Like so many others, I was lured into architecture as a child by the seductive glow of British television.

Grand Designs presented a glamorous, almost heroic vision: passionate couples with bottomless determination transforming ambitious dreams into breathtaking homes. Kevin McCloud’s narration romanticised risk, creativity, and the pure joy of building something meaningful. The show made architecture feel accessible, exciting, and deeply personal – an artistic calling rather than a mere career. It masked the grind, the politics, the financial reality and the institutional dysfunction.

By the time I entered architecture school in Melbourne, I was already hooked on the myth. Many of my peers trace their decision to the same cultural pipeline: design shows, glossy magazines, and the promise of shaping the world through beautiful buildings.

That initial spark is understandable. Architecture matters. It is one of the few professions that directly shapes the physical environment for millions of people every day – homes, workplaces, cities, hospitals, schools. Done well, it improves quality of life, supports sustainability, and creates spaces that uplift the human spirit.

Yet the profession itself has evolved into something far darker: a self-perpetuating cult characterised by intellectual elitism, extreme political homogeneity, economic self-exploitation, and social inbreeding.

This is not hyperbole.

It is a pattern recognised by countless current and former practitioners. The very system that once drew idealistic young people now burns them out and drives many away, all while society still desperately needs competent, pragmatic architects.

The Dream Television Sold Us

The Grand Designs effect cannot be overstated. The show and similar media – think Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch – sold architecture as a noble, individualistic pursuit where vision always triumphs over practicality. Young viewers absorbed the fantasy: late-night sketching sessions fuelled by passion rather than deadlines, clients who deferred to genius, and buildings that became cultural icons.

Reality hits hard in school. The five-to-seven-year education path is far less about technical mastery and more about ideological formation. Studio culture demands all-nighters – I gave up my social life for years, staying up long after my family had gone to bed, building scale models with balsa wood, glue and tweezers under the cold light of my Luxo Lamp in the bleak and depressing complete silence of the night.

The critiques were often brutal and very public. I regularly saw tutors tear down students’ work so harshly that they ended up in tears. One mocked an international student in front of the entire class for mispronouncing an architectural term. Another picked up a student’s carefully made model and threw it onto the table in anger. Some tutors set such unrealistic assignments that all-nighters without sleep became were the only option.

I studied in both Melbourne and Paris, and in each city there was one particularly notorious design studio run by a difficult but highly respected tutor. Students were expected to give up everything – social life, sleep, balance –  just to survive the semester. These studios were brutal, yet they carried a strange badge of honour. They were the most sought-after, competitive design electives amongst students.

This kind of emotional hazing was treated as normal – even necessary – training at the time. It was simply how architecture school worked.

Some of the most prestigious architecture schools are known by employers to produce graduates who are nowhere near job-ready and have little understanding of how to actually put a real building together. If it wasn’t for the initial drafting course I completed before studying architecture, I feel I would have been in the same boat. I once knew of a firm that asked graduate interviewees the size of a standard brick before progressing their application  – it weeded out a large majority of candidates. Students learn early that suffering is proof of commitment. This hothouse environment filters for those willing to romanticise hardship – the same trait that keeps the profession’s exploitative structures intact for decades.

The Superiority Complex and the Cult Dynamic

Once inside the profession, the superiority complex solidifies. Architecture has long cultivated the image of the architect as a visionary auteur, heir to figures like Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, or Zaha Hadid. The ‘starchitect’ era amplified this: signature buildings became brands, and the profession celebrated individual genius over collaborative pragmatism. In firms and schools, practical concerns – codes, engineering coordination, contractor realities – are often treated as annoyances rather than core responsibilities. Outsiders (clients, developers, the public, even clients) are viewed with subtle condescension. When criticism arises – over budget overruns, maintenance nightmares, or buildings that feel alienating – the default response is dismissal: ‘They don’t understand design.’ This creates classic cult behaviour: a shared vocabulary, a canon of revered projects, aesthetic orthodoxies, and strong in-group loyalty. Dissent is rarely engaged on merit; it is moralised or psychologised. The result is an insular world where architects talk mainly to other architects, reinforcing their elevated self-image while disconnecting from the people who actually use their buildings.

Political Uniformity and Its Consequences

The profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning, often to an extreme degree. This alignment stems naturally from the creative and academic pipelines that feed the field.

Architecture schools have integrated frameworks of social justice, equity, decolonisation, and climate activism into nearly every aspect of training.

In practice, there is a near-obsessive focus on ‘stolen land’ almost every project presentation now begins with a declaration that the site is on ‘stolen land’ followed by the Aboriginal name of the place instead of its everyday Australian one. These Acknowledgement of Country statements have become so repetitive and formulaic that they feel like cult-like incantations, delivered with the same solemn tone no matter who is listening or what the project is about.

At its best, this produces meaningful focus on sustainability and inclusive public space. At its worst, it turns design into performative ideology. Every material choice, form, or program becomes a political statement rather than a response to client needs or market realities. And like so many others who have left the profession, I have simply had enough of it.

This monoculture narrows debate. Pragmatic or cost-conscious perspectives are sometimes framed as regressive or insensitive. It alienates potential collaborators and clients outside the ideological bubble. When public taste clashes with prevailing architectural preferences – as seen in repeated surveys showing broad preference for traditional or contextual design over modernist experimentation – the profession often doubles down rather than adapts. The echo chamber becomes self-reinforcing, limiting innovation exactly when the built environment faces complex, real-world pressures.

