The other day an architect asked me, basically, if I think architects should not be paid better and if this is not an obstacle to the development of innovative and responsible architecture in the face of climate change. A recurring question.
An employee of a large company, I think she was referring to the amount of fees collected by the agencies, which in any case flow more or less abundantly according to the personality of the architect and the profits of his company.
It is rare to talk about money in France, except to complain. This question is very much from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, when the accumulation of wealth was an end in itself, so here, I imagine, it should be understood as a recrimination.
However, the question of the remuneration of architects often appears, ruddy; it is also the subject of precise and detailed investigations but, so to speak, it suggests that poor architects really have no chance with bad public project owners who have no more money than ideas and the cruel private project owners who tighten the screws on the men and women of art.
Some numbers. According to Capital (July 7, 2023), a magazine that does not joke with this kind of information and that cites data from the consulting firm People Base CBM, ” on average in 2023, all specialties combined, an employed architect receives an annual remuneration of €47,946 gross, for a professional experience – still on average – of 11 years. Men receive an average remuneration of €52,775 gross per year, compared to €43,188 gross for women. “. This average was €30,000 in 2010, €43,349 in 2016. In short, considering inflation and the passage of time, things are not much better or much worse than before. Business as usual?
If, the article specifies, a State architect and urban planner can earn up to €6,203.19 gross per month in 2023, an architect ” classic » an approved self-employed worker receives an average annual income of €33,007 (average annual accounting profit, which corresponds to remuneration after payment of charges but before income tax), or approximately €2,751 per month for being his own boss. It is true that this may seem a bit much after long years of strenuous studies.
In other words, the architect who practices as a freelancer is the one who has the most responsibilities, the most hours to work and who earns the least. It is this last figure – €2,751 per month – that people who complained like to remember. Compared, however, with the salary of a nurse, emergency doctor, teacher and many university professors and researchers, is this not a completely unfair situation? The fault of the hungry fees? No doubt there are so many of them who remember an imaginary golden age when, apart from a few Jaguar collectors, there were obviously so many architects driving Ferraris. However, among our French Pritzkers, few gold diggers.
This idea of measuring talent according to the measure of wealth – despite the cursed artists – remains general, however, as evidenced every year by the magazine’s TOP 400 French agencies, which reached a turnover greater than €1M. But this question, which regularly raises steam in the microcosm – are architects not particularly poorly paid and does this not harm their efficiency, if not their creativity – is it still relevant in 2023?
If his statement seems to assume from the outset that architects are poorly paid – which the average income of architects at first glance suggests – the topic is not new, however. When was the last time you heard an architect complain about being overpaid? Today, in 2023, the state architect (DE) going through his HMO knows from the start that his chances of making a lot of money with his art are minimal and he also knows that the famous and respected architect nt is more than urban. legend and country myth.
Clearly, the young person who is launching into the profession in our time already knows before starting that when it comes to remuneration, especially as a freelancer, he will have to be patient! For decades! And he must know that if it were easy to be an architect, everyone would be. Of course, it goes faster for the sons and daughters of mom and dad, but for others who want to practice this profession, patience is a cardinal virtue.
Why do they do it despite all this? It’s true, why be an architect?
It all depends on the ambition of each person and there are as many situations as there are architects. For example, it is completely legal for an architect registered with the order to accumulate the projects of developers for 400 residences and commercial centers for twenty years and to build a large agency (although large in this case can be quickly lead to confusion) . It’s not that complicated and business acumen and a flexible backbone can pay off big. If it flows down into the agency, or even floods, and everyone is there, so much the better, but then there is no reason to complain.
It is equally legal to have a position as a knowledgeable architect, to maintain it, sometimes bordering on insolence, and to carry out projects one after another, in the form of haute couture, alone or almost. This in no way sometimes prevents success and payment of wealth tax even if, most often, proud solitude only lowers the average emoluments of the profession.
I also know the case of architects who, in order to become companions, incur heavy debts (among architects there are more and more collaborators and fewer and fewer men and women of the art to practice a purely liberal exercise. strictly speaking) and, knowing that they took ten years of work, in the meantime they only pay themselves some kind of minimum wage, without any guarantee that the situation after a decade will allow them to operate the agency as they imagined. Most of them grit their teeth, forge their destiny and don’t complain.
There is also the case of those partners who invest the profits of the agency to become as it were “owners” of an operation allowing their employees to be settled in Paris; if we want good employees and want to keep them, we have to make choices. Frugal architects?
In addition, in order to reassure oneself about their way of life, in most cases it is enough to discover the offices of architects who have mostly forgotten to be stupid. Only they know how to recognize an opportunity in an impossible space that, when the work is done, leaves you speechless. Earning less money but working in a self-designed work environment, for an architect, is hardly a better reward. No complaints from them either.
Finally, if the object of the exercise is to boast of one’s talent and/or interpersonal skills with gold leaf, there is always the possibility of selling one’s soul to the devil and going to work for a tyrant whatever, they are never stingy with fortune and their bad taste, which will suit perfectly any careerist architect who generally has the good taste not to complain.
So what? Being an architect is a choice with multiple answers, but the question of the amount of fees is ultimately irrelevant. Besides, what matters from fifty years from now – if the architect’s building is still there, which should normally be the case, considering the cost of construction and maintenance and what the investment has yielded or not during this period – whether the architect’s fees are 3 or 10% does not matter. For the architect no doubt at the time he builds but otherwise, according to the scale of the project, the cost, let’s say intellectual, of the man or woman of art is ridiculous, whether the building is successful or not.
Here too, in my opinion, the question of fair remuneration for the architect, or his beneficiaries, should arise. Indeed, the great-grandchildren of a great film director, or a great artist, or a popular B-series actor/actress, continue in one way or another to receive royalties on the work of the ancestor. But a building is not a work of art and, after fifty years, whether his work is a marvel or a disaster, the architect will earn neither less nor more than what he was paid during the construction. Genius or not, in architecture, no copyright!
If the project is a disaster, fifty years later no one knows who to blame for it. However, if the architect has done his job well, his building is successful and can take fifty more and the owner of the work never stops caring for his great-grandchildren – with no royalties for the inspired artist. And no percentage for him on the numerous resales of his work… If it is not crazy to do this work!
Many of the architects I know are architects and can’t do anything about it. They live their work with more or less happiness and success as a vocation, adventure, priesthood, passion, mission, it depends. That their work is rewarded at its fair value is the least, but who finally to judge it, if not of course those who for fifty years appreciate or endure it?
Christophe Leray