Despite happy-clappy hopes, there are fewer jobs in architecture than a decade ago. Total construction dollars have still not rebounded since the market peak, even with a 10% bump in the last two years. Less building equals less need for architectural services. Although the U.S. Labor Department predicts that architectural unemployment will be 7% in 2024, the most recently cited figure, according to Architzer’s 2012 survey, was 13.9%. But the greater truth is that the profession of architecture is at a breakpoint far beyond the microeconomic realities of the Great Recession.

It’s not unusual to find underperforming professions in periods of technological revolution. Buggy whip makers needed a new career path in the Roaring 20’s. Today, bank tellers can’t look an ATM in the eye without anger. Architects can see 3D printing, Revit and each successive AutoCad release, and sense human obsolescence. When training ignores new realities, the future is completely unknowable: we could all have abacus training, or learn how to write code.

And yet recent years have seen record numbers of architecture school graduates. The unabated flow of graduates in the lean seven years since the advent of the Great Recession are nowhere near being absorbed by a depressed job market. Even though matriculation and graduation from architecture schools are slightly down, if you average the 6,000 degrees awarded now and the 3,000 degrees awarded 50 years ago, there are well over 200,000 people with professional architectural degrees, in a market containing far fewer jobs. Even with this professional brown-out, there are nine new schools of architecture trying to get accredited.

The joys of the profession are transitioning from those found in getting a structure out of the ground, to the thrill of creating designs that are virtually beautiful. Virtual reality can substitute for the need for reality itself when that reality is hard to find (think pornography).

....

Instead of unemployed architects becoming technicians in related fields or getting a job in construction, the fine arts orientation of mainstream architectural education and its relatively large cadre of over 6,000 professors tend to celebrate the conceptual over the built.

As fewer architects can actually build, more want to teach. It is a change spiral: the less professors build the less they convey the connection between architectural education and building. Architectural-cyberporn simulations can sublimate the old school urge to build into a word, “Architecture,” almost willfully detached from the act of building.

A new media expression of this new lifestyle choice can be found in any number of choir-singing-to-the-choir websites: “Life of an Architect”, “YoungArchitect.com”, “Think I Architect” and many more. Competitions are cheaper to organize and execute so the new paradigm of Architizer A+Awards where virtually hundreds of annual awards are given by hundreds of jurists judging thousands of entrants is just the flagship in a new Architect Hall of Mirrors: all in a orgy of inside baseball self-congratulation.

There are historic parallels. A few generations ago “second sons” of wealthy families often became architects. Or clerics. Clergy was once central to our culture, but church attendance is crashing faster than construction did at the height of the Great Recession.

....