The Real Homes of Real Architects

When you picture the kind of architect’s home that’s usually featured in a publication like Dwell, you probably see soaring ceilings; straight lines in blond wood; a house with an… interesting silhouette that has more window square footage in one room than you’d find in the entirety of a typical city apartment. But for the vast majority of people who do the work of architecture every day, home isn’t a head-to-toe showcase for their design sensibility or a perfectly crafted jewel box of a country escape. It’s just the place where they spend their hours eating, sleeping and, probably more than any other single activity, working. 

For a handful of successful firm owners and name-brand stars, maybe the average layperson’s rose-colored idea of what an architect does—dashing off a few brilliant drawings in a light-filled studio, handing them to a builder and waiting for the millions and critical accolades to roll in—is not so far off. But for many thousands of others, it couldn’t be further from reality. And that reality suddenly became impossible to ignore last December, when the staff at SHoP Architects, a prominent New York-based firm, announced their decision to unionize as Architectural Workers United. AWU’s effort at SHoP faced what employees described as intense pushback from the firm’s leadership, and ultimately never led to a vote (SHoP has stated publicly that "any allegations of bad faith campaigning are unfounded"). But the campaign has kickstarted other similar efforts and sparked an important, ongoing conversation about the exhausting workloads and outdated attitudes those in the field are expected to tolerate.  

"The industry just doesn’t know how to treat its workers well," says Andrew Daley, a former architect at SHoP who helped launch AWU and is now working full-time for the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM) to support other architectural workers who want to organize their firms. Daley says that the same issues tend to come up again and again: pay and benefits that don’t match the high level of skill and the difficult, expensive training required for the job; a severe lack of gender parity and racial diversity; an intensely competition-driven business model (exacerbated by arguably misapplied antitrust laws) that tends to transfer its hidden costs to those doing the design work.  

And, almost always at the top of the list: the hours and hours of unpaid overtime. The architects I spoke to for this story say a normal week can easily be 50 or 60 hours, and leading up to project deadlines, that might increase to more than 70 or 80 hours for weeks on end. "And that’s not uncommon. That’s very standard," Daley says.

So how does the softly lit fantasy of this particular job persist? Daley’s take is that architects "are bad at educating the public and educating the clients as to what our working conditions are, A, and B, what our value actually is." To help peel back the curtain, Dwell visited three former and current SHoP employees and architects living in New York City—all of whom were involved in the effort to unionize the firm—to talk about their work, how they’ve made a home in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and their vision for how to build a better architecture industry.

Jennifer Siqueira — 39, Project Architect at Bernheimer Architecture 

It feels appropriate that Jennifer Siqueira, who knew she wanted to design buildings at the early age of 7, lives in an apartment with such a distinct aesthetic. The previous owners of the Jackson Heights co-op Siqueira now shares with her partner, toddler and cat had hired New York-based David Bench to handle their renovation, and it shows: The sleek midcentury-style built-ins, beautiful tile work (including green bathroom tiles cribbed from Bench’s own apartment) and quirky pointed archways between rooms are not exactly standard-issue for most Queens two-bedrooms. "We saw a lot of other apartments in the area and you can’t come close to this," Siqueira says. "It’s really special." 

The family moved in the summer of 2021 from a Brooklyn Heights rental, though they likely would have stayed in that neighborhood if they had an infinite budget. "I just don’t think I would have considered it," Siqueira says of Jackson Heights, which she and her partner, Edwin Ackerman, now love for its cultural diversity, walkability and great food. But once they started looking, "We liked it for so many reasons and we could actually afford to buy a place." That was only thanks to her dad’s help with a down payment on the apartment, which they negotiated down from $535,000 to $510,000. In addition to their mortgage, Siqueira is still paying off the loans she took out 10 years ago to attend her master’s degree program.