An architect’s average median salary is very low, despite it taking over nine years to qualify. This is “totally utterly absurd” says Roger Zogolovitch, creative director of Solidspace, and comes down to the fact that architects don’t monetize their services.

Architects need to understand and prove the services they provide can be value and not only costs for the client. Clients are interested in added value. The job of an architect is to communicate that value as persuasively as possible.

But if adding value is not solely just based on design skills, what’s the market knowledge that architects need to survive? In other businesses, these include a relentless focus on the customer, understanding the importance of increasing sales and profits, and building brands.

Though architects might initially suffer from a lack of business knowledge necessary for entrepreneurship, the architectural discipline does at least prepare architects as problem-solvers. In being creative, architects have already fought half the battle. Creativity is a hard thing to teach and learn; business is not.

Architect’s widely held distrust of being “commercial” is having serious consequences for the profession argues developer Roger Zogolovitch and his son Gus, chairman of Inhabit Homes.

In their talk, held on 8 January 2015, they argue that architects need to put as much emphasis on sales and marketing as design in order to grow a successful business. And they advise architects “to get their hands dirty” by expanding into other areas such as property development, in order to understand their own “creative commercial mode” and understand the decisions that have a tangible financial impact.

See for yourself in the video of the talk by archiboo:

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To learn more about how you can embrace the business behind designing buildings check out Archipreneur’s book on new business models for architects, “The Archipreneur Concept”. There is a whole chapter on Architect as Developers where we explore funding options and practical examples of exactly how successful archipreneurs have used bank loans, partnering and venture capital to develop their own buildings.

The post Editor’s Pick: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur with Roger and Gus Zogolovitch appeared first on Archipreneur.

The business world is changing, and so is the world of architecture. The ‘space as a service’ concept and digital technologies are affecting the architect’s profession. Unfortunately, architecture graduates are coming to learn about these changes somewhat late in the game, and part of the problem lies in the plodding, defunct methodologies that are taught in architectural schools.

The LSA, founded by Will Hunter in 2013 (read our interview with him), however, is proposing a different type of educational enterprise. The LSA wants to make an education in architecture more affordable, emphasizing ‘real world practice’ and better preparing talented graduates for tackling the vast changes that the architectural profession is currently undergoing.

The future for architects is one of the school’s most pressing concerns. In a panel discussion at the Design Museum last month, the LSA invited leading thinkers Alastair Parvin and Daniel Susskind to debate the contemporary state of the profession.

Alastair Parvin is a strategic designer at 00 London and a co-founder of WikiHouse Foundation. We have previously written about WikiHouse, where we outlined Alastair’s simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? This concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere, anytime.

Daniel Susskind is co-author with Richard Susskind of The Future of the Professions, and is a lecturer in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Previously, he worked for the British government in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, as well as in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street and as a Senior Policy Adviser in the Cabinet Office.

Alastair and Daniel – who are at the forefront of critical enquiry into the role of the architect – both presented their visions for how the profession must evolve in a panel discussion with LSA founder Will Hunter and Farshid Moussavi, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

See for yourself:

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We presented our own vision for the 5 emerging trends that will shape the future of architecture in a recent article. What do you think the future for architects will look like?

The post Editor’s Pick: Daniel Susskind and Alastair Parvin Debate the Future for Architects appeared first on Archipreneur.