Architects must get over their aversion to the business side of practice, writes Gareth Stapleton as part of our Performance Review series.

Architects are trained to solve spatial problems. Buildings, not businesses. The myth runs deep: the lone genius sketching late into the night, conjuring visions for cities not yet imagined.

Seductive, but false. Practices don’t collapse because of weak ideas. They collapse because they are badly run.

Architecture has an identity crisis. Too many firms behave as if business rules don’t apply to them. They bill by the hour. They cling to memories of fee scales. They scrape by on wafer-thin margins. They gamble on competitions that bleed talent and resources.

If we want architecture to survive, we must drop the fantasy that “business” is a dirty word

Burnout is normalised. Fees are pitiful. The profession’s cultural value far exceeds its economic resilience – a paradox that is consuming it.

If we want architecture to survive, we must drop the fantasy that “business” is a dirty word. Running a practice is not the dull necessity behind design, it is designed. A business model is a drawing in another language.

A client relationship is a detail to be shaped. Culture itself is a design project, one that demands imagination, courage and discipline.
Entrepreneurship must be reclaimed, not in the hollow Silicon Valley sense, but as a mindset: purposeful, client-focused, value-driven.

The best practices today don’t just design buildings. They create the machinery that makes design possible – business models, services and cultures that can withstand economic shocks, social upheaval and environmental crises.

Ask most architects why their practice exists, and they stumble. “To make good buildings.” It isn’t enough. Purpose is not branding fluff. It dictates who hires you, who stays with you, and how you matter. Without it, firms drift. With it, they lead.

Alejandro Aravena demonstrated that process can be as meaningful as product in his incremental housing projects. HawkinsBrown went further, embedding social intent into its business form by becoming an EBT and a B Corp. These are not side notes. Purpose is strategy.

The profession’s other blind spot is its obsession with projects. One client. One building. One fee. A fragile equation. When markets crash, when projects stall, when politics interfere, the practice wobbles.

Entrepreneurial firms don’t just wait for commissions. They diversify.

If architects could make more money manufacturing cardboard boxes, they should

BIG set up BIG Ideas to spin products, tools and IP alongside buildings. Assemble stretched across art, design, film and regeneration, building resilience through multiplicity. Snøhetta works in architecture, landscape, interiors and graphics, blurring boundaries and strengthening capacity.

These moves aren’t distractions, they are new definitions of practice.

Too often, clients are treated as adversaries, meddlers, philistines or cost-cutters. It’s toxic. Architecture is a service industry. Pretend otherwise, and you lose.

The most successful firms flip the script. Snøhetta‘s reputation rests as much on collaboration as form. Its best projects emerge from listening, empathy and co-creation.

When clients and communities are partners rather than obstacles, conversations shift from defending fees to creating shared value. Trust follows. And with it, resilience.

The irony is that architects themselves often fail to grasp the value they create. Too many reduce their role to drawings and hours, when in fact they de-risk multimillion-pound investments, shape reputations and transform communities. By neglecting to claim that value, the profession has handed much of it away to project managers, consultants and anyone willing to step into the gap.

The result? One more thing on the architect’s to-do list, and one less reason for clients to see them as essential. If we can’t articulate that value, why should clients?

And here’s the brutal truth: if architects could make more money manufacturing cardboard boxes, they should. Because only a healthy business can sustain design. Profit is not vulgar. It is oxygen.

The future belongs to firms that treat themselves as design problems

Yet too many architects wear their ignorance of finance as if it were a mark of purity. They can calculate the simple bending moment of a beam, but not a profit margin. They can detail a curtain wall but not a cash-flow forecast.

This is not noble. It is negligent. Without financial literacy, firms fluctuate between feast and famine, unable to innovate or invest effectively. Ignorance doesn’t protect creativity. It starves it.

Business competence is not the enemy of design. It is the condition for design. Without margins, no research. Without cash flow, no experiments. Without a strategy, no innovation. Business doesn’t suffocate creativity, it sets it free.

And yet, the culture of the profession still fetishises martyrdom. The long night in the studio. The unpaid competition entry. The heroic narrative of suffering for design.

This is not nobility, it is a dysfunction. Burnout is not a badge of honour, it is a leadership failure. Good leaders know when to say no: when to walk away from toxic clients, when to delegate.

They design organisations that nurture rather than consume. Leadership isn’t about control. It’s about building systems where creativity can flourish without destroying the people who create it.

The lesson is blunt: the future belongs to firms that treat themselves as design problems. Just as we sketch facades, we must prototype business models, iterate on formats, redraw internal cultures. Creativity demands it. Discipline sustains it.

Some of the most radical experiments in architecture today are happening not in form, but in format – co-ops, B Corps, hybrids straddling research and delivery. Cross-sector collaborations linking architects with technologists, activists and financiers.

Those who cling to the drawing as their sole deliverable will be displaced

These models don’t dilute design, they empower it. They expand the terrain where architects can create value.

Technology raises the stakes further. Artificial intelligence, digital twins and modular platforms are not threats unless we ignore them. They are invitations to rethink what architects sell. Is it a drawing? A process? A system? An experience?

BIG‘s spin-outs and Aravena’s incremental frameworks hint at answers. The firms that experiment with these questions will thrive. Those who cling to the drawing as their sole deliverable will be displaced.

The myths won’t save us. The underpaid martyr, the hope that “design will speak for itself”. These were always illusions. They are collapsing now in plain sight.

And the stakes are bigger than the profession itself. The world is urbanising. Climate deadlines are closing in. Built environment decisions have consequences that span generations. Weak businesses cannot rise to this challenge. Strong ones can.

Gareth Stapleton is a partner at management consultancy Host and a senior vice president at real-estate firm Colliers. In 2025 he was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to architecture and to project and construction management. His book The Architect’s Edge: Innovation, Leadership and Practice was published by Unicorn Publishing Group in August 2025.

The photo is by Pedro Cardigo.

Illustration by Yifei Xiang

Performance Review

This article is part of Dezeen’s Performance Review series interrogating the problems plaguing architecture and design, from difficult working conditions to ethical dilemmas.

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