a building trimmed to the bone is also the one whose outcome swings most violently when anything moves, because margin is precisely what holds a design steady. Slack is not waste. It is the optimisation of survival, and it deserves to be priced and funded openly rather than cut first.

The second is to make the disagreement explicit. There is rarely a single client with a single wish, but a developer and an investor and a planning authority and a future occupant whose interests genuinely pull apart, and the trade-offs between them should sit on the table as shared decisions rather than be smuggled inside the planning for one party to absorb as a private failing.

The third is to pool risk rather than dump it – target-cost arrangements, early contractor involvement, or even partnering models where the parties win or lose together. These are not just gestures. They put the risk where it can actually be carried.

For the client, all of this comes down to one plain fact about the fee in front of them. It is no longer a protected margin with care folded invisibly inside. It is, much more directly, the budget for that care, and the value the architect creates. Driven to the lowest bid, the fee does not shave off a comfortable surplus – it buys less of the work that keeps a building out of trouble. It skips the coordination that prevents a clash on site, the second look that catches the detail before it leaks, the slack to absorb a price rise without a redesign. A cheap service often makes for an expensive building. An architect who says plainly where the uncertainty sits is not the weakest bid in the room. They are the one already minding the thing the client will still be using long after the price of the architects' drawings has stopped mattering. That, in the end, is the only thing worth optimising for.

None of this is simple, but it is at least the right problem to be working on.

Editor

* In business, project management, and design, "eating the variance" means absorbing the financial, operational, or labour costs of unexpected deviations from a plan without passing them onto the client, customer, or higher stakeholders.

Notes and references

1. Cartwright, M. (2018, November 14). Medieval Guilds. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Guilds/ ↩
2. https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/957541/dl ↩
3. https://averyreview.com/media/pages/issues/36/sherman-antitrust-act/587ed7ad41-1772703976/deamer-the-sherman-antitrust-act.pdf ↩
4. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/archive/riba-to-bin-outdated-fee-scale-graphs ↩
5. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62017CJ0377 ↩
6. Gransberg, Douglas & Jeong, H. (2019). A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ALLIANCING AND INTEGRATED PROJECT DELIVERY ON COMPLEX PROJECTS: PARALLEL SYSTEMS SHARING A COMMON OBJECTIVE. ↩

Architekti strávia roky náročným vzdelávaním, aby mohli vstúpiť do regulovaného povolania a niesť zodpovednosť za estetickú, technickú, právnu a ľudskú komplexnosť, ktorá formuje vystavané prostredie na celé desaťročia. Celkový obrat architektonických praxí viac ako 580 000 registrovaných architektov v Európe však predstavuje nie viac ako 1 % stavebného trhu*. Tieto čísla odhaľujú nesúlad medzi hodnotou, ktorú architekti vytvárajú, a spôsobom, akým sú ich služby bežne odmeňované. Ak majú architekti naďalej prinášať trvácu kvalitu pre klientov a komunity, modely odmeňovania za ich služby sa musia zmeniť. Architektonická profesia potrebuje novú diskusiu o hodnote.

