Why "Architects" Are Taking Over

The term is vague but sounds authoritative – perfect for the information economy

Inigo Jones, the man who introduced Renaissance architecture to Britain, shows the lack of technical knowledge that long characterised the profession. He was a costume designer by training. (Image: Wikipedia)

According to a major UK recruitment company, architects are now the highest earning professionals in the job market. Not real architects, of course, but security architects, followed closely by solution architects and cloud architects. These tech positions have nothing to do with the design of buildings, but they do earn more than double the average architect’s salary of £45,000. As Harry Wallop observes in an entertaining piece for the Times, the term “architect” has been caught up in an epidemic of pompous and inflated job titles. He gives more examples from the IT industry: “There are enterprise architects, control enablement architects, data warehouse architects, Azure cloud solution architects… and plain old technology architects.” It doesn’t stop there. Among the other roles that Wallop finds are customer experience architect, content architect, inclusive culture architect and diversity architect.

Why has architecture become such a popular metaphor in white-collar work? In fairness, the concept has always lent itself to imaginative extension; in his dialogue The Statesman, for instance, Plato compares the kind of intelligence needed for effective leadership to that of the architect. I think similar assumptions about the supposed qualities of the architect’s mind make the title appealing today. “Architect” is one of the personality types identified by the Myers-Briggs test, a questionnaire used by many corporate employers. According to one website, architects in the Myers-Briggs sense are “intellectually curious individuals with a deep-seated thirst for knowledge,” who “value creative ingenuity, straightforward rationality, and self-improvement.” More generally, the word “architect” suggests someone who is both creative and organised, possessing technical awareness as well as vision and judgment. It implies an ability to stand back and see the whole picture, to make a detailed plan and keep track of the moving parts.

Of course the grandeur of the term should make us suspicious of what it conceals. The architectural profession has had a famously uncomfortable relationship with the technical business of actually building things; at various times since the Renaissance, such practical knowledge has been left to lowly craftsmen or engineers, allowing architecture to be regarded as more of an intellectual and artistic pursuit, the domain of the gentleman amateur or the respectable professional. When the title is extended into other fields today, it carries with it a similar ambiguity. Some of the jobs that have borrowed it involve deep technical expertise and enormous responsibility; maybe with better “security architecture,” the British Library would not still be reeling from a cyber attack it experienced last October. In other cases though – “cultural architect” springs to mind – the term seems to be compensating for a lack of skill by invoking a vague impression of managerial competence or strategic insight. Strangely, large bureaucratic organisations often seem to echo the empty honours and indifference to practical knowledge that were characteristic of more aristocratic eras. “Architect” can easily become one of those sonorous words that advertises a person’s status rather than any concrete, learned abilities.

This presents an interesting contrast with how design roles have multiplied over the decades. The term “design” is less vulnerable to rhetorical inflation, for the simple reason that it usually implies specialised, technical understanding rather than general intelligence. And yet, as I’ve learned from hours spent trawling through obscure search results in library catalogues, the professional applications of design are almost limitless, ranging from software to waste pipes, electrical circuitry to satellites. There are books whose entire purpose is to share insights between fields of design that, while nominally part of the same discipline, probably don’t know of each other’s existence. Ironically, this extraordinary specialisation of designers stems from the same source as the ill-defined roles of some “architects,” namely, the sheer complexity of the modern economy. The growth in products and services, and the increasingly differentiated processes for making, delivering and selling them, calls into being new forms of design. But it also gives rise to complex bureaucratic edifices, which end up committing most of their energy to managing and co-ordinating their own internal structures.