Free the Interns!

There are only one or two circumstances in which an architecture student can, in my view, legitimately be asked to work in a for-profit professional office without monetary compensation: when a visa specifically prohibits payment, and (in my opinion) when an architect is working on an unpaid competition and couldn’t otherwise afford to participate in the competition.

In the first case it behooves the employer to find ways to treat the student employee to whatever perks can be legally provided. In the second it is only fair that if the architect ultimately is paid for their work (as when they win or go to a compensated short list) the student architect should be fairly and proportionately compensated. In both cases giving proper credit for the work is literally the very least one could do (though often it is the least these employers don’t do).

Somehow, for decades, many architects have managed to ignore the quaint notion of a ‘minimum hourly wage’ and skip the monetary portion of the transaction for a variety of ‘internships’. This has most recently been exposed at Sci-Arc, the esteemed progressive institution in Los Angleles, where tenured staff have ‘employed’ students and promoted the view that working for free, at the right boutique studios, is a necessary way station on the path to career success.

The shop-worn excuse is that ‘architecture is a calling’, not a profession, and therefore limitless work for limited (or no) pay is just part of the proof that a student or young graduate is serious about their commitment to the art. This is so blatantly class-based, so utterly undermining of one’s future calibration of the value of work, and so self-serving for the professor/employers as to be laughable. But, laughable or not, it persists.

I thought this issue was settled long ago, when highly visible practitioners like Richard Meier (who has now added ‘high profile sexual harasser’ or worse to his bio) and others who were charged by the Dept of Labor of violating the minimum wage laws. Even though these are usually (but not always) highly sought voluntary engagements, there is the legal question of who benefits from the internship. If the employee is the primary beneficiary (as at an architecture school) payment to them may not be legally required, but if the employer benefits the most then payment is mandatory. Even this distinction is a disservice to the entire profession, grooming a generation of architects to believe that they can use anyone studying architecture, anyone in need of office experience, as a source of free labor. It is simply theft of labor by other means.

Indentured servitude is baked into the professional licensing requirements. The licensing exam in the US was once unavailable to applicants unless they had completed their 2 years of ‘internship’ working in a professional, licensed organization, and the license to practice still requires 2 years of work under the tutelage of a licensed professional.

The entire licensing structure borders on restraint of trade, keeping the number of sanctioned architects to a minimum, while supplying a steady stream of cheap labor to the profession. These interns are paid employees, of course, but are trapped in a system that demands fealty to their licensed masters. Graduate architects (who cannot legally use the term ‘architect’ until licensed) need the written endorsement of their employers to document the work requirement. That keeps them in line, still more subservient than mere employees, literally in need of their masters approval at the end of their tenure as employees.

This arrangement resembles a Guild more than a profession, and in fact the alternate route to license is a decade of that internship in lieu of formal education and professional degree. It’s the route Frank Lloyd Wright took and, though still possible today, is more like the 19^th century when Bertram Goodhue was placed, at age 15, in the office of James Renwick, to earn his way into the profession. Yes, age 15.

Today the professional degree requirement restrains the educational system more than the individual; we are accustomed to a prerequisite degree but not just any degree will do. Only a ‘Bachelor of Architecture’ or ‘Masters of Architecture’ will permit entry into the profession. Today there are just 50 colleges in the US offering a B.Arch, less than 1% of all secondary educational institutions. Loss of accreditation for those few colleges would be devastating, and even those large and well established ones (as my own) have been threatened with losing that imprimatur when a box can’t be checked on some bureaucratic form.

Students, the ‘pre-professional’ intern pool, are a different story. Students have no standing to object to their treatment as interns, especially when working for their own professors. They don’t yet have college degrees, are still subject to the vagaries of their professors whims, and are essentially competing to be the most abused among their peers. It’s a bit like the reputation student architects have within the university; laboring all night for reviews is seen as a mark of dedication (not fear or bad time management!) and something of a badge of honor. It’s a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome right at home.

