If I were 18 again, I would learn the business of architecture alongside architecture
A few days ago, I posted a photograph of myself as a child on LinkedIn and wrote that if I knew at 18 what I know about architecture at 38, I would have approached becoming an architect very differently.
The post reached more than 10,000 people within a couple of days and generated more than 40 comments. Most of that reach came from outside my existing network, while almost two-thirds of the audience LinkedIn identified came from architecture and planning. What interested me wasn't really the number of people who saw it. It was the discussion that developed underneath it, and how many people with very different experiences of the profession seemed to recognise some version of the same contradiction.
Architecture can be an extraordinary education. It can also be a difficult business.
I don't regret becoming an architect. I spent nearly ten years in the profession, including time at Foster + Partners and WilkinsonEyre, and much of the way I think today came from those years. Architecture taught me how to take an enormous amount of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information and gradually make sense of it. It taught me to question assumptions, communicate ideas, coordinate different disciplines, defend decisions and keep moving when there wasn't an obviously correct answer.
Those skills have followed me into everything I've done since.
What I wish I had understood much earlier was the business surrounding all of it. At 18, I knew surprisingly little about fees, margins, clients, development, procurement, commercial value, positioning, business models or where projects actually came from. Even after entering practice, it took me a long time to understand the machinery around the architecture I was helping to produce.
If I were starting again, I wouldn't replace the architectural education. I would learn another one alongside it.
We sell young people a very particular version of architecture
I think most people understand that architecture is demanding before they enter it. Nobody seriously expects years of education followed by a life spent casually sketching beautiful buildings. But the version of architecture that attracts many people into the profession is understandably centred on the work itself.
We talk about buildings, cities, design, culture, materials, ideas and the possibility of changing something about the world around us. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Those are perfectly good reasons to become an architect, and they were certainly part of what attracted me to it.
The problem is that the architecture can only exist inside a much larger commercial system.
Somebody has to own or acquire the land. Somebody has to finance the project and believe there is a reason to build it. There will be planning, procurement, consultants, contractors, risk, budgets and competing commercial interests. The architecture practice itself has salaries, insurance, software, premises and other costs that need to be paid whether or not the next brilliant project has arrived.
At some point, somebody also has to find the next client.
Jake Rudin described this gap particularly well in the discussion beneath my post. He wrote that the romantic version of architecture leaves out much of the actual game: “fees, clients, money, influence, business models.”
I think understanding those things earlier would have changed not only how I built my career, but how I understood architecture itself.
We become responsible for businesses we weren't necessarily taught how to build
There is a strange transition that happens as architects become more senior. Early in a career, success is understandably associated largely with becoming better at the work. You learn how to design, draw, coordinate, present, manage packages, work with consultants and eventually take responsibility for projects and teams.
Then somebody becomes an associate, director or starts a studio of their own and the questions begin to change.
They are suddenly thinking about what a project actually costs the practice to deliver, what the studio should charge, which opportunities are worth pursuing, how much future revenue is genuinely secured and what happens to cash flow when a project is delayed. They need to understand how much time is being spent bidding for work, which sectors the practice should pursue, how clients choose architects and where the next project is actually going to come from.
These aren't peripheral concerns sitting somewhere outside architecture. They determine whether the practice gets to continue producing architecture.
It would be unfair to say that the profession ignores business altogether. RIBA has extensive resources around fees, business management and benchmarking, and the professional route into architecture includes practice-based competence. RIBA's annual Business Benchmarking research itself measures salaries, practice revenue, expenditure, profit, charge-out rates, billable hours, work sectors and business policies. RIBA
What strikes me is how far somebody can progress into architecture before many of these questions become central to their working life. By the time they do, the consequences of getting them wrong are no longer theoretical. There may be a team whose salaries depend on the answers.
The value we believe we bring and the value somebody else believes we bring
One comment from Michael Keaveney has stayed with me because I think it reaches beyond the original question.
He described the difference between “the value we bring” and “the value others believe we bring”. After we discussed it further, he refined the point by distinguishing financial value from social value and asking how clients weight those different kinds of value when making decisions.
That is uncomfortable territory for architecture because the profession understandably thinks about its contribution in much broader terms than money. A good building can improve people's lives. Good housing matters. Thoughtful design can create social, environmental and cultural value that is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reduce to a spreadsheet.
