Hasta La Ideas

As this writer hails from Chicago, which is currently in the midst of an Olympic bid, we hope they’re paying attention right now with the planning for the 2012 Olympics in London, learning from the successes and mistakes they’ve had along the way. This week, we’re hoping for an education in the latter, as the London organizers currently have some egg on their collective faces, though whether they understand that or not is a bit confusing. Design Week reports that the organization received so many applications to work in various areas of design for the specific Commission for Sustainable London 2012, they decided to just go with luck and give jobs to the firms they’d randomly selected (though, to be fair, there were a few bits of criteria that had to be met for those names that went into the hat). Was this story uncovered due to some accidentally discovery? Or by some particularly keen investigative journalist? No. Instead, it was in the e-mail the organizers sent out to the firms and freelancers who didn’t land the job:

An e-mail sent by Olympics tender organisation Compete For to consultancies that had missed out on the tender says, ‘We had an overwhelming response from 245 organisations.’

‘Due to the number of high-scoring responses we have shortlisted a number of suppliers randomly from those who scored the highest mark in the questionnaire. This was done anonymously.’

Understandably, the designers and firms who weren’t hired are a little upset. After all, while honesty is nice, would it have killed them to at least pretended to look at their work first? Also, probably not the best piece of news for people to be reading the same week the committee has launched a competition for young people, ages 16 to 21, to design a logo for their official education logo. “Sorry kids, we were pretty busy, so we just picked one of your logos at random. Hope you understand. Bye!” is how we imagine the truly horrible e-mail would read.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Well, with the news of the big names letting employees go, massive country-wide layoffs, and lots about fewer and fewer available projects, we’ll gladly take any news that’s even slightly positive. So it is with the just-released DesignIntelligence Compensation and Benefits Survey, which found that designers and architects are still being compensated well and, most surprisingly, better paid than they were at this same point in 2008, with slight to average inflation depending on the position, experience, and education, as such:

The survey shows that the average compensation figures continue to march upward for recent architecture school grads. The mean salary for a graduate with a Bachelor of Architecture degree, for example, has risen from $39,333 in 2008 to $41,012 in 2009. The mean salary for a graduate with a Master of Architecture degree has risen from $42,985 to $47,263.

So good news for those who have jobs, but with fewer and fewer positions to go around, you just sorta have to take what you can get in the happy department.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Richard Rogers had to let go a quarter of his staff last week, Frank Gehry laid off dozens, and Norman Foster gave walking papers to over 300 employees. Now Zaha Hadid is the latest starchitect to be hit by the economy, as her firm has announced that they will be reducing their employee numbers in an effort to “rebalance the composition of its staff” which, if we may say so, is a little too heavy on the business speak and therefore a touch insensitive. But regardless of language, here we have yet another major architect who is having likely having fewer projects to pitch on and those they’ve won are being put on hold, despite what they say to the contrary:

Responding to rumours of wider redundancies at the practice, a spokesman said that the firm had never had more projects on site around the world, and had other projects due to begin in the near future, but would be reducing staff numbers by a “small amount.”

A spokesman from the practice said: “The office has always evaluated its resources in line with our clients’ requirements and based on current forecasts of work and assessment of skills within the practice, we believe that we are in a good position with some skills adjustment required.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

First Frank Gehry laid off his entire Atlantic Yards staff and then Norman Foster announced that he was letting go more than three hundred of his employees due to the economic slump. Now the latest big name starchitect has issued walking papers: Richard Rogers, who has announced that his firm, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, would be laying off a full quarter of their staff. Unlike Foster’s massive operation, this isn’t affecting nearly as many architects and other staffers, but 35 people no longer have jobs at the firm. Surely another blow to the morale of the industry. Here’s a bit:

Lord Rogers said: “Projects which seemed secure three months ago are now on hold or cancelled.”

Among them are the tower at 122 Leadenhall Street, London, nicknamed ‘the Cheesegrater’, and one of the towers at New York’s troubled Ground Zero site.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Kevin’s got a great piece in the April Blueprint, entitled Design and the Depression. Here’s the (bitter) sweet spot:

But the Bring-On-The-Slump crowd are equally self-indulgent. Recessions are marked by bankruptcies, mass unemployment, house repossessions and general misery, not by moral renewal. A mean-spirited Puritanism lies behind those beckoning recession.

Their outlook reveals a shocking detachment from economic and historical realities. The recessionistas just don’t get it, they have not grasped the depth of the economic crisis we face. This is no mere downturn, blip or ‘natural correction’; it’s a process that will last years. It could inflict a terrible toll on the profession. No doubt these commentators come from the kind of backgrounds that weren’t blighted by previous busts, but few practising designers and architects will be able to maintain such glorious indifference in the face of the coming havoc.

The prospect facing young designers is particularly bleak. Ian Cochrane, director of Tice group and former managing director of both Fitch and Landor Europe, recently gave a clue to what might happen. He recommended that design agencies should consider a three-day week, and advised design students to ‘get out of this business… [which] does not need you’.

Read the whole thing here.

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