It feels like the third season of Ashes to Ashes: the world is shrinking, the mood is heavy, and something is wrong but unnamed. That is architecture today. For forty years the profession has been drifting, kept alive on life support not by conspiracy but by habit, fear, and a lack of imagination. Everyone feels the malaise. Few can diagnose it. Fewer still can speak it aloud.
Until the 1980s, architects knew their role. They had vision, authority, and a voice. When the service economy rose and contractors seized construction, architects mistook change for loss, and opportunity for bereavement. Like children bored of a toy until someone else plays with it, they suddenly coveted blockwork, waterproofing, and design-and-build. They wanted to be contractors just as contractors no longer needed them.
Since then, the profession has shrunk into managerial populism. Architects behave like centrist politicians: no project, no stance, no vision. They react instead of lead, chase opinion instead of set direction. They follow the diktats of agents, planners, and contractors—who themselves only look backwards, repeating yesterday’s formulas. The result: architects two steps behind, forever administrating decline.
To mask this impotence, practices drape themselves in awards and slogans. They proclaim “people come first” while outsourcing imagination. They clutch safe, decontextualised causes—placemaking, contextualism, CLT—more for optics than impact. They pretend to be contractors to please developers, and sanctimonious street preachers to impress peers, failing at both.
What remains is a profession of contradictions, an Orwellian parody of itself:
Money is greedy and corrupt (yet the profession is funded by it).
Aesthetics are superficial (yet clients pay for them, and people find joy in them).
Intellectual discourse is academic and immature (yet it has reshaped whole industries).
Lifestyle is pretentious (yet architecture always belongs to its zeitgeist).
Popular culture is vulgar (yet it is people we design for, not other architects).
So architects do the work of others: managing construction without being contractors, administrating codes without being lawyers, grinding repetitive tasks better done by algorithms, shaming joy like street preachers without a congregation. The result is a ghost ship: a profession drifting, hollowed out, still partying as if it were 1983.
What architects abandoned was their core: to observe, to research, to design, to imagine, to innovate, to narrate. Had they not surrendered design to production, they could have remained cultural authorities in property, style, technology, and society. Instead they recoil from the very economy and lifestyle they inhabit, latching onto moralistic causes that serve optics but neglect substance.
Labour MP Gerald Kaufman once called his party’s 1983 manifesto “the longest suicide note in history.” He could just as easily have been speaking of the architectural profession. But some of us do not intend to die with it.