Top five things you should know before pursuing a career as an architect

As I slurped the last of the fettucini alfredo, a shower cap adorned with multicolored, helium-filled balloons savagely attacked my perfect hair. The restaurant staff clapped and sang and made sure everyone could enjoy my dignity being pillaged. My mom and sister couldn’t contain their laughter. My face couldn’t conceal its humiliation. If this was supposed to be a celebration lunch for my entry into adulthood, after 18 years of never being the cool kid, I needed to reconsider a few things.

Later that day, feeling no love for the world, I entered a busy movie theater with my family to watch Sleepless in Seattle (nope, I didn’t see any other teenage guys in the audience—my coolness factor took another beating). I had recently graduated from high school near the nerdy top of my class and was looking forward, if apprehensively, to entering university in the fall to study architecture. 

It seems twisted, but Sleepless in Seattle gave me renewed confidence in my chosen path. Like Tom Hanks’ character, I was restless, feeling lonely and in need of someone, or something, to fill an emptiness in my life. I desperately wanted—needed—to be seen as a cool adult. Tom Hanks’ character had good friends and a stylish, comfortable house on the water in a region of the country I often daydreamed about. And he ended up with Meg Ryan who was, in my estimation at the time, the hottest woman on the planet.

My emotionally infected logic let me know why this fictional dude had it all: he was an architect!

A career in architecture would give me prestige, excitement and a luxurious lifestyle. It would mask, if not erase, my personal insecurities. Or so I imagined. After only one semester in an undergraduate architecture program, I decided I’d had enough. I was lucky—reality would not have matched my expectations.

When Hollywood screenwriters need a hip profession for a dapper leading character, they often choose architecture. Design and lifestyle magazines fill their pages with glossy pictures of highly distinctive buildings. And at cocktail parties everywhere can be heard the phrase, “You know, I was once going to be an architect,” complete with lots of narcissistic zeal. It all creates the general misconception that architects lead a life of glamour.

But in contacting various architects for this article, each at different stages of their careers, I’ve learned that most of the ideas I’ve held about this line of work are based on faulty stereotypes. And plenty of news stories and online discussion forums also reveal a profession very different from the one I thought I knew when I first signed up for it.

To be sure, there are plenty of great reasons to consider architecture as a career that can lead to personal and professional fulfillment. It can give you the opportunity to have a tangible effect on the quality of other people’s lives and cultural experiences. It can give you an outlet to explore the interplay between function and style. And it can provide you the chance to make a positive difference in the world by designing buildings that have low impact upon the environment.

Still, as you ponder the profession of architecture, you might want to consider the following five points:

5) It’s probably more complex than you think

Being an architect requires more than just concerning oneself with surface design and style. Jim Meiklejohn, a highly experienced, sought-after architect in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, says, “In reality, those parts are there, but there are an awful lot of cost, construction and technical components to the profession.”

When you see architects at work in the movies, chances are good they’re busy drafting or making models for very prestigious projects. What usually gets left off screen are the important, time-consuming tasks of negotiating with builders, getting approvals, presenting at public hearings, assembling the right teams and dealing with delays in construction schedules. Design is frequently a very small portion of the workday, if it happens at all.

And advances in technology have created a flood of new design and structural possibilities, meaning plenty of architects feel pressure to stay up-to-date. With computer aided drafting (CAD), the practice of hand drawing may soon be extinct in architectural firms the world over.

But embracing the modern tools of the profession, complex as they may seem, doesn’t mean turning your back on inventiveness or artistry. The architects I contacted were quick to say that they don’t believe technology is having a detrimental impact on creativity. Marc Wyzykowski, a young architect and project manager for a small firm in California, says, “People should understand that technology is not in opposition to artistic expression. Technological advances in software that we use, and building systems, have augmented artistic expression in architecture today. We would not know who Frank Gehry is without technological innovation.”