The Elemental architecture bureau, run by Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena, will no longer hire - no pay - interns. The Chilean workshop, which is renowned for its outreach projects and innovative solutions for affordable housing, explained that it did it to protect its professional reputation. The decision was made after the scandal over the "exploitation of free labor".
It all started when designer and artist Adam Nathaniel Furman decided to raise public awareness of the issue of unpaid internships and launched the #archislavery campaign on Instagram. Elemental was named one of the first "unscrupulous" bureaus to practice a culture of free labor.
The Dezeen website sent a formal request to the Aravena bureau and posted the architects' response. It details
outlines the reasons why Elemental hired such trainees. Chilean architects began to practice working with students back in 2003, when they organized a competition for social housing projects. They paid for the winners of the flight, room and board and considered this interaction "a fair exchange of time for experience." The finalists had to live 4 months in Chile: during this period, as expected, the professionals will have time to transfer knowledge to the trainees. It also took time to develop a working language.
“We knew we couldn't afford to pay interns, so we encouraged candidates to apply for a scholarship in their country. Many students came with grants,”Alejandro Aravena and his colleagues explain in the letter. Over the years, more than 150 interns have visited them under these conditions. The bureau noted that in 2015 it even conducted a survey among young people who worked for them to tell them how much they enjoyed working in the bureau and what they would like to change. Based on the survey, the architects scored 8 out of 10 and made some improvements to the workflow. The changes mainly affected insurance, food and workspace organization.
Another target of Furman's campaign was the 44-year-old Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. The reason was the promulgated terms of participation in the design of the summer pavilion for the Serpentine gallery in London. Recall that this year the London gallery commissioned the traditional summer building from Ishigami. It turned out that the internship is not paid, and applicants must bring their own laptops with preinstalled software to the office. The work week runs from Monday to Saturday, from 11 am to midnight. The email also states that the studio does not help foreign applicants to obtain a Japanese visa. The student who applied for the place of the "intern" admitted to the British magazine Architects ’Journal that after receiving a response from Junya Ishigami + Associates,“I realized how absurd these conditions are.” “I can't afford it, given that Tokyo is not a cheap place to live at all,” explained the failed trainee AJ.
A similar story happened in 2013 with another Japanese architect, the author of the summer pavilion for the Serpentine, So Fujimoto. Then he openly shared with journalists his own experience of using unpaid labor and called such interaction "an excellent opportunity for both parties." Fujimoto said Japan has a widespread practice of "open desks", where students and university graduates work for free for three to six months just to gain experience. Architectural firms regularly employ such trainees in making models and preparing drawings.
However, what is considered common in Japan is against the rules in the UK. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) outlawed unpaid internships back in 2011. British architectural firms must provide internship students with compensation equal to at least the official minimum wage. Fujimoto then managed to avoid serious criticism, and Ishigami was unlucky. He will have to pay everyone who worked and is working on the project for the Serpentine, the gallery itself insisted on this, apparently under pressure from the public, since at first the representatives of the institution said they were not aware of the situation. RIBA President Ben Derbyshire says he was "shocked" when he learned that the workshops were looking for free interns and added that the institute "strongly condemns the exploitation of students in this way."
In the comments under the publications dedicated to these troubles, current students and already established specialists spoke out. Readers' answers basically boil down to one thing: any work must be paid, especially since often trainees are not at all inept newcomers, and can even give a head start to employers, because they have valuable knowledge and are better versed in technology. Someone calls the behavior of architectural "stars" beastly and says that it is not worth hiring interns if there is no money to pay them.
Some commentators recalled that the education of an architect, as it was and remains extremely expensive and elite, primarily in developing countries, for example, in the same Chile. Few can afford to study without the support of wealthy patrons - their role is usually played by their parents. One of Jon's readers wrote that such internships are accepted by those for whom money is not important. “They can afford to work for free because they have wealthy parents. Those who need to support themselves cannot take this risk, and as a result, they are at a disadvantage throughout their careers,”explains the Dezeen reader.
A girl with the nickname shelikesbacon agrees with him: "If internships are not paid, then only children with good financial support can participate in them, which prepares them for higher-paying jobs." This widens the gap between the poorer students and their more fortunate classmates. “Stop acting like it's a great honor for a young student to enter your studio, or your presence is a blessing for them,” Ali says to the workshops.
But there are also those who support well-known bureaus, emphasizing that young people always have a choice and they are free not to agree to those conditions that they do not like. “To be honest, it’s much more efficient to do the job yourself than to train interns,” says reader Hwa Yeong Lee.
Daniel writes that the profession of an architect is in principle cruel and unpaid work is not only the lot of trainees. Firms generally “overuse your deadlines and demand [give labor] all your time, it's not a nine-to-five job,” explains Daniel. “Behind many big names there are innumerable [rank-and-file] professionals performing b about most of the work. They are severely underpaid, constantly overworked and do not receive due recognition for their work. Is the building you like built by Norman Foster? Most likely, this is not even his idea,”the reader sums up.
