When he left college in 1972 armed with an architecture degree, Jamie Snead thought he'd make a few bucks painting houses before getting on with his life. Little did he know that 20 years later he'd be flung back to about where he started.
"I made more money painting houses in 1972 than I'll make as an architect in 1992," Mr. Snead said. "Architects are getting killed."
That's the way architecture is these days. In fact, Mr. Snead is one of the luckier architects around: About 40 percent of Maryland's architects don't have a job within their field, meaning that architecture may be the profession hit the hardest by a recession that slammed commercial development to a virtual halt.
In 1991, the fountainhead flooded all over architecture firms, from small fry like Ziger, Hoopes & Snead, the eight-employee shop where Mr. Snead is a partner, to firms like RTKL Associates Inc. which laid off 28 percent of its 670 workers last year. From big layoffs to fierce fee-cutting that Mr. Snead predicts will trigger shoddy work and thus years of lawsuits, the year was Ayn Rand's revenge reverie come to life.
An estimated 1,000 of the 2,500 architecture jobs in the state vanished between 1989 and 1991, according to the Maryland Society of the American Institute of Architects. And few of them will be back soon.
"Probably no more than 20 percent," said RTKL Chairman Harold L. Adams. "I think we've been through a unique time and I don't think we'll see a return. . . . The 1980s were a consequence of a whole series of events. There was a lot of money being thrown at real estate. Not all of it was abusive -- not all of it was as bad as the public has been led to believe -- but there will be a lot of empty buildings out there for a long time."
How could this happen? Why are architects bearing the brunt of the recession? Where are the laid-off architects going? And what are architecture firms going to do to survive, let alone grow?
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Steve Ziger and Harold Adams had seen the signs for a while, but each remembers when he really knew the 1980s party was over.
Mr. Ziger, whose firm, Ziger, Hoopes & Snead, is above an art gallery in Mount Vernon, saw his epiphany in the collapse of a real estate deal on Charles Street. Another local architecture firm was involved in a bid to build retail space across from the Brass Elephant restaurant.
"I think they had 70 percent pre-leasing, and they had a verbal commitment from the bank," said Mr. Ziger, a youthful-looking former RTKL architect. "They took down the existing building and [then] the bank said no, we want 90 percent. There's parking there now.
"Everyone looked around and said, 'Oh my God.' "
For the globe-trotting Mr. Adams of RTKL, the sign was the near-collapse of Federated Department Stores Inc., a longtime contact, after a hostile takeover by Canadian developer Robert Campeau.
"One of the engines of RTKL has been retail, mixed-use, and that started sputtering when Campeau drove Federated into the ground," Mr. Adams said. "People [at Federated] who had given us 35-40 jobs over the years were calling us looking for leads for jobs."
RTKL had grown to 670 employees from just over 200 in the early 1980s. But by June 1990, the firm decided to plan for the worst -- a 50 percent cut in its commercial design business.
"And it happened," Mr. Adams said. RTKL's revenues fell 25 percent in 1991 and the firm lost money for the first time in decades. (It expects a profit this year.)
RTKL has refocused on design work for institutions such as hospitals. It has pushed harder to get work in Indonesia, Mexico, the Middle East and other areas less affected by a U.S. recession. And it is hoping to cash in on the federal government's wave of office consolidations. One example: RTKL doing design work for a development team bidding to build the new U.S. Health Care Financing Administration headquarters.
Such diversity softened the recession's impact.
Still, RTKL closed its Florida office, laid off about 200 people, including about a half-dozen of the firm's 32 principals, scaled back contributions to the 401(k) program and other employee benefits and virtually halted capital investment.
One cost cut RTKL has not made: breaking its lease commitment at Commerce Place, the new 450,000-square-foot downtown office building. RTKL is slated to lease 100,000 square feet when the building is finished later this year.
Across town, the partners at Ziger, Hoopes & Snead were looking at the same problems, on a smaller scale. Commercial work used to be 40 percent of their business, Mr. Ziger said -- now it's about 10 percent.
As revenues fell 40 percent, architects at the Mount Vernon firm were put on a four-day workweek to minimize layoffs and to keep the creative team together until better times, said Mr. Ziger, who is partners with Craig Hoopes and Mr. Snead.
Ziger, Hoopes & Snead doesn't have the kind of international reach RTKL has, nor can it easily take on a job as big as HCFA's new headquarters. Like RTKL, it is pushing for more institutional work. The firm designed the new Head Theater at Center Stage, for example, and is doing a lot of church work.
But even the institutional work is down, so the firm is cutting back.
Every employee is on a four-day workweek now. The bookkeeper has been cut to part-time because there isn't enough work to keep her busy. And the principals took a 20 percent pay cut that makes Mr. Snead harken back to the days when he wielded a paintbrush instead of a mechanical pencil.
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Many architects who aren't working will have to do something else. Mr. Snead thinks as many as 50 percent of the architects displaced by the recession will leave the field for good, though some will choose jobs that draw on their architectural skills.
One example: former RTKL architect Tom Faucher, who had been working in computer support for the firm and is now in the software business full-time. He's working for an Ohio architectural software concern with a former graduate school professor, but he plans to move to a Columbia firm soon.
"Basically I see an economy and an industry that has started to shrink," Mr. Faucher said. "The choice to me was to wait for the industry to rebound or to grow in another way."
Tom Seiler, who was laid off from the Baltimore firm of Ayers Saint Gross early this year, said "the prospects in architecture are pretty bleak." He's plugging away at building a small independent practice, though, living on savings and his fiancee's income as well as his earnings.
Meanwhile, he has turned to making furniture -- which used to be a hobby -- as a new way to earn at least part of his living.
"People are much more responsive to spending a little money on furniture than a lot of money on a house," Mr. Seiler said. In three to five years, he thinks he'll be back in architecture full time, though he admits that he was chafing under bosses who wanted more traditional looks than the modernist lines he prefers. Steve Ziger and Jamie Snead have their own worries about the future.
They say fee-cutting is getting so stiff that some buildings are being designed by the least-qualified architects in some firms, because their low salaries permit profitable bids. Mr. Snead thinks that will lead to liability suits, when the inexperience shows.
And they look around and see big firms like RTKL competing for jobs the big fish would have rejected a few years ago.
"We're going after small stuff," Mr. Adams concedes. "Everyone is. . . . I don't think anything was ever too small. But now that's about all that's out there."
Mr. Adams is known more for being cool and professional than funny, but the industry's state brings out some gallows humor.
"Recruiting costs definitely went down . . .," he said. "It's amazing that only 18 months ago -- maybe 20 months -- we were spending as much time marketing to get people as we were to get jobs."
But Mr. Snead and Mr. Ziger seem more apprehensive than jolly.
They didn't become architects to get rich -- few do. The profession's payoff has always been mostly psychological.
"We're in this for the long haul," Mr. Snead said. "We're trying to be responsible."
"I don't think we'll starve," said Mr. Ziger. "But if it came down to it, yes" he would, he said. Mr. Snead shot him a look.
"OK," Mr. Ziger relents. "Starve is kind of a big word."