The Brutal Economics

Perhaps the most indefensible feature is how the profession treats its own talent. After five-to-seven years of expensive university education, many graduates come out with significant HECS-HELP debt, only to enter a market of low starting salaries, extended unpaid or poorly compensated internships, and chronic overtime.

Median architect salaries in Australia typically sit between $75,000 and $97,000 AUD, with most early- and mid-career architects earning closer to the lower end – especially once you factor in long hours, unpaid weekend work, high stress, and the cost of living in cities like Melbourne and Sydney. I recently received an email from a recruiter offering a ‘Project Architect’ role (for those outside the industry, this is roughly equivalent to a registrar in medicine – a mid-level position where you’re expected to run entire projects with significant responsibility) paying only $85,000 AUD and asking for five-to-seven years of experience. This is mind-boggling and I replied as such.

The pay frequently feels inadequate relative to the debt burden and the years invested. This stands in stark contrast to other long professional degrees such as medicine and law. Doctors and lawyers also invest many years and endure intense training, but they are typically rewarded with high salaries that justify the sacrifice. In architecture, the financial return on that investment is often abysmal. The industry has a euphemism for this: it’s called the ‘passion tax’ – the idea that true architects are expected to suffer for their art. Clients and developers squeeze design fees, firms pass the pressure onto staff, and the culture romanticises overwork. Burnout is widespread, with many practitioners reporting poor work-life balance and seriously considering leaving the profession.

This is structural exploitation dressed as dedication. It drives out pragmatic, well intentioned, balanced individuals while retaining those most willing to endure (and later enforce) the same conditions.

The Graduate Jobs Crisis

Compounding all of this is a serious oversupply problem. Universities continue to graduate thousands of architecture students every year, even though the actual number of available positions in the profession is far smaller than it used to be. Most new graduates simply cannot find proper architectural work and end up in long, poorly paid internships or underemployed roles. And the outlook is getting worse. Artificial intelligence is already beginning to automate large parts of the design, documentation, and visualisation process. Within the next decade, AI will likely replace or significantly shrink many of the entry-level and mid-tier tasks that currently employ junior architects. I mean in the future what’s to stop a client from writing a brief, inputting their budget and address and immediately an AI system pulls council drawings, overlays, requirements, local building guidelines and generates plans, sections, elevations, schedules of hardware and finishes and a hyper-realistic 3D model which you can walk around through with VR goggles in matter of seconds? Better yet, visualise and provide a list of the real furniture that goes with the design and is available to buy from local suppliers at the click of a button (sorry interior designers).

The Incestuous Social Ecosystem

Architecture is socially inbred to a remarkable degree. Intense studio culture forges lifelong bonds through shared trauma. Graduates cluster in the same firms, attend the same conferences, follow the same publications, and socialise in overlapping circles. Romantic relationships and marriages within the profession are extremely common. The result is a closed network with limited external perspectives. Intellectual and aesthetic echo chambers deepen. Political and cultural conformity becomes the norm. This insularity hurts adaptability. Architecture faces massive challenges – housing affordability crises, technological disruption in work and living patterns, and aging infrastructure. When nearly everyone at the table shares similar educational backgrounds, aesthetic biases, and ideological priors, blind spots become systemic. Fresh thinking suffers.

The Paradox: We Still Need Architects

Here lies the central tragedy. Society genuinely needs skilled architects more than ever. Urbanisation continues rapidly. The housing shortage in many countries is acute. Architects who balance vision with realism, cost-effectiveness, and user needs could play a heroic role.

Instead, the profession’s pathologies – elitism, political rigidity, exploitation, and insularity – drive away many of the very people best equipped to meet these demands. The brightest pragmatists often exit for careers in tech, building, product design, or unrelated fields. (I now work as a Project Manager.) Those who remain are often the most ideologically committed or the most willing to tolerate poor conditions. Others simply cannot leave due to heavy financial pressures and familial obligations – mortgages, young children, partners also working in the industry, or family expectations – which make retraining or changing careers extremely difficult.

This is the great waste: we urgently need good architects, yet the profession itself repels or traps the very people best equipped to do the job.

Fixing a Broken Profession

Real reform will not be easy, but it is long overdue. Above all, what happens inside architecture schools needs to be openly exposed and seriously examined. The intense studio culture, all-nighters, public humiliations during crits, and the normalisation of emotional breakdown have gone unchallenged for decades. These practices are too often romanticised as ‘character building’ when they frequently cross into damaging psychological territory.

Professional organisations should prioritise protecting young talent from exploitation rather than glorifying it. Firms need to confront billing practices and fee structures that make overwork inevitable. Most importantly, the culture would benefit from genuine intellectual and political diversity: welcoming voices that value function, affordability, and beauty that resonates with everyday users rather than just fellow insiders.

Those of us who left are not failures. We are often the ones who refused to keep subsidising a dysfunctional system with our health, time, and talent. The profession can – and must – do better. It needs to stop treating burnout and conformity as badges of honour and start rewarding competence, pragmatism, and genuine service to the public.

The world still needs architects. It simply does not need the architecture cult that currently dominates the field. If the profession confronts its own myths honestly, it can reclaim the inspiring promise that once drew so many of us in – the same promise Grand Designs once symbolised – before it became buried under layers of elitism, ideology, and self-defeating tradition.