Architects on the bread line

The architects at the Sabadell H Arquitectes Studio have the work and they have the recognition. What they are lacking is the money. Although they recently won the Enor Award for young architects, with a prefab gym they built in Barberá del Vallés (Barcelona), they are finding it hard to make ends meet. Increasingly, they have to deal with projects that require more work and more imagination, on a tighter budget. For instance, when they signed on for the executive project of Casa 712 in Gualba (Barcelona), the bank went back on its word, and instead of the 240,000-euro mortgage it had promised, it only loaned half the amount. So the architects were forced to change their plans and reduce their fees.

The situation is not new. "For the last 10 years we've been earning below the collective bargaining standard [21,000 euros a year]. And for an employee, that's illegal," says David Lorente, one of the partners at Sabadell H Arquitectes. But there is no easy solution: "If we make things legal, then we would have to shut down."

The great lesson from all this hardship is clear: eliminating everything that can be eliminated from a project requires a different kind of architecture. The economic crisis has not resulted in a crisis of ideas in Spanish architecture; on the contrary, the new ethic is producing a new esthetic marked by a shortage of means but no shortage of ambition.

But there is another explanation for the lean times. Architecture is one of the professions that has undergone the deepest transformation in the wake of Spaniards' wider access to higher education. With so many graduates out there, everyone is getting a smaller piece of the pie. The option of actually making money through building remains in the hands of the property developers, who are merely interested in construction, not architecture. And the old habit of treating this profession like a club rather than a business is only an option for architects from wealthy families.

And so, the only way to survive these days is to change things around. And that means viewing this job instability as an opportunity to redefine the values of a new kind of architecture.

What is happening in Sabadell is echoed in Seville, where María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz, also close to 40, have been partners at Estudio Sol89 for a decade. They were lucky enough to win a couple of public tenders, but even so, they are the only two people with long-term contracts at the studio. They draw the blueprints, take the measurements, handle the bills and deal with the cleaning. Nobody picks up the phone for them if they are at the construction site or giving a lecture. They enjoy the world of education, and for the last five years both have been teaching at the School of Seville.

"Back then everyone was building, and to get a teaching job in competition against 12 other people was a reasonable mission," explains López de la Cruz. But things have changed. The crisis has prompted people to get into teaching, and now there are around 70 candidates for every opening.

The studio's costs are minimal, and this austerity is an attitude that can also be felt at the site. Their projects cost about 600 to 800 euros per square meter. At the port of Huelva, where they were supposed to build a training center, González and López de la Cruz found a derelict prefabricated building. Rather than demolish it, as would have been the norm, they considered recycling it. That was a trial run for their current reutilization strategies in the city suburbs. But the architects of Sol89 say they are used to working on a shoestring budget. "There are colleagues who are having a much harder time than us. We're among the lucky ones."

One might say, without being cynical, that the Madrid-born architect Enrique Krahe is also lucky. And that's the tragedy of it. He built the Municipal Theater in Zafra, Badajoz, a building that was full of ideas, opened up a new path to the future within the local building tradition, and earned him a number of awards. Later, he was selected to design a student residence in Norway, which he is still working on. Even so, Krahe belongs to that group of workers who make less than 1,000 euros a month. He lives on what he makes from his projects and from teaching a few workshops. "Although, while we're at it, I might as well admit that I've also lived off my wife," he says in a telephone interview from Delft (Holland), where he spends half the month because his partner, an aeronautics engineer, works at the university there.

All the roles are changing, even the client's. Krahe says the owner of a house he is building near Madrid quit working at Telefónica to become the site manager of his own home. "He is an engineer and doesn't know about these things. But because he's the studious type, he took on the role. Who better to watch over the construction of his own house?"

Krahe talks about the urgency of reconsidering the traditional formula in which the architect checked that the construction coincided with the architectural plans. "Today, the site work is where half the project takes place," he explains. This drastically reduces expenses, but also the amount of work that an architect can do.

The democratization of architecture is begetting changes that pose new challenges to architects and to the profession as a whole. "Architecture always follows in the wake of social change, capturing its effects and bearing witness to the changes and transformations of society, whether for economic or catastrophic reasons," says Ángela García de Paredes, a third-generation professional of the trade. "There are numerous examples of high-quality architecture that was produced at times of great adversity."