Contemporary Architectural Practice: Precarity, Power and Transformation

Dear Colleagues,

Architecture sits at the confluences of commerce and culture, tradition and technology, and creativity and constraint. Buildings and their designers must navigate regulations, market forces, and material realities, while striving to provide meaningful and enduring spaces. Developed in responses to these tensions, institutions and frameworks of professionalization—however imperfect—have provided architectural practices a degree of stability while also reinforcing a particular social, economic, political, and cultural role for architects.

However, in light of recent social, technological, and environmental changes—from climate breakdown to the decline of democratic governance and the purported eclipsing of human expertise—even those models of practice that have continuously evolved in response to broader shifts in the economy and the design and construction industry now appear increasingly unstable. Architecture has always adapted to changing conditions, but today, we may be at an inflection point—a moment of disruption and reinvention. Architects can either design their own future or have it designed for them.

Normative Contradictions and Structural Instabilities

Architects have long espoused values of collaboration, sustainability, and equity, yet these ideals often stand in stark contrast to the realities of practice. The structures of professional authorship remain rigid despite rhetoric about collaboration; sustainability goals are often undermined by the realities of material sourcing and global supply chains; and calls for equity persist in a profession with exclusionary labor structures and precarious career trajectories. These contradictions are not incidental but structural conditions shaped by forces that architects must either reckon with or risk being subsumed by.

At the same time, private capital increasingly dictates the terms of architectural production. The built environment is shaped not simply by design intent but by financial speculation, corporate interests, and global markets, where architecture is often reduced to an instrument of real estate profit, resource extraction, or the consolidation of economic and political power. As a result, architects operate within a narrow spectrum—pressured to produce hyper-standardized efficiency on one hand or extravagant formal experimentation on the other, with little room for alternative models. This economic capture of architecture limits the profession’s agency, forcing architects to navigate shrinking influence over both the built environment and their own labor.

Interdisciplinary Competition and the Crisis of Architectural Expertise

Compounding these challenges is a rapidly expanding universe of knowledge that is reshaping contemporary architectural practice. Emerging fields—from computational design and synthetic biology to climate science, behavioral psychology, and data-driven urbanism—are introducing new methods, materials, and models of spatial organization. Architects no longer operate within a contained professional domain but in a landscape where expertise is fluid, interdisciplinary boundaries are porous, and the very definition of design is being reconfigured. These expanding domains do not simply offer new tools for architects to adopt; they also inspire, challenge, and, in some cases, bypass architectural expertise altogether.

This raises urgent questions about architecture’s evolving identity and agency: What remains core to architectural expertise? If interdisciplinary collaboration is inevitable, what should architects retain, what should they cede, and on what terms? When does ceding authority strengthen architectural influence, and when does it simply diminish it? Is architectural expertise at risk of becoming so diluted that other disciplines dictate the terms of design?

The notion that architects can simply “surf” these shifting conditions, as Rem Koolhaas once proposed, now appears wholly inadequate. The multiplying channels of professional practice, the precarity of architectural labor, and the commodification of design expertise suggest that agility is no longer enough. Instead, architecture faces multiple possible futures: a profession in free fall, unmoored from stable ground; a slow dissolution, where its authority and coherence fragment across disciplines; or a radical transformation, where architecture redesigns itself into something unrecognizable yet newly relevant. Whether architects can influence these trajectories—or whether they are simply being pulled along by larger forces—remains unanswered.

Call for Contributions

To explore these questions, we invite contributions from:

• Professionals reflecting on their own work practices through case studies that examine the origins, tensions, and affordances of contemporary design processes.
• Academics speculating on the implications of their research for the evolving boundaries of architecture.
• Historians and scholars from adjacent fields offering insights into the formation and future trajectories of architectural labor, authorship, and knowledge production.

Potential themes might include:

• The role of private capital in shaping architectural work—from real estate speculation to the financialization of design.
• The decentering of human-focused approaches to architecture, driven by new materialism and post-Anthropocene perspectives, which consider the co-mediation of more-than-human ecological actors.
• The distribution of expertise, authority, and agency across human and technological networks, exploring values beyond optimization, novelty, or service.
• The structures of education, research, legitimation, exchange, and governance necessary to support a more diverse range of specialized, participatory, or global architectural practices.
• The challenges and opportunities of labor precarity in architecture—what alternative models of practice might emerge in response?

Through these contributions, we seek to capture and critically examine a representative cross-section of contemporary architectural practice at a pivotal moment—asking what histories, areas of knowledge, and modes of thought and work architects draw together, as well as what futures these specific convergences might reveal.

Prof. Dr. Brian Schermer
Dr. Aaron Tobey
Guest Editors

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• design practice
• expertise
• agency
• labor
• pedagogy
• regulation
• transformation