Is being an architect worth it?

Commentary on the article entitled "Being an architect isn't worth it" says commenter published on 15 August 2025.

Naziaty Mohd Yaacob argued that the connection to bridging the gap between architecture education and practice is to breakdown what exactly is the learning to acquire skills and knowledge to be an architect when it comes to 'design' as the student needs to get this part right, which is identifying and solving the 'design problem'.

Link to the Dezeen.com article

© 2025 Talk Architecture, Author: Naziaty Mohd Yaacob.

Transcript

Hello, welcome again to another episode on Talk Architecture podcast and I'm your host Naziaty Mohd Yaacob and I commented in an on end article at dezeendotcom on the 15th of August 2025 where the article said “being an architect isn't worth it”, says a commenter.

And right on top where it says in the article that “the industry is fundamentally broken”.

So reports rang through with dezeendotcom readers for Jeff, “the architecture industry and architectural education have been too long detached from one another”.

And RIBA and RIAS seem to fiddle away on peripheral issues while Rome burns.

So it's kind of like dramatic , but a lot of us has been thinking about this where “there is a disconnect between architectural education and architectural practice”.

And what I did was I reacted to it, obviously, and I was reading something or I had an interaction with someone wanting their child to be an architectural visualizer and I said, why don't they be an architect?

And because the mother was thinking that the child is very good at drawing and so the mother said an architectural visualizer is what the child would want to do.

And I have no problems with that, what another human being wants to aspire to, but then I was thinking, I comment to her, “ the child could be an architect?”

So that they have choices later on to be an architectural visualizer. But she was adamant that the child just wanted to draw and visualize.

This made me think to actually address this bigger issue because of the dezeendotcom article.

So I said that the rise of architectural visualizer courses and such like shows a certain trend that happen not because we're not following current developments and market demands, but because of architecture education, and schools of architecture fail to address the fundamentals of training and architect.

Remember the disconnect between education and practice?

What architecture schools have failed to do is to recognize ‘design problems’ in each project and solve it. 

As the project becomes more complex, the student must be able to solve like 12 to 20 design problems in the thesis year or the final year rather than two to four design problems in the first year project.

But then there need to be different design problems. You can have some design problems appearing again and again.

But there need to be others in it because the student will get bored.

I've had a student graduate who did very well, saying that they just coasted because they just produce work for their tutors to say, yay, that's a wow factor.

You know, they just basically did illustrations.

So I'm not surprised about the architectural visualizer, you know, a goal for people.

But so I didn't record this or publish this interview I had with this graduate, but they wanted to project their emotions and how they felt about being in architecture school.

So you see, I contested here that even in first year, a student can do a master plan project.

It's just about identifying the design problems that the student need to identify.

Obviously, for first year student, they had secondary school earlier.

They know about issues in environment, like traffic jams and problems with traffic, problem with crossing the road, problems with, you know, things that people would normally face in the built environment.

And that could be one of the design problems they could identify that they have experienced before, therefore, they can do the master plan, even problems with disconnect between complex of buildings.

I had as a younger lecturer before being criticized of introducing master planning  for the third year. Though the students clearly loved doing that project , because I was experimenting what is urban context and what is urban design. And traditionally, people would only do urban design in the fourth year.

So to me now, thinking about it, that was fine, actually, to do a master planning project in the third year. (Which they deemed only should be done in the 4th year).

And because we just don't understand about the design problem made us feel kind of, like, uncomfortable about doing it for the students.

So, you know, it's just about what you want them to learn, really.

So when you break down things to design problem, like interior design have micro design problems, which you can touch.

You can even create physically like an interior design of a space, a bedroom or a bathroom even or usually you don't do bathroom because the equipment difficult to replicate.

But with 3D printing or , you know, using cardboard boxeses, you can create a bathroom project, no problem, you can do a mock-up and you can learn about the design problem in terms of accessibility.

But anyway, about criting students and asking what is the wow factor, just focusing on the image or the sketch-up design of the project . And doing it again and again with the different projects year after year, it's not going to make the students be able to be challenged.

And it's, you know, it's just wasting of time.

You can have a couple of similar design problems throughout the years , but there need to be other things that you need to learn, okay?

So critics, all academics need to know this and be on the same page about this.

It's not about the size of the project, it's about the design problems addressed in each project .

And actually, at the end of the day, you can have architecture degree, only one, three years, and then two years of practical training, and you can register as an architect by 5 years. 

That would be so attractive to do architecture.

There would be no issue.

Is it worth it to do architecture?

And then, not only that, you'd be confident because you've been focusing on the skills and knowledge to be a graduate architect.

When they say that architecture schools seems not to be in touch with the reality of what's happening in industry, you can have your experiential arts and humanities, because it's part of life and they could expound on that and be that graduate who reads a lot, you know.

So the inquisitive nature, the curiosity will never be eliminated from the architecture education course.

So it's just that we're not in the same boat, we're not focusing on the design problems and making a course in any university or college, attractive and getting the students to focus on what is really needed.

Because there is too much wrong learning or non-learning or repetitive learning in the course, which lacks serious challenges, you get graduates who are not confident and can't compete.

That's the reason why you have this article and you have the situation reacting, this article reacting on the situation of being an architect isn't worth it anymore.

So I'm asking you , again, is that true?

That it's not worth anymore?

Worthy anymore to be an architect?

I'm asking the profession, I'm asking the university academics who are in schools of architecture.

So we need to learn or relearn or understand this much more precise.

Thank you very much for listening