Elia Zenghelis has passed away. And it does not come as a surprise that Rem Koolhaas remembers him. But what he wrote in his obituary made me think.

Koolhaas remembers not only a person, but a particular moment in architecture: a time of extraordinary confidence in the discipline and in what it might achieve. He describes the early days of OMA as a period of almost euphoric belief in architecture, recalling Zenghelis drawing, talking, arguing and singing late into the night. What comes through is not simply nostalgia for a colleague. It is the memory of architecture as something worth becoming completely absorbed by.

Reading this today feels strangely distant. Not because architects no longer work late. They certainly do. But the conversations around architecture have changed. Scroll through architectural social media and much of the discussion is about salaries, overtime, unpaid competitions, burnout, toxic office culture and work-life balance. Where previous generations talked about changing the city, reinventing housing or overthrowing convention, we increasingly talk about the conditions under which architects are employed.

The heroic architect has become the architectural worker.

It would be easy to blame younger architects. To say that architecture has become just another job for them, that they lack the passion of previous generations. But I suspect the opposite is true. Young architects increasingly treat architecture as a job because architecture has spent the last fifty years turning itself into one. The profession has reorganised itself as a professional service industry while continuing to demand the devotion of an artistic vocation. That contradiction explains much of its current dissatisfaction.

The machine was there from the beginning

Ironically, the origins of this transformation can be found in one of architecture’s most heroic episodes: modernism. Modernism wanted to liberate architecture from historical convention and artisanal production. Housing could be industrialised, components standardised, construction accelerated and cities rationally organised for mass society. The house became a machine. The city became a system.

But modernism combined its obsession with efficiency with extraordinary ambition. Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus, CIAM and their successors were interested in standardisation because they believed architecture could transform society. Their drawings were not merely descriptions of buildings; they were propositions about how people might live.

Modernism essentially said: we will rationalise everything because we intend to change everything. What followed was different. We kept the rationalisation and gradually lost the revolution. Standards multiplied. Regulations multiplied. Consultants, deliverables, procurement stages, certification systems, BIM protocols and contractual structures multiplied. Much of this happened for good reasons. Buildings became more complex, safety improved, sustainability matters and large developments need coordination. But cumulatively these changes altered the architect’s position. The architect became less the person proposing what the world might become and more the person coordinating the increasingly complicated process through which predetermined projects are delivered.

The atelier became the company. The drawing board became the workstation. The architect became the employee. Architecture became a professional service.

The IKEAisation of architecture

Consider a typical contemporary development. The hotel operator already knows the room size. The developer establishes the financial model. Planning defines the envelope. The engineer determines the efficient grid. Consultants set performance requirements. The contractor establishes what can be built economically. The asset manager increasingly determines what can be maintained profitably. By the time the architect enters many of these conversations, a remarkable amount has already been decided. Architecture is then asked to create distinction: a different façade, a special lobby, some local material, interesting landscaping, a dramatic staircase, a memorable image for the brochure.

Architecture has not exactly become IKEA. IKEA is actually honest about what it is. What we have created is closer to mass customisation masquerading as authorship: standardised underlying products wrapped in manufactured difference. This is why contemporary cities can look more designed than ever and more similar than ever. Every building desperately tries to appear individual while being produced through almost identical processes. We have perfected architectural differentiation without necessarily producing architectural difference.

And perhaps we should be more honest about this. A considerable part of what is presented as architectural innovation today is simply styling applied to highly standardised real-estate products.

The market finished what modernism started

Economics accelerated the transformation. Architecture entered an increasingly competitive professional-services market while remaining remarkably bad at defending the value of its own work.

Fees came under pressure while technical complexity, liability and client expectations increased. Practices responded exactly as rational businesses would. They standardised workflows, reused solutions, created templates, measured utilisation, introduced project management, relocated production and tried to extract more output from fewer hours.

The machine that modernists once wanted architecture to design gradually became the architectural office itself. There is nothing wrong with efficiency. The problem begins when efficiency becomes the purpose rather than the means. Then experimentation becomes expensive, uncertainty becomes a risk, thinking becomes difficult to invoice and anything without an obvious deliverable starts to look unproductive. Architecture becomes something to be processed.

Even more troubling is that the profession has largely collaborated in its own commodification. Architects complain about low fees while entering competitions with absurd odds, producing large amounts of unpaid work and continuously proving to clients that someone else will always do more for less. We defend architecture as culturally indispensable while routinely pricing it as if it were interchangeable. Then we wonder why the market believes us.

The worst of both worlds

Architecture becoming a professional service would not necessarily be a tragedy. Engineering, law and consulting are professional services. They can provide intellectually demanding, influential and well-paid careers.

Architecture’s problem is that it has professionalised its production without fully professionalising either its economics or its culture.

Employees are expected to accept modest salaries because architecture is supposedly a passion. They are expected to work extraordinary hours because it is supposedly an art. They carry substantial responsibility because it is supposedly a profession. And their offices compete aggressively on price because architecture is supposedly a commodity.

We want the productivity of a factory, the accountability of a profession and the devotion of an artistic movement, often within a business model incapable of paying properly for any of the three.

