ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the phenomenon of overwork in architecture and explains how the system disadvantages women, caregivers, and older workers, and presents models of alternative flexible work organisation. Contemporary open-plan layouts in architectural offices organise space through banks of desks that are easily surveyed. However the survey-able desk has an even longer history, arguably originating in the 19th century practice of apprenticed pupils paying an established architect for drawing instruction. Beliefs and work practices are entwined in architecture’s ‘long hours’ culture, a pattern that begins in architecture schools and continues beyond graduation. The negative interpretation of non-standard patterns of work is not confined to architecture. Rates of flexibility censure vary but are reported as higher in male dominated professions, which would include architecture. An architectural culture that prizes full-time workers, accompanied by intransigent attitudes to flexible work practice, curtails women architects’ engagement.