Profesii dlhodobo dominujú dva modely odmeňovania a oba sú vyčerpané. Percento zo stavebných nákladov viaže odmenu architekta na číslo, ktoré nemá pod kontrolou. Tento model predpokladá, že náročnosť a stavebné náklady sa pohybujú ruka v ruke. Často to tak nie je. Druhým modelom je časový honorár. Spočítaj hodiny. Vynásob ich hodinovou sadzbou. Vystav faktúru. Pôsobí to férovo. Pôsobí to transparentne. V skutočnosti je to intelektuálny relikt. Pracovná teória hodnoty bola jadrom klasickej ekonómie u Smitha a Ricarda, no marginalistická revolúcia 70. rokov 19. storočia ju vytlačila a už sa nikdy neobnovila. Nedokázala započítať inováciu. Nedokázala započítať trh. Jej pokračovanie v marxistickej filozofii bolo len potvrdením jej vymiznutia z ekonomického myslenia. Žiadna relevantná ekonomická teória modernej éry netvrdí, že hodnota je úmerná vloženej práci. A predsa, vo veku umelej inteligencie, profesia stále obhajuje svoju hodnotu počítaním hodín. Vzťah medzi stráveným časom a vytvorenou hodnotou nikdy nebol voľnejší. Vždy bol konvenciou. Dnes je absurditou. V posledných rokoch, odkedy internet a mobily pretvorili svet, sa vzťahy architektov s klientmi zmenili. Očakávania sa znásobili. Nové technológie a regulačné prostredie urobili z každého projektu labyrint vzájomne previazaných povinností. V práci architekta sa tak mnohé dynamicky mení. Spôsoby odmeňovania sa nepohli vôbec. Reálne honoráre v prostredí politicky diktovanej voľnej súťaže klesajú. Výsledkom sú preteky ku dnu, ktoré trestajú kvalitu, nie priemernosť. Klienti od architektov očakávajú samotné stavby. Veci, ktoré môžu užívať, obývať, zapamätať si, odfotografvať, ukázať na ne. Všetko, čo im predchádza, sa pochopiteľne javí ako náklad na ceste k nim. Toto je problém profesie. A profesia ho musí vyriešiť.

Čo teda robiť? Navyšovanie hodinovej sadzby alebo percent z nákladov stavby nie sú odpoveďou. Zavedené modely odmeňovania nedokážu vyjadriť hodnotu, ktorú architekt prináša, ani pre architektov, ani pre klientov. Potrebný je iný rámec spolupráce. Časový honorár môže stále zostať užitočnou metódou pri ďalších a dodatočných službách a poradenskej práci. Pre základné služby architekta je potrebné uviesť do praxe pojem hodnoty, nie ako rétorické gesto, ale ako dôsledný, ekonomicky podložený rámec každej fázy. Budova je dôkazom. Hodnotou je proces, ktorý architekt vedie od počiatočnej neistoty k rozhodnutiam, ktoré ho posúvajú ďalej.

Myšlienka je jednoduchá. Každá etapa práce architekta vytvára pre klienta osobitný, kvantifikovateľný výsledok. Nemeraný v hodinách. Neviazaný na náklady stavby. Meraný tým, čo klient môže urobiť, aké rozhodnutia môže prijať, akým rizikám sa môže vyhnúť, aké možnosti sa mu otvoria ako priamy dôsledok kvalitne ukončenej fázy. Riziko odstránené vo fáze overovacej štúdie má väčšiu hodnotu než honorár za túto fázu. Koncept, ktorý sa v povoľovacom procese stane financovateľným, má väčšiu hodnotu než výkresy, ktoré ho obsahujú. Vezmime si fázu zadania a overovacej štúdie. Pred ňou má klient pozemok a ambíciu. Po nej má program, overenú logiku svojho projektu, pochopenie územnoplánovacích a povoľovacích súvislostí, rozpätie nákladov stavby, ktoré vie reálne podložiť. Hodnota tejto fázy nie je v hodinách strávených jej prípravou. Hodnota je v jasnosti rozhodnutia, v znížení investičného rizika, v schopnosti pokračovať s dôverou. Túto hodnotu možno vypočítať. Možno ju obhájiť. Možno ju zmluvne dohodnúť. Vezmime si fázu spracovania návrhu. Pred ňou je budova konceptom. Po nej je koordinovaným, plnohodnotným riešením, ktoré možno povoliť a obstarať. Je to moment, v ktorom sa sen stáva uskutočniteľným. Hodnota nespočíva vo výkresoch samotných. Hodnota spočíva v realizovateľnosti, úžitkovosti a poistiteľnosti. Cena tejto záruky, v porovnaní s cenou jej absencie, nikdy nie je predmetom sporu. Každá fáza, každá etapa – hodnota.

