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The way the architectural profession is practised today did not simply happen; it was built, slowly, out of a handful of developments, each a genuine advance – the rise of the professional institutes, the arrival of public procurement, a series of consequential court rulings. Each was a reasonable answer to the problem of its day. Taken together, over more than a century, they have produced the fragile, atomised practice we now treat as natural. The profession's priorities took shape inside that same frame: the enforcement of standards, the culture of the competition, the turn toward sustainability – all more a response to pressure than a choice of its own.¹

The profession has accepted the rules of the game, and now spends much of its effort adapting to the consequences of how the legal and political environment has opened up over the last fifty years – a shift that has quietly reshaped it.² But the "maths" underneath is indifferent, and tends to pull the field into a spiral toward the bottom.³ The proposed measures are fine as far as they go, but they treat symptoms rather than causes – partly because institutional memory is short, and the status quo has every reason not to let go. The spiral is not bad luck on individual commissions. In an unprotected market the hard project is a statistical certainty – a fat-tail event, heavier and likelier than anyone expects. When it lands, it is the architect exposed in open competition who absorbs the unpriced risk of the developed, technical design. The rational move is to step out before that risk falls due.

The retreat is only one symptom, and a spreading one, while the landscape overburdens those who stay and try hardest. But their good intentions alone never fix it. That it is structural is worth showing precisely – even if it means applying a little classical mathematics. When architects and civil engineers work on design, planning, permitting, and construction together, their decisions become the variables of a single objective function – one that is non-separable, because the mixed partial derivatives (the mutual couplings between decisions) are very large in today's world, and non-convex, because the resulting landscape is rugged, full of false peaks and dead ends rather than a single smooth slope to the best answer.⁴ Under those conditions, coordinate descent – each profession optimising mainly its own part – is provably liable to get stuck in a local minimum that can be arbitrarily worse than the global optimum.⁵ From there, no single participant can improve things by adjusting their own decisions alone.⁶ The only way out is a simultaneous, coordinated change of several of these variables at once, sustained as iterative coordination, re-optimised over time, not a one-off settlement. The current structure of practice, and its contractual basis, are ill-suited to that – and it is precisely the architect, as the responsible coordinator, who eats the consequences. Put simply, the problem is not failure of effort. It is systemic.

Editor

Notes and references

1. Abbott, A. (1988). *The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor*. University of Chicago Press; and Larson, M. S. (1977). *The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis*. University of California Press — on professions securing their standing by walling expert work off from open price competition. ↩
2. On competition law dismantling mandatory fee scales, the last of them Germany's HOAI in 2019: Court of Justice of the EU, *Commission v Germany*, C-377/17. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62017CJ0377; and RIBA's abandonment of its mandatory fee scale. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/archive/riba-to-bin-outdated-fee-scale-graphs ↩
3. Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. *Quarterly Journal of Economics*, 84(3), 488–500 — markets selecting on price under quality uncertainty tend to drive quality down. ↩
4. Boyd, S., & Vandenberghe, L. (2004). *Convex Optimization*. Cambridge University Press — on non-convexity and the existence of local optima arbitrarily far from the global one. ↩
5. Tseng, P. (2001). Convergence of a Block Coordinate Descent Method for Nondifferentiable Minimization. *Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications*, 109(3), 475–494 — coordinate descent need not reach a global, or even stationary, point when the objective is non-separable. ↩
6. Nash, J. (1951). Non-Cooperative Games. *Annals of Mathematics*, 54(2), 286–295 — the equilibrium in which no participant can improve by changing their own decision alone; the familiar Prisoner's Dilemma is the case where that equilibrium is jointly worse than an outcome reachable only together. See also Schelling, T. C. (1960). *The Strategy of Conflict*. Harvard University Press, on coordination and the strategic limits of unilateral moves. ↩

Picture a dinner. Everyone at the table ordered from the average. The client budgeted the expected figure, the bank lent against it, the planning office approved it. But the kitchen never serves the average. It serves the whole spread. The delays, the price spikes, the late change to a regulation, the municipality that cannot make up its mind. Someone has to swallow the gap between the tidy number on the menu and the messy plate that actually arrives. The contract decides who, and most contracts seat the architect at the head of the table and leave them to eat whatever the kitchen sends out. The pleasant surprises drift off towards the developer. The unpleasant ones land on the plate of the party who promised a fixed outcome in a world that only ever delivers a range.

