Building Beautiful Places, What About Building a Beautiful Profession?

It seems strange to me that professions dedicated to improving people's lives can sometimes neglect the conditions needed to produce that very outcome. At a glimpse, we have an overworked, underpaid and deadline-driven industry where "urgent" can quickly start to feel like the everyday.

As someone who recently qualified as an architect, I sometimes wonder where these unrealistic expectations of performance actually started.

Thinking back university, all-nighters were almost a competition. The less you slept, the more dedicated you appeared. I used to partake in the ritual too, until halfway through my master's when I realised something embarrassingly obvious: my 3am ideas weren't actually better.

I became what I like to call a reformed all-nighter student. I stopped doing them and discovered that what took me three hours at 2am could take me 30 minutes with a fresh mind in the morning.

Perhaps university is where some of this starts. But behind it I think sits what I call "the tortured artist syndrome." Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that great work requires great suffering and sacrifice. Long hours become commitment, burnout becomes passion, working weekends become ambition and being permanently tired with a caffeine addiction somehow becomes professionalism.

But does it have to?

I've never had the great aha! moment at 3am staring at a bright screen where all the lines have started to look the same. My best thinking usually happens after I've walked away from the problem, done something else entirely, slept, or spoken to a colleague. Sometimes the subconscious mind is better at solving the problem than another three hours staring at it.

Maybe we've mistaken more hours for better work.

In architecture we obsess over quality, details and phenomenology a word the public might reasonably assume we muttered in our tired state yet we rarely discuss the conditions in which those decisions are actually being made.

Perhaps this isn't just a feeling. ARB's workplace culture research found concerns that excessive workloads can affect not only wellbeing, but the quality of work and ethical behaviour. That caught my attention because it changes the conversation. Working conditions aren't simply a wellbeing issue; they can become a professional one.

Medicine has long recognised that fatigue and excessive working hours can affect judgement and patient safety, contributing to safeguards around working time. Which made me wonder about our own industry.

Particularly in a post-Grenfell world, we rightly talk about competence, accountability and the Golden Thread. The Golden Thread itself is about maintaining reliable building information, but perhaps, metaphorically, that thread also needs a strand of coherent and sound judgement. After all, the information is only as good as the decisions behind it.

Working in transportation has probably made me think about this even more.

The Elizabeth line now regularly sees more than 800,000 journeys a day during the week. Beyond moving people from A to B, transport connects people to jobs, education and opportunity, supports economies and can reduce reliance on private cars and improve air quality in cities.

I'm currently working on Dubai's Gold Line, which is expected to benefit more than 1.5 million people by 2040. When you think about projects at that scale, the drawings we produce today eventually become places millions of people will move through.

No pressure then.

And, of course, it isn't just architects. Projects of this scale depend on engineers, contractors, project managers, planners, specialists, clients and countless others coordinating thousands of decisions. To undertake something that complex, you need people bringing their best thinking to design reviews and coordination meetings.

It has made me appreciate just how much impact our industry has on everyday life and perhaps how badly we sometimes communicate our own value.

Which brings me to something less comfortable: unpaid overtime.

Both RIBA and ARB research have raised concerns around working conditions, workloads and unpaid overtime. During my time as a RIBA student representative, I also spoke to young graduates who described working so many additional hours that, once those hours were considered, their effective hourly pay became worryingly low.

I don't think the problem is the occasional late night. Construction has deadlines, programmes, budgets and very real financial consequences when things aren't delivered. Sometimes projects genuinely require an extra push. I'm not oblivious to that.

What interests me is what happens when the exception quietly becomes the culture.

And perhaps the consequences of a neglected profession are already showing beyond wellbeing. We talk constantly about attracting a more diverse profession, while also asking why women leave architecture, why some groups remain underrepresented and why talented graduates decide to do something else.

Maybe the more interesting question isn't only how do we attract people?

It's what kind of profession are we asking them to stay in?

Because diversity isn't simply about opening the door. Someone has to want to stay once they're through it.

Through the CIC 2050 group, I've enjoyed having conversations like these beyond architecture because I've realised none of this belongs to one profession. We are all part of the same slightly chaotic ecosystem trying to deliver incredibly complicated things together.

And perhaps that's where some of the answer sits.

Not in another grand statement about transforming the industry overnight, but in smaller cultural shifts: how we collaborate, how senior professionals treat those coming through, whether someone feels comfortable speaking up, whether we mentor rather than simply manage, and whether we value clear thinking as much as visible busyness.

I don't know exactly what a "beautiful profession" looks like. Maybe none of us do yet.

But I imagine one where a student doesn't have to brag about an all-nighter to prove they care. Where talented people don't have to choose between the profession they love and having a life outside it. Where architects, engineers, contractors and the countless people behind a project share in its success rather than chasing the idea of one "star" creator. And where wellbeing isn't seen as being in conflict with productivity, professionalism or ambition.

We spend our career trying to create a better world but maybe we need to be crazy enough to believe we can create a better way of doing it too.