Klient, ktorý rozumie hodnotovému honoráru, získava profesionála, ktorý vie v každej fáze pomenovať, čo dodáva a prečo na tom záleží. Partnera vo výsledku, nie protivníka vo faktúre. Hodnotové honoráre oceňujú inteligenciu, nie námahu. Odmeňujú investíciu do fáz, v ktorých vznikajú hodnoty. Ak klient vníma dokončenie každej fázy ako náklad, nie ako investíciu, ak odborné vedomosti považuje za komoditu, ktorú treba obstarať za najnižšiu cenu, potom „nekupuje“ to, čo architekt skutočne dodáva. Nie je to jeho vina. Je to nesúlad vo vzťahu. Rámec hodnotových honorárov nemení iba spôsob, akým architekti oceňujú svoju prácu. Mení aj to, kto sú ich klienti. Architekti ním získajú klientov, ktorí im rozumejú. Developerov, ktorí vedia, čo dobre pripravený projekt ušetrí na nákladoch. Inštitúcie, ktoré chápu, čo kvalita návrhu vracia v dlhodobej výkonnosti. Samosprávy, ktoré vedia, čo architektúra robí pre identitu komunity. Niektorí klienti, ktorí túto hodnotu nevidia, pôjdu inde. To je v poriadku. Na trhu je miesto pre tých, ktorí chcú architektúru, aj pre tých, ktorým stačia výkresy.

Argument za spravodlivé odmeňovanie nevznikne presnejším počítaním hodín ani lobovaním za vyššie percentá zo stavebných nákladov. Vznikne zmenou jazyka vo vzťahu medzi klientom a architektom – schopnosťou v každej fáze preukázať, že architektúra vytvára hodnotu, že túto hodnotu možno pomenovať a obhájiť a že honorár je jej legitímnou cenou.

Keď to možno preukázať, profesia nežiada o spravodlivejší podiel. Dokazuje, že to, čo poskytuje, je hodné primeranej odmeny.

Editor

* Zdroj dát: ACE Sector Study 2024

Architects spend years in demanding education to enter a regulated profession, carrying responsibility for aesthetic, technical, legal, and human complexity that shapes the built environment for decades. Across Europe, more than 580,000 registered architects generate total practice turnover representing no more than 1% of the construction market*. These figures reveal a mismatch between the value architects create and the way their services are commonly remunerated. To remain capable of delivering lasting quality for clients and communities, fee models for the services of architects must evolve. The architectural profession needs a new conversation about value.

Two fee models have dominated the profession, and both are exhausted. The percentage of construction cost ties the architect's reward to a number she does not control. The model assumes that complexity and construction cost move in lockstep. Often, they do not. The second is the hourly fee. Count the hours. Multiply by a rate. Issue an invoice. This feels fair. It feels transparent. It is, in fact, an intellectual relic. The labour theory of value was central to classical economics through Smith and Ricardo, displaced by the marginalist revolution of the 1870s, and never recovered again. It could not account for innovation. It could not account for the market. Its continuation in Marxist philosophy only confirmed its displacement from economic thought. Not one relevant economic theory in the modern era holds that value is proportional to labour input. And yet, in the age of artificial intelligence, the profession still defends its worth by counting hours. The relationship between time spent and value created has never been looser. It was always a convention. Now it is an absurdity. In recent years, since the internet and the smartphone rewired the world, the relationships between architects and their clients have been transformed. Expectations have multiplied. New technologies and the regulatory environment have made every project a labyrinth of interdependent obligations. So much in the architect's work is shifting dynamically. The fee structures have not moved at all. Real fees are declining amid politically dictated free competition, and the race to the bottom punishes quality, not mediocrity. Clients tend to commission an architect for the buildings themselves — the things you can inhabit, remember, photograph, point to. Everything before it reads, understandably, as the cost of getting there. This is the profession's problem. And it is the profession's to solve.

What, then, is to be done? Raising the hourly rate or the percentage of construction cost is not the answer. The established fee models fail to express the value that the architect delivers — for architects and for clients alike. What is needed is a different framework for collaboration. Hourly charging may still remain a useful method for other and additional services and advisory work. For the architect's basic services, however, the concept of value must be introduced into practice — not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a rigorous, economically grounded framework for every phase. The building is the proof. The value is the process, led by the architect from initial uncertainty to the decisions that carry it forward.

