DEATH OF ARHICTECTURE

Architecture didn’t die because it became irrelevant. It died because the system realised it could extract the value of architects without paying for the architect.

Ours is one of the few professions left where people still enter out of compulsion, not convenience. It isn’t a career decision; it’s a biological one. We don’t want to be architects; we need to be. That is exactly why capitalism preys on us. It knows passion is cheaper than salaries. It knows devotion can be leveraged. It knows a calling can be exploited more efficiently than a contract.

The modern development machine doesn’t actually want architecture; it wants the illusion of architecture without the cost, conscience, or craft. It wants the intelligence, the foresight, the systems thinking, the deep time horizon, but it refuses to value any of it because the payoff doesn’t occur within the next quarter. Capitalism consumes in 90-day cycles; architecture operates in 90-year ones.

So the profession becomes collateral damage, not because it failed, but because it cannot be compressed into the shallow timeframes of extraction-based economics.

Developers talk about “value engineering” with a straight face, as if stripping intelligence from a building makes it smarter. As if erasing the architect somehow improves the outcome. As if the long-term cost of bad design doesn’t eventually eclipse every penny they hoarded.

Strip away the language and you see the truth: Value engineering is vandalism with a spreadsheet.

But here’s the part no one says out loud:

Architecture isn’t disappearing. It’s being stolen, fragmented, outsourced, diluted, buried under procurement layers, dissolved into “design and build,” replaced by templates and software, mined for aesthetics rather than insight.

And yet, despite all this, architects keep showing up, because this is not just labour. Its identity. Its purpose.

Which is exactly why the system treats us the way it does.

The real question is:

What comes after this failed model?

What replaces a profession that can no longer survive inside the economic framework that feeds on it?