That is precisely what teachers capitalize on, and it is undoubtedly what the SCI-Arc professors believed; as teachers, they reason, any relationship between them and students is inherently an educational one, with the value flowing to the intern not the teacher. This delusion persists even when interns are put to work on real, paid projects, substituting their free labor for paid labor. Or when interns are assigned menial tasks like office cleaning, or in one documented case, refinishing hardware for the employer/professor’s own home.

How can it be anything but coerced labor when a student’s professor advises them that unpaid internships are the only route to eventual career success? The 13^th Amendment outlawed involuntary servitude 150 years ago, without, I believe, an architectural internship exemption! One clever attorney has linked the 13^th to the abortion debate, claiming that when the state forces a woman to carry an unwanted child it violates the amendment.

While we could debate voluntary vs. involuntary, coercion is coercion. I’m pretty sure that the tax returns for these businesses don’t show free labor as income (like a debt forgiven) or payment of social security or other taxes for services rendered. “This will be good for you” is the claim of nearly every abuser seeking free or discounted services, but of course all benefit first goes to them. Whether the intern derives any benefit at all is debatable; becoming known for working on the cheap is not traditionally considered a benefit!

The whole notion that architects don’t need to be paid may have started with the ‘gentlemen architects’ (there were no ‘gentlewoman architects’ to speak of then) in the 15^th and 16^th century, when people started to be called ‘architects’ and the idea of a profession gelled. Still, it was generally a profession for the classes that could afford to be architects. There were wealthy architects (like Bernini) and more monk-like ones (like his bete noire Borromini) but there were no schools that could educate an ‘any man’ to find their talent. It was the calling of the upper classes, the leisure and landed classes. It’s like the adage about raising horses (to paraphrase) “if you want to make a small fortune in architecture, best to start with a large fortune”.

Since Alberti, in the 15^th century, the definition of architects has separated the mere labor of building from the intellectual, artistic labor of the architect. That sense of elevation has either been applied to architects, or architects themselves have adopted the cloak of the artist. Valuing the work, assigning a monetary value to the design of buildings, was difficult (and beneath the gentleman architect) being, at the time, inseparable from the actual building costs.

It remains an elusive thing; determining the fee one pays an architect is a matter of the market these days, but clients routinely question that value. Large firms represent a tiny percentage of the total number of architecture offices, but command an inversely proportioned (i.e. enormous percentage) of the total architectural fees paid. Wealth is in scale, generally.

The permission structure to ‘hire’ (and is that even the right word if they are unpaid?) interns at no pay may be in part because of the widespread experience of the firm owners; firms, especially small firms, are often unpaid even when the services are rendered. And it’s not just Donald Trump; he is the rule rather than the exception among developers and others who take any excuse to withhold payment.

Clients might be smart enough not to stiff their attorneys (where Trump is an exception…as I said, ‘smart enough’) but what can a poor architect do to be paid? Two simple words, it turns out, ‘mechanics lien’. Architects may resist being mere ‘mechanics’ (like plumbers, electricians, carpenters, contractors, etc.) but in matters of payment we should be grateful to be part of the brethren who are entitled to lien a property. It works. In the short term, but it often backfires.

Consider William Van Alen, the esteemed architect of the beloved Chrysler Building. In spite of the extraordinarily clever way in which he surpassed the competition to make the building (briefly) the tallest in the world, Walter Chrysler decided to withhold payment. Van Alen took him to court and won, was paid in full, and was essentially blackballed for the rest of his career.

The choice, I suppose, was being paid or having a career, and that pretty much sums up the business training architects seem to have absorbed. ‘If I insist on being paid I won’t get the work I want…or any work at all’ is a mighty disincentive to pursue what one deserves.

Somehow architects have failed to adopt the Coco Chanel quip that ‘the best things in life are free; the second best are very expensive’, though working for free wasn’t exactly what Coco had in mind.