For decades the profession survived through what might be called the passion discount. Young architects accepted lower salaries, insecurity and excessive hours because the work offered another form of compensation: authorship, excitement, cultural relevance, intellectual life, creative freedom and occasionally the feeling that they were participating in something important.

But that bargain only works as long as the other side remains attractive.

If architects become small components of enormous production chains, if decision-making moves elsewhere, if experimentation is eliminated by risk management and if much of the day consists of coordination, compliance and documentation, then the emotional compensation disappears.

You cannot continuously reduce architects’ agency while continuing to demand the same devotion.

Eventually people will ask to be paid properly. Eventually they will want to leave at six. Eventually they will say architecture is their job rather than their life. And they are entitled to.

The old heroism was not innocent

None of this means we should romanticise the architectural culture Koolhaas describes. Architecture’s heroic periods had substantial problems. Celebrated studios often depended on underpaid assistants, invisible collaborators and a cult of the individual author. The mythology of working through the night was frequently sustained by privilege and by other people absorbing the consequences.

A profession organised around genius can be exhilarating for the genius and considerably less enjoyable for everyone else.

Better employment conditions, normal working hours, parental leave and respectful workplaces are progress. The answer cannot be to tell another generation that it should suffer more enthusiastically.

But the alternative to exploitative heroism should have been collective ambition. Instead, too often, we replaced ambition with management. That is the deeper failure. Architecture solved some of the abuses of the heroic office by increasingly organising itself like every other corporate workplace, without asking what might be lost in the process. We removed some of the pathology, but also much of the intensity, intellectual friction and sense of shared purpose that made the work culturally productive. The answer should never have been less ambition. It should have been ambition distributed more fairly.

Perhaps young architects simply understand the deal

Seen this way, the growing focus of younger architects on employment conditions may not signal architecture’s decline at all. It may simply be an accurate reading of the profession they entered.

If Monday is spent coordinating ceiling penetrations, Tuesday correcting BIM classifications, Wednesday producing tender documentation, Thursday modifying apartment layouts to satisfy a sales matrix and Friday preparing visuals for a competition the office has little chance of winning, why should this demand the emotional commitment of an artist? Because we continue calling it architecture?

Architecture schools still recruit idealists. Students still enter because they are fascinated by cities, buildings, politics, form and the possibility of changing environments. They still make models through the night, travel hundreds of kilometres to see buildings and argue endlessly about drawings.

The passion has not disappeared. The profession has become less capable of converting passion into agency. Young architects may not be rejecting architecture. They may be rejecting the increasingly implausible demand that they sacrifice themselves for a production system over which they exercise remarkably little influence. Perhaps the question is therefore not why younger architects care so much about working conditions. The question is why previous generations tolerated such bad ones for so long.

And now comes AI

Artificial intelligence may make this contradiction impossible to ignore.

For decades architectural practices have tried to make production faster, more standardised, more predictable and less dependent on individual judgement. We are now developing machines extraordinarily well suited to precisely those tasks.

Drawings, renderings, schedules, options, specifications, coordination and standard design solutions will become dramatically easier to produce. What took days will increasingly take hours or minutes. For practices whose business model depends on selling large quantities of professional time, this is not a technological adjustment. It is an existential problem.

But it may also be architecture’s opportunity. AI forces the profession to answer a question it has successfully avoided: what are architects actually for? Not what do architects produce. What are they for?

If their value lies mainly in documentation, machines will absorb increasing amounts of that work. If their value lies in efficiently recombining established solutions, machines will do that too. A profession that defines itself primarily through production will find its economic position becoming weaker still. But if architects can identify possibilities others have not seen; connect spatial change to political, social, technological and economic transformation; mediate between conflicting interests; and give physical form to new ideas about how society might operate, then architecture becomes interesting again. Perhaps even indispensable.

AI may therefore force architecture to choose between the two identities it has tried to inhabit simultaneously: architecture as production and architecture as proposition.

Architecture does not need the hero back. It needs heroism back.

This may be why Koolhaas’s remembrance of Zenghelis feels so striking.

It is not really the drawing boards we miss, nor the cigarettes, the all-nighters or the culture of sacrifice. What feels remote is the belief behind them: that architecture mattered enough to argue about all night; that a drawing might contain an idea about society; that an office could be created around a proposition rather than primarily around a business plan; that architects might occasionally challenge the conditions handed to them rather than simply deliver within them.

We do not need the authoritarian master architect back. We do not need to glorify exhaustion or rebuild offices around unpaid devotion. But architecture desperately needs some form of post-heroic heroism: ambition without exploitation, conviction without the cult of personality, experimentation without personal sacrifice.

Otherwise the future is depressingly clear. Architecture schools will continue recruiting idealists and offices will continue transforming many of them into production staff. Developers will buy increasingly standardised architectural services. Practices will complain about declining fees. Employees will ask why they should dedicate their lives to work over which they have ever less influence.

And the profession will organise ever more discussions about wellbeing while avoiding the more uncomfortable question: what if the dissatisfaction is not primarily caused by working conditions, but by the shrinking meaning of the work itself?

Perhaps, then, the most provocative response to young architects who say architecture has become just a job is not to accuse them of losing their passion. It is to ask what happened to architecture that made them right.

Ai tools have been used for image creation, spelling and grammar.