The insight is simple. Each stage of an architect's work creates a distinct, quantifiable outcome for the client. Not measured in hours. Not anchored to construction costs. Measured in what the client can do, what decisions they can make, what risks they can avoid, what possibilities they unlock, as a direct result of that phase being completed well. A risk retired at feasibility is worth more than its fee. A scheme made fundable at planning is worth more than the drawings that carry it. Consider the briefing and feasibility phase. Before it, the client has a site and an ambition. After it, they have a programme, a tested development logic, an understanding of planning and permitting contexts, a construction budget range they can actually underwrite. The value of that phase is not the hours spent arriving there. The value is the clarity of decision, the reduction in investment risk, the ability to proceed with confidence. That value can be calculated. It can be defended. It can be contracted. Consider the design development phase. Before it, the building is a design concept. After it, it is a coordinated, comprehensive proposition that can be consented and procured. It is the moment at which the dream becomes buildable. The value lies not in the drawings themselves. The value is buildability, usability, and insurability. The cost of that guarantee, when quantified against the cost of its absence, is never a debate. Every phase, every stage — a value.

The client who understands value-based fee gets a professional who can articulate at every stage what she is delivering and why it matters. A partner in outcome, not an adversary in invoice. Value-based fees prize intelligence, not effort. They reward investment in the phases in which value is created. If a client treats every phase completion as a cost rather than an investment, if expertise is regarded as a commodity to be sourced at the lowest price, then that client is not buying what the architect is really delivering. That is not their fault. It is a relationship mismatch. The value-based fee framework does not just change how architects price their work. It changes who their clients are. It will attract clients who understand it — developers who know what a well-briefed project saves in costs, institutions that understand what design quality returns in long-term performance, municipalities that know what architecture does for community identity. Some clients who do not see this value will go elsewhere. That is all right. The market has room for those who want architecture, and for those for whom drawings will suffice.

The case for fair remuneration will not be made by counting hours more carefully or lobbying for percentage increases in construction cost. It will be made by changing the language of the client–architect relationship — by demonstrating, at every stage, that architecture creates value, that this value can be named and defended, and that the fee is its legitimate price.

When that can be demonstrated, the profession is no longer asking for a fairer slice. It is proving that what it delivers is worth paying for.

Editor

* Zdroj dát: ACE Sector Study 2024

Archdata je webový portál pre architektov, klientov a verejných obstarávateľov, ktorí chcú spolupracovať jasnejšie, čitateľnejšie a v súlade so štandardným modelom práce architekta. Vzniká ako praktické prostredie pre lepšie porozumenie tomu, čo architekt poskytuje, akú hodnotu prináša a ako sa má spolupráca nastaviť od prvého zadania až po užívanie stavby.

Základom portálu sú moduly Štandardy a Kalkulátor. Štandardy, vypracované pod záštitou a s podporou Slovenskej komory architektov, obsahujú metodické postupy, katalógy služieb, zmluvné vzory a slovník pojmov, ktoré pomáhajú pomenovať rozsah služieb architekta a úlohy klienta. Kalkulátor ponúka orientačné nástroje na overenie hodnoty zákazky architekta podľa parametrov stavby a náročnosti zadania.

Portál dopĺňa AI asistent, ktorý pomáha rýchlejšie vyhľadávať v metodických podkladoch.

Cieľom portálu je vytvárať stabilné podmienky pre férovú, odbornú a dlhodobo fungujúcu spoluprácu medzi klientmi a architektmi.

Editor

Archdata is a web portal for architects, clients and public-sector procurers who want to collaborate more clearly, more transparently and in line with the standard model of an architect's work. It has been created as a practical environment for better understanding what an architect provides, what value they bring, and how collaboration should be set up — from the very first brief through to the use of the completed building.

The portal is built around two core modules: Standards and Calculator. The Standards module, produced with the support of the Slovak Chamber of Architects, contains methodological procedures, service catalogues, model contracts and a glossary of terms that help to define the scope of the services of architects and the client's responsibilities. The Calculator provides indicative tools for verifying the value of an architect's commission according to the parameters of the building and the complexity of the brief.

The portal is complemented by an AI assistant, which helps you search the methodological materials more quickly.

The portal's aim is to create stable conditions for fair, professional and enduring collaboration between clients and architects.

Editor