It is tempting to read this as a profession complaining about its fate. But it is far more a diagnosis. For most of the last century, certainty in planning and building was real. But it was a purchased good, not a natural one. Stable material prices, slack in the supply chain, unhurried regulation, and a fee structure that kept architects from undercutting one another. These were all buffers, and buffers absorb variance. They have been deliberately removed in the name of efficiency that let everyone pretend the future was fixed. The cushions that disguised the distribution are simply gone. So when a project overruns or stumbles, the problem is rarely a hidden incompetence finally exposed. It is variance that was always present in the work, becoming visible now that nothing softens it.

When a building misses its goals, the instinct is to find the party who got it wrong and make them carry the difference. But chasing indemnity does not shrink the gap. It only relocates it and, by the logic of how the industry is now built, it relocates it onto the smallest balance sheets in the room. Small studios cannot pool a bad outcome the way a large firm can. For a two-person studio, one project is the whole portfolio, and one tail event is existential. Pushing the variance there simply loads the risk onto the party least able to absorb it, who then does the only thing they can – competes on price and sheds whatever risk they can in turn. That is a spiral dressed up as prudence. Offloading the risk that way is like bailing water into the other end of the boat – it never actually leaves.

None of this fell from the sky. For almost the whole of the profession's existence, the duty and the protection arrived together. The duty itself is ancient. Hammurabi already had it almost four thousand years ago, in the form of a builder put to death if the house collapsed on its owner – back then there was no profession at all, only a master builder and a frightening liability. In the Middle Ages the protection was collective. The masons' guilds fixed prices, set the standards, and capped competition, so no member had to undercut another to win work. The guild protected the cathedral and the mason's living at the same time.¹ The figure we would now call an architect – the designer set apart from the trades, owing something to the city as well as to the client – is a Renaissance idea, but it grew up under patronage. You served a prince or a pope, not a market. The modern shape was set in the nineteenth century, when the new institutes (RIBA in 1834, the AIA in 1857) codified a conscience and, in the same breath, a commercial wall. Architects were barred from profiting from the building work and forbidden, by mandatory minimum fee scales, to compete on price. That wall quietly did something useful. It meant the work of getting a building right was underwritten – the care was subsidised by the protection. Then, within living memory, two things happened at once. Competition law dismantled the fee floors across Europe and America (the last of them, Germany's, as recently as 2019)^{2, 3, 4, 5}, and a heavy new obligation landed – energy, carbon, together with the thickening rulebook of the past fifty years. Society kept the first half of the old sentence – we will load you with duties to people who do not pay you – and deleted the second – and wall you off from the price war so you can afford them. The duties are heavier than ever. The wall that made the whole thing bearable is gone.

Yet it would be too tidy to cast the architect purely as the party things were done to. Much of the load is carried voluntarily, and on purpose. A profession that measured itself in money alone might have rebuilt some wall of its own – consolidated, specialised, priced the risk, declined the unpaid competition, stepped back from scope it is not paid to cover. Architecture, by and large, chooses otherwise, because it does not run on money alone. It runs on craft, on the award, the publication, the regard of peers, the authorship of something that may outlive its makers. The one who undercharges and overdelivers and gives everything to the good idea is not losing the game – they are playing a different one, whose rewards are largely symbolic and whose entry is paid in unbilled hours. This is the genuinely delicate part, because the generous reading and the sceptical reading describe the same fact. The refusal to treat a building as merely a product is the discipline's dignity – and it is also the very thing that lets the field draw unbilled hours and unpriced risk from its own members under a banner everybody salutes. The ideal is real, and it is bound up with the cost. Both halves have to be held at once.

