A recent win for workers stateside and a high profile protest abroad are drawing eyes to the particular tensions of organizing in the industry.
2025 wasn’t a great year for architects. Billing continued to dwindle. In the penultimate month of the year, Trump "deprofessionalized" architecture, a change that will affect higher ed funding for the worse. After a year of sad trombone sounds, building collective power amongst precarious workers has become even more urgent: As business slows, firm leaders attempting to undercut competition by reducing their workforce and overloading whoever remains has become common practice. Yet two pieces of good news this month may provide cause for hope, with architectural workers in the United Kingdom and the United States standing in solidarity and even scoring a win, too. Firms leaders should take notice. These recent battles expose the tensions that are inherent to building a business dependent on creative minds. As the industry’s stresses put pressure on firms to innovate or perish, junior staff are urging their bosses to recognize that valuing their humanity is an asset in creating cutting-edge design—not a liability.
This past week, per the Architect’s Newspaper, workers at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) took to the streets of rainy London to protest the firm’s decision to lay off more than 70 workers who were hired to work on a now-cancelled project (Dezeen reports that the project in question is located in Saudi Arabia; there’s some speculation that it’s one of many cancelled or suspended projects driven by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030). More than half of BIG’s London staff are part of the Section of Architectural Workers Union, though as they await formal recognition from management, BIG’s London office announced "mass redundancies" late last year; the protest was a reaction to the combination of these cuts, and BIG’s recent alleged $10.2 million payout to shareholders (though a representative from BIG called this sum "false"). Workers are demanding six months of pay to those who lost their positions and urging management to recognize the union. As many of those designers are reportedly working on visas, potentially forcing them to relocate or return to their home countries, union demands also include "fair redundancy terms for workers who relocated to London on skilled visas," per AN.
The observation deck SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, designed by Snøhetta, is a popular tourist attraction in New York City.
Photo by James D. Morgan via Getty Images
Back in New York, another big name practice has been in the spotlight for their own anti-union actions: Three years ago, after a tumultuous organizing period, workers at Snøhetta’s New York office lost their union vote and eight employees were subsequently terminated. Those workers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that they were discriminated against for organizing. Earlier this month, the NLRB affirmed that belief; as reported by the New York Times, the firm leaders were accused by the federal board of discouraging employees from engaging in protected unionizing activity, as well as "interrogating employees about their union sympathies or activities."
The industry would be pretty foolish to shrug off this news—in their ruling, the NLRB made public some damning emails shared between Snøhetta’s leadership. Hell Gate reported that one director compared the unionizing effort to the "‘conditioned-reflex therapy’ scene at the end of A Clockwork Orange" and besmirched unionizing employees, continuing, ‘I’m astonished by the diversity of detachments from reality the iPhone generation has gleaned from the recently digitized, remote industrial manufacturing of reality our erstwhile art has, at scale, become." Say that last sentence 10 times fast—or, as I had to, read it 10 times over. This director seems to bemoan the state of their "art" as having succumbed to the demand for rapid production while demeaning those who seek to fix at least some of the ramifications of those demands. It’s pretty embarrassing, frankly.
Architect Bjarke Ingels’s firm has offices in six countries.
Photo by Maria Jose Lopez/Europa Press via Getty Images
It doesn’t take revealing internal emails to show one’s ass, either; after all, Ingels has also raised the issue of rapid production and architectural artmaking. In a 2025 talk hosted by acoustics company Rockfon focused on the future of architecture, Ingels described an ethos that speaks to the humanity of an end-user, an architecture that is "generous toward the city." But in a twist, he responded to a question about AI in the field, stating that "someone who graduates from architecture school today, who has a lot of will and intent, could actually have the force of 700 [designers] at his or her fingertips simply by being very good at working with AI." He took it a step further in an interview posted to Instagram by an AI-powered architecture software company a couple months later, where he likened his interactions with his cadre of employees—which took him 25 years to amass as a team—to inputting a prompt into an AI interface.
Having compared his collaborations with colleagues to machine learning, it would come at no surprise then that he would treat his workers as interchangeable widgets, but it sounds like both Snøhetta and BIG are both grappling with the demands of technology, production, and artistry in their practices. Whether firm leaders want to hear it or not, creating a workplace where their designers are dignified through compensation and job security might just help them outpace their competition. Sadly, too many are content with lowering their profession’s own standards—treating salaried designers as 1099 workers, hired and fired en masse by shortsighted leadership to keep their business model competitive in an era of endless industry tumult and resulting concessions. Of course, to dig themselves out of this hole would require firms to collectively decide that intentionally recognizing the humanity of their workforce is what yields a thriving creative practice; whether or not they want to take the reins of their own profession is a test of how committed they are to artistry over capital.
Top photo courtesy of SAW-Unite.
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