None of that stops being true because the person commissioning the building has a commercial objective.
The difficulty is that the client is making a decision from outside the profession. A developer, hotel operator, local authority, private homeowner and institutional investor can all look at an architectural service through very different lenses because they have different pressures, risks and measures of success.
A practice can therefore be completely sincere about the value of what it does while still struggling to communicate that value in terms that matter to the person deciding whether to appoint it.
That has consequences for much more than marketing. It affects positioning, fees, negotiation, client selection and ultimately which studios win which work.
I understood the value of architecture from inside architecture long before I understood how somebody buying architecture might assess it from the outside. With hindsight, that is something I would have wanted to understand much earlier.
Passion cannot be the profession's business model
One of the most interesting tensions in the comments came from two views that initially seem to pull in opposite directions.
Ian Cheistwer wrote that despite not making huge amounts of money and working long days and nights, he would follow his heart all over again. I understand that completely. There is a reason people tolerate things in architecture they might reject in another career. The work matters personally. There is satisfaction in making something that eventually exists in the world, and architecture can become part of how somebody sees themselves rather than simply what they do for a living.
Alison Smith approached the same passion from another direction. Her advice to young people has been that they should enter architecture only if they cannot imagine themselves doing anything else, because they will be competing with people prepared to do it “for love (and for free).”
There is an uncomfortable economic question sitting between those two perspectives. Passion is one of architecture's greatest strengths, but can that same passion make it easier for poor economics to become normalised?
I don't think the answer is as simple as saying architects accept low fees because they love their work. Practices operate in a competitive market and face substantial costs that have little to do with professional romanticism. RIBA's research points to downward pressure on fees alongside rising expenditure on staff, premises, technology and professional indemnity insurance. Its 2025 Future Business of Architecture work also describes widespread concerns about overtime, remuneration and wellbeing. RIBA
But culture matters too. If working late, doing additional work without charging for it or accepting relatively modest financial rewards becomes evidence of commitment to architecture, it becomes harder to separate professional dedication from an economic model that relies upon that dedication.
The point isn't that architects should care less. It is that passion cannot be expected to compensate indefinitely for a business that doesn't work.
Perhaps the problem isn't that architecture lacks value
The economics become particularly interesting when we return to Michael's distinction between the value architects believe they create and the value somebody else is prepared to pay for.
RIBA's own guidance on setting fees asks practices to account for staff time, overheads, project costs, risk and an appropriate profit margin. Its Fee Calculator similarly works from the actual cost of running the business rather than treating a fee as an arbitrary percentage attached to a construction budget. RIBA
But calculating what a project needs to cost does not mean a client will agree to pay it.
If a practice needs a certain fee to deliver a project properly but the market is consistently prepared to pay less, there are only so many places for that difference to go. Margin reduces, scope changes, people work additional hours, the practice finds ways of becoming more efficient or it decides that the project isn't commercially viable.
This raises a more interesting question than whether architects are simply underpaid: why can one practice sometimes defend its value when another apparently comparable studio cannot?
There will never be one answer. Reputation matters. Specialism matters. Relationships matter. The client's perception of risk matters. The practice's experience matters. How much the client wants that particular studio rather than an interchangeable alternative matters.
A practice therefore doesn't only need to produce valuable work. It needs to build a position in the market in which the people commissioning that work understand why its particular value matters.
That is part of the business of architecture too.
Some people learn the business by being thrown directly into it
One of my favourite responses came from Paul Conn.
Paul's route into the profession was very different from the conventional one. He left school at 16, studied construction and land use, entered an architect's office at 18 and was running jobs by 22. At the same time, he was doing private work because he needed the money, working on site, working directly with a developer and eventually starting his own practice at 29.
What struck me wasn't that his route was necessarily better. It was what he had been forced to learn along the way.
Architecture and the business of architecture arrived together.
Clients weren't an abstract stakeholder in a university project. They were the people paying him. Site wasn't something encountered only after years of study. It was part of the education. Finding work, delivering it and understanding the consequences of decisions were all intertwined.
There are very good reasons for professional education and regulation in a profession carrying significant responsibility for the built environment, and the UK qualification system itself is currently evolving. ARB is moving towards competency-based outcomes and is introducing new registration arrangements, so the route into the profession will not necessarily remain exactly as previous generations experienced it. Architects Registration Board
I don't take Paul's experience as an argument against architectural education. I take it as an interesting question about when different kinds of learning happen.