If blame cannot shrink the variance and vocation cannot be legislated away, what is left is the only thing that actually works – managing the spread together. You cannot sue the weather. You can only dress for it and agree in advance who carries the umbrella. Simple in theory, difficult in practice.⁶

The first is to buy back a little slack on purpose – generous tolerances, a loose-fit plan, structural and systems margin – and to recognise that a building trimmed to the bone is also the one whose outcome swings most violently when anything moves, because margin is precisely what holds a design steady. Slack is not waste. It is the optimisation of survival, and it deserves to be priced and funded openly rather than cut first.

The second is to make the disagreement explicit. There is rarely a single client with a single wish, but a developer and an investor and a planning authority and a future occupant whose interests genuinely pull apart, and the trade-offs between them should sit on the table as shared decisions rather than be smuggled inside the planning for one party to absorb as a private failing.

The third is to pool risk rather than dump it – target-cost arrangements, early contractor involvement, or even partnering models where the parties win or lose together. These are not just gestures. They put the risk where it can actually be carried.

For the client, all of this comes down to one plain fact about the fee in front of them. It is no longer a protected margin with care folded invisibly inside. It is, much more directly, the budget for that care, and the value the architect creates. Driven to the lowest bid, the fee does not shave off a comfortable surplus – it buys less of the work that keeps a building out of trouble. It skips the coordination that prevents a clash on site, the second look that catches the detail before it leaks, the slack to absorb a price rise without a redesign. A cheap service often makes for an expensive building. An architect who says plainly where the uncertainty sits is not the weakest bid in the room. They are the one already minding the thing the client will still be using long after the price of the architects' drawings has stopped mattering. That, in the end, is the only thing worth optimising for.

None of this is simple, but it is at least the right problem to be working on.

Editor

* In business, project management, and design, "eating the variance" means absorbing the financial, operational, or labour costs of unexpected deviations from a plan without passing them onto the client, customer, or higher stakeholders.

Notes and references

1. Cartwright, M. (2018, November 14). Medieval Guilds. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Guilds/ ↩
2. https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/957541/dl ↩
3. https://averyreview.com/media/pages/issues/36/sherman-antitrust-act/587ed7ad41-1772703976/deamer-the-sherman-antitrust-act.pdf ↩
4. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/archive/riba-to-bin-outdated-fee-scale-graphs ↩
5. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62017CJ0377 ↩
6. Gransberg, Douglas & Jeong, H. (2019). A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ALLIANCING AND INTEGRATED PROJECT DELIVERY ON COMPLEX PROJECTS: PARALLEL SYSTEMS SHARING A COMMON OBJECTIVE. ↩

Architekti strávia roky náročným vzdelávaním, aby mohli vstúpiť do regulovaného povolania a niesť zodpovednosť za estetickú, technickú, právnu a ľudskú komplexnosť, ktorá formuje vystavané prostredie na celé desaťročia. Celkový obrat architektonických praxí viac ako 580 000 registrovaných architektov v Európe však predstavuje nie viac ako 1 % stavebného trhu*. Tieto čísla odhaľujú nesúlad medzi hodnotou, ktorú architekti vytvárajú, a spôsobom, akým sú ich služby bežne odmeňované. Ak majú architekti naďalej prinášať trvácu kvalitu pre klientov a komunity, modely odmeňovania za ich služby sa musia zmeniť. Architektonická profesia potrebuje novú diskusiu o hodnote.

Profesii dlhodobo dominujú dva modely odmeňovania a oba sú vyčerpané. Percento zo stavebných nákladov viaže odmenu architekta na číslo, ktoré nemá pod kontrolou. Tento model predpokladá, že náročnosť a stavebné náklady sa pohybujú ruka v ruke. Často to tak nie je. Druhým modelom je časový honorár. Spočítaj hodiny. Vynásob ich hodinovou sadzbou. Vystav faktúru. Pôsobí to férovo. Pôsobí to transparentne. V skutočnosti je to intelektuálny relikt. Pracovná teória hodnoty bola jadrom klasickej ekonómie u Smitha a Ricarda, no marginalistická revolúcia 70. rokov 19. storočia ju vytlačila a už sa nikdy neobnovila. Nedokázala započítať inováciu. Nedokázala započítať trh. Jej pokračovanie v marxistickej filozofii bolo len potvrdením jej vymiznutia z ekonomického myslenia. Žiadna relevantná ekonomická teória modernej éry netvrdí, že hodnota je úmerná vloženej práci. A predsa, vo veku umelej inteligencie, profesia stále obhajuje svoju hodnotu počítaním hodín. Vzťah medzi stráveným časom a vytvorenou hodnotou nikdy nebol voľnejší. Vždy bol konvenciou. Dnes je absurditou. V posledných rokoch, odkedy internet a mobily pretvorili svet, sa vzťahy architektov s klientmi zmenili. Očakávania sa znásobili. Nové technológie a regulačné prostredie urobili z každého projektu labyrint vzájomne previazaných povinností. V práci architekta sa tak mnohé dynamicky mení. Spôsoby odmeňovania sa nepohli vôbec. Reálne honoráre v prostredí politicky diktovanej voľnej súťaže klesajú. Výsledkom sú preteky ku dnu, ktoré trestajú kvalitu, nie priemernosť. Klienti od architektov očakávajú samotné stavby. Veci, ktoré môžu užívať, obývať, zapamätať si, odfotografvať, ukázať na ne. Všetko, čo im predchádza, sa pochopiteľne javí ako náklad na ceste k nim. Toto je problém profesie. A profesia ho musí vyriešiť.

Čo teda robiť? Navyšovanie hodinovej sadzby alebo percent z nákladov stavby nie sú odpoveďou. Zavedené modely odmeňovania nedokážu vyjadriť hodnotu, ktorú architekt prináša, ani pre architektov, ani pre klientov. Potrebný je iný rámec spolupráce. Časový honorár môže stále zostať užitočnou metódou pri ďalších a dodatočných službách a poradenskej práci. Pre základné služby architekta je potrebné uviesť do praxe pojem hodnoty, nie ako rétorické gesto, ale ako dôsledný, ekonomicky podložený rámec každej fázy. Budova je dôkazom. Hodnotou je proces, ktorý architekt vedie od počiatočnej neistoty k rozhodnutiam, ktoré ho posúvajú ďalej.

Myšlienka je jednoduchá. Každá etapa práce architekta vytvára pre klienta osobitný, kvantifikovateľný výsledok. Nemeraný v hodinách. Neviazaný na náklady stavby. Meraný tým, čo klient môže urobiť, aké rozhodnutia môže prijať, akým rizikám sa môže vyhnúť, aké možnosti sa mu otvoria ako priamy dôsledok kvalitne ukončenej fázy. Riziko odstránené vo fáze overovacej štúdie má väčšiu hodnotu než honorár za túto fázu. Koncept, ktorý sa v povoľovacom procese stane financovateľným, má väčšiu hodnotu než výkresy, ktoré ho obsahujú. Vezmime si fázu zadania a overovacej štúdie. Pred ňou má klient pozemok a ambíciu. Po nej má program, overenú logiku svojho projektu, pochopenie územnoplánovacích a povoľovacích súvislostí, rozpätie nákladov stavby, ktoré vie reálne podložiť. Hodnota tejto fázy nie je v hodinách strávených jej prípravou. Hodnota je v jasnosti rozhodnutia, v znížení investičného rizika, v schopnosti pokračovať s dôverou. Túto hodnotu možno vypočítať. Možno ju obhájiť. Možno ju zmluvne dohodnúť. Vezmime si fázu spracovania návrhu. Pred ňou je budova konceptom. Po nej je koordinovaným, plnohodnotným riešením, ktoré možno povoliť a obstarať. Je to moment, v ktorom sa sen stáva uskutočniteľným. Hodnota nespočíva vo výkresoch samotných. Hodnota spočíva v realizovateľnosti, úžitkovosti a poistiteľnosti. Cena tejto záruky, v porovnaní s cenou jej absencie, nikdy nie je predmetom sporu. Každá fáza, každá etapa – hodnota.