Could architects encounter clients, commercial decision-making, development and the economics of running a studio earlier and more deliberately, alongside design and technical education rather than discovering much of it when responsibility eventually forces them to?
I think there would be considerable value in that.
This conversation seems to be older than the current market
Another thing I noticed in the responses was the timescale.
Richard Henley told me that around 55 years ago his father, then a partner at Powell & Moya, advised both his sons not to follow him into architecture. Anthony Juliano described his father, an Italian mason, warning him in the 1970s about stress, low pay and long hours. Anthony became an architect anyway and, after 36 years in the field, described architecture as an extraordinary education while saying he would approach it differently with hindsight. Michael Keaveney said he was already aware of many of these issues in 1986.
Three personal stories obviously don't establish an economic trend across half a century, and it would be wrong to use them as evidence that nothing has changed. The profession today operates in a very different regulatory, technological and commercial environment.
They do, however, make the conversation more interesting than simply saying architecture is experiencing a difficult market in 2026.
Current evidence shows that some of the commercial pressures are very real. RIBA's 2025 benchmarking recorded a strong increase in total revenue and an improvement in profitability after years of stagnation, but it also found that the gains were unevenly distributed and highlighted continuing pressure from fees, regulation, planning delays and rising costs. RIBA
There may therefore be something more persistent in architecture's relationship with money, business and its own professional identity.
Dr Nathaniel Coleman touched on this in the discussion by distinguishing architecture as a commercial activity from architecture as a discipline and a way of knowing and doing. I think that distinction helps explain why people can be deeply frustrated by the economics of practising architecture while remaining deeply attached to architecture itself.
I certainly am.
Leaving practice didn't make me value architecture less
Neil Southwell described a contradiction very similar to my own. He no longer works as an architect, remains deeply fond of the profession and believes his architectural training helped make him the businessperson he became.
Anthony talked about the critical-thinking skills architecture gave him and how differently he sees the world because of it.
I feel much the same.
Architecture taught me to think in systems long before I would have described it that way. A building is never one problem. Change one thing and five other things move. You learn to hold a large amount of complexity in your head, understand relationships between apparently separate decisions and gradually create structure from ambiguity.
I use exactly the same way of thinking now.
The difference is that I am applying it to a part of architectural practice I barely understood when I entered the profession: where does the next project actually come from?
That apparently simple question contains an entire system of its own. A studio needs to decide what work it actually wants and understand which organisations commission it. It needs to know who inside those organisations influences appointments, how opportunities emerge and how relationships develop before a formal procurement process begins. It needs some way of remembering those relationships and following them over the months or years in which there may be no immediate project to discuss.
By the time a brief becomes visible to the market, a great deal may already have happened around the opportunity.
That whole commercial world became considerably clearer to me after leaving architectural practice and subsequently working much closer to clients, recruitment, business development and eventually directly with architecture and design studios.
Ironically, architecture gave me many of the skills I now use to understand it.
What would I tell myself at 18?
I wouldn't tell that slightly ridiculous-looking child in the photograph not to become an architect.
I would still want him to learn how buildings work and experience the extraordinary feeling of seeing something that existed in your head eventually become physical. I would still want the design studios, critiques, difficult projects, brilliant colleagues and all the strange ways architecture teaches you to see the world.
I would simply tell him more about the world surrounding it.
I would want him to understand money earlier and become curious about how developers and other clients think. I would want him to understand why projects happen, how clients decide who to appoint and what a professional fee actually has to pay for before deciding whether it sounds expensive. I would want him to notice the people bringing work into a practice and understand what they are doing before a brief lands on somebody's desk.
Most importantly, I would want him to understand that being brilliant at architecture and building a brilliant career or successful practice are related, but they are not the same thing.
If he eventually wanted to build a studio of his own, I would tell him to approach the business with the same curiosity he applied to the architecture. Learn how the practice makes money, how it develops relationships, how it finds work and how it creates enough commercial stability for good architecture to happen.
Architecture may still be one of the best educations I could have had.
I just wish somebody had told me earlier that learning architecture was only part of learning how to build a life and a business around it.
The discussion that led to this article started with this LinkedIn post, where architects and others working around the profession shared their own experiences of what they wish they had understood earlier.
By Richard Hall, Founder & CEO of Grand House