Klient, ktorý rozumie hodnotovému honoráru, získava profesionála, ktorý vie v každej fáze pomenovať, čo dodáva a prečo na tom záleží. Partnera vo výsledku, nie protivníka vo faktúre. Hodnotové honoráre oceňujú inteligenciu, nie námahu. Odmeňujú investíciu do fáz, v ktorých vznikajú hodnoty. Ak klient vníma dokončenie každej fázy ako náklad, nie ako investíciu, ak odborné vedomosti považuje za komoditu, ktorú treba obstarať za najnižšiu cenu, potom „nekupuje“ to, čo architekt skutočne dodáva. Nie je to jeho vina. Je to nesúlad vo vzťahu. Rámec hodnotových honorárov nemení iba spôsob, akým architekti oceňujú svoju prácu. Mení aj to, kto sú ich klienti. Architekti ním získajú klientov, ktorí im rozumejú. Developerov, ktorí vedia, čo dobre pripravený projekt ušetrí na nákladoch. Inštitúcie, ktoré chápu, čo kvalita návrhu vracia v dlhodobej výkonnosti. Samosprávy, ktoré vedia, čo architektúra robí pre identitu komunity. Niektorí klienti, ktorí túto hodnotu nevidia, pôjdu inde. To je v poriadku. Na trhu je miesto pre tých, ktorí chcú architektúru, aj pre tých, ktorým stačia výkresy.

Argument za spravodlivé odmeňovanie nevznikne presnejším počítaním hodín ani lobovaním za vyššie percentá zo stavebných nákladov. Vznikne zmenou jazyka vo vzťahu medzi klientom a architektom – schopnosťou v každej fáze preukázať, že architektúra vytvára hodnotu, že túto hodnotu možno pomenovať a obhájiť a že honorár je jej legitímnou cenou.

Keď to možno preukázať, profesia nežiada o spravodlivejší podiel. Dokazuje, že to, čo poskytuje, je hodné primeranej odmeny.

Editor

* Zdroj dát: ACE Sector Study 2024

Architects spend years in demanding education to enter a regulated profession, carrying responsibility for aesthetic, technical, legal, and human complexity that shapes the built environment for decades. Across Europe, more than 580,000 registered architects generate total practice turnover representing no more than 1% of the construction market*. These figures reveal a mismatch between the value architects create and the way their services are commonly remunerated. To remain capable of delivering lasting quality for clients and communities, fee models for the services of architects must evolve. The architectural profession needs a new conversation about value.

Two fee models have dominated the profession, and both are exhausted. The percentage of construction cost ties the architect's reward to a number she does not control. The model assumes that complexity and construction cost move in lockstep. Often, they do not. The second is the hourly fee. Count the hours. Multiply by a rate. Issue an invoice. This feels fair. It feels transparent. It is, in fact, an intellectual relic. The labour theory of value was central to classical economics through Smith and Ricardo, displaced by the marginalist revolution of the 1870s, and never recovered again. It could not account for innovation. It could not account for the market. Its continuation in Marxist philosophy only confirmed its displacement from economic thought. Not one relevant economic theory in the modern era holds that value is proportional to labour input. And yet, in the age of artificial intelligence, the profession still defends its worth by counting hours. The relationship between time spent and value created has never been looser. It was always a convention. Now it is an absurdity. In recent years, since the internet and the smartphone rewired the world, the relationships between architects and their clients have been transformed. Expectations have multiplied. New technologies and the regulatory environment have made every project a labyrinth of interdependent obligations. So much in the architect's work is shifting dynamically. The fee structures have not moved at all. Real fees are declining amid politically dictated free competition, and the race to the bottom punishes quality, not mediocrity. Clients tend to commission an architect for the buildings themselves — the things you can inhabit, remember, photograph, point to. Everything before it reads, understandably, as the cost of getting there. This is the profession's problem. And it is the profession's to solve.

What, then, is to be done? Raising the hourly rate or the percentage of construction cost is not the answer. The established fee models fail to express the value that the architect delivers — for architects and for clients alike. What is needed is a different framework for collaboration. Hourly charging may still remain a useful method for other and additional services and advisory work. For the architect's basic services, however, the concept of value must be introduced into practice — not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a rigorous, economically grounded framework for every phase. The building is the proof. The value is the process, led by the architect from initial uncertainty to the decisions that carry it forward.

The insight is simple. Each stage of an architect's work creates a distinct, quantifiable outcome for the client. Not measured in hours. Not anchored to construction costs. Measured in what the client can do, what decisions they can make, what risks they can avoid, what possibilities they unlock, as a direct result of that phase being completed well. A risk retired at feasibility is worth more than its fee. A scheme made fundable at planning is worth more than the drawings that carry it. Consider the briefing and feasibility phase. Before it, the client has a site and an ambition. After it, they have a programme, a tested development logic, an understanding of planning and permitting contexts, a construction budget range they can actually underwrite. The value of that phase is not the hours spent arriving there. The value is the clarity of decision, the reduction in investment risk, the ability to proceed with confidence. That value can be calculated. It can be defended. It can be contracted. Consider the design development phase. Before it, the building is a design concept. After it, it is a coordinated, comprehensive proposition that can be consented and procured. It is the moment at which the dream becomes buildable. The value lies not in the drawings themselves. The value is buildability, usability, and insurability. The cost of that guarantee, when quantified against the cost of its absence, is never a debate. Every phase, every stage — a value.

The client who understands value-based fee gets a professional who can articulate at every stage what she is delivering and why it matters. A partner in outcome, not an adversary in invoice. Value-based fees prize intelligence, not effort. They reward investment in the phases in which value is created. If a client treats every phase completion as a cost rather than an investment, if expertise is regarded as a commodity to be sourced at the lowest price, then that client is not buying what the architect is really delivering. That is not their fault. It is a relationship mismatch. The value-based fee framework does not just change how architects price their work. It changes who their clients are. It will attract clients who understand it — developers who know what a well-briefed project saves in costs, institutions that understand what design quality returns in long-term performance, municipalities that know what architecture does for community identity. Some clients who do not see this value will go elsewhere. That is all right. The market has room for those who want architecture, and for those for whom drawings will suffice.

The case for fair remuneration will not be made by counting hours more carefully or lobbying for percentage increases in construction cost. It will be made by changing the language of the client–architect relationship — by demonstrating, at every stage, that architecture creates value, that this value can be named and defended, and that the fee is its legitimate price.

When that can be demonstrated, the profession is no longer asking for a fairer slice. It is proving that what it delivers is worth paying for.

Editor

* Zdroj dát: ACE Sector Study 2024

Archdata je webový portál pre architektov, klientov a verejných obstarávateľov, ktorí chcú spolupracovať jasnejšie, čitateľnejšie a v súlade so štandardným modelom práce architekta. Vzniká ako praktické prostredie pre lepšie porozumenie tomu, čo architekt poskytuje, akú hodnotu prináša a ako sa má spolupráca nastaviť od prvého zadania až po užívanie stavby.

Základom portálu sú moduly Štandardy a Kalkulátor. Štandardy, vypracované pod záštitou a s podporou Slovenskej komory architektov, obsahujú metodické postupy, katalógy služieb, zmluvné vzory a slovník pojmov, ktoré pomáhajú pomenovať rozsah služieb architekta a úlohy klienta. Kalkulátor ponúka orientačné nástroje na overenie hodnoty zákazky architekta podľa parametrov stavby a náročnosti zadania.

Portál dopĺňa AI asistent, ktorý pomáha rýchlejšie vyhľadávať v metodických podkladoch.

Cieľom portálu je vytvárať stabilné podmienky pre férovú, odbornú a dlhodobo fungujúcu spoluprácu medzi klientmi a architektmi.

Editor

Archdata is a web portal for architects, clients and public-sector procurers who want to collaborate more clearly, more transparently and in line with the standard model of an architect's work. It has been created as a practical environment for better understanding what an architect provides, what value they bring, and how collaboration should be set up — from the very first brief through to the use of the completed building.

The portal is built around two core modules: Standards and Calculator. The Standards module, produced with the backing and support of the Slovak Chamber of Architects, contains methodological procedures, service catalogues, model contracts and a glossary of terms that help to define the scope of the services of architects and the client's responsibilities. The Calculator provides indicative tools for verifying the value of an architect's commission according to the parameters of the building and the complexity of the brief.

The portal is complemented by an AI assistant, which helps you search the methodological materials more quickly.

The portal's aim is to create stable conditions for fair, professional and enduring collaboration between clients and architects.

Editor