Crit - An architecture crit (short for critique) is an academic review where an architecture student pins up drawings and models to present their design work to professors, peers, and guest critics for feedback and debate.

In architecture school, you can be brilliant and talented but if you never learn how to develop a professional relationship with your tutor and your professors then you are likely setting yourself up for failure further down the line. This is why I have devised the C.R.I.T system. A four point guide that will help you develop a successful and healthy working relationship with your architecture tutor this semester.

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The C.R.I.T System

C - Collaborate

Your tutor is not your enemy. They are also not your friend. Your tutor is your colleague. Work with them, not against them. Imagine your ideas and concepts are a football. Every CRIT is an opportunity to play with the ball. The best students develop a relationship with their tutor by passing the ball back and forth. Share the ball, be generous with the ball and never huff and refuse to pass the ball back to your tutor. The tutor is on your team. By the end of the semester, you and your tutor will have such a strong relationship that they will be setting you up for the winning goal in the final review. You build this relationship by collaborating with your tutor.

R - Research

Once you and your tutor have established a rapport and identified a problem, it is imperative that you independently research this problem. Your tutor may offer some guidance on where to look but ultimately, you will be the one responsible for collating the research. Research is critical. Anyone can design a pretty building in architecture school. The best students are able to communicate to their tutors why the problem requires a pretty building at all. Architecture is problem solving and the best problems are explored through research. This can be precedent, literary references, journals. Research can take many shapes. The students who understand the importance of research will go further than the students who obsess over pretty images. Research is the structural backbone of every great student project.

I - Iterate

The worst students show up to meet their tutor on day 1 with an idea then show up for the final crit 12 weeks later with the exact same idea having stubbornly refused to test an alternative. Architecture is about the process not the product. Students who understand that the process is a journey of iteration and ideation that is to be explored with your tutor will be the first to understand how the practice of architecture works in the real world. An architect must respond to an ever-changing context where the goal posts (another football metaphor) are constantly moving. A client cuts the budget, new legislation makes a proposal unviable, your boss changes the design 5 times a day, etc. Your tutor is trying to teach you how to be flexible and dynamic. The best students react to new information, external feedback and develop a design proposal through testing and iteration. Design is not a linear process, it is an imperfect circle. It is ok to return to the original idea after weeks of experimentation and testing, you will be better for it as you will now be able to confidently defend your proposal:

Have you tried turning it upside down?

Yes. Yes I have. It didn’t work and I can prove that it didn’t work. Multiple iterations prove that it didn’t work.

Next question please.

T - Teach

Teach your Tutor

Nothing will impress and excite an architecture tutor quite like a student being able to teach them something new about a topic. Architecture tutors spend 40 hours a week listening to students ramble on about Le Corbusier’s 5 points and something something poetics of space. But can you go so deep on a topic that you can reveal something new to your tutor? Can you change their mind or opinion on a subject? Better yet, can you prove the theory through your design project? This is architecture studio gold. Do not set out to impress your tutor, set out to teach them something new. Be humble and generous with your learning.

Cathal Crumley is an Architect, content creator and the co-founder of CRITBAY, the first creator led online marketplace for architecture students.

My Pineapple Panic

I recently attended a club tropicana themed summer party. Hawaiian shirts, coconut bowls and drinks with tiny cute umbrellas. I was nursing an alcohol free pina colada. There were tiny yellow specs of pineapple floating in the foam at the top of what I can only describe as a flamboyant oblong piece of glassware. Not quite a glass, not quite a bowl either. Somewhere between a goblet and a tiny translucent bucket. I needed two hands just to hold it. Not because it was heavy, just because it was unusually large. I was convinced there was at least half a pineapple brooding beneath the creamy foam that had begun to curdle on the surface.

I asked the host if there was any thing I could use to stop the drink from spilling. She pointed me towards the kitchen where I discovered a treasure trove of colourful silly straws. I began to scavenge through the sticky plastic haystack when I was approached from behind by a complete stranger.

‘you’re that architect guy on the internet!’

F*ck.

Escape by Rupert Holmes begins to play again on a distant speaker. This is the fifth time I have heard this song tonight. I have been at the party for 45 minutes.

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Now let me be clear. The algorithm works in strange and mysterious ways. I have learned on a number of occasions that you do not have to be an architect or even have an interest in architecture for a complete and total stranger with zero interest in architecture to be exposed to a video about architecture. Viral means Viral. You don’t get to control who sees you. I have had numerous strangers introduce themselves to me in public. This is flattering and humbling, especially when they are genuine fans of your content, having said that, there is always a burden of responsibility to fulfil that strangers’ expectation of you.

This is just the cost of being a creator and I am fine with it. It’s a very small cost after all but there is always an awkward tension when people begin to realise that that guy on the internet is a just a persona, the guy in real life is a 35 year old man with sticky pineapple fingers and a penchant for decadent silly straws. Sometimes, I just want to be left alone to blow air bubbles in to my drink as I attempt to break down what is seemingly the worlds largest chunk of pineapple. Pineapples are funny. Prickly and sharp on the outside, sweet and tangy on the inside. I worry that I am becoming the pathetic brooding inversion of a pineapple so I smile and turn around to introduce myself.

We hit it off and begin talking about content and architecture. Eventually I’m asked the question :

‘so now that you make so much money in content creation why do you even bother with architecture anymore?’

I didn’t know how to answer. Not because the question was difficult but because the question was grossly misinformed.

I currently have 3 videos sitting at over 1,000,000 views across Instagram and TikTok and at my content production peak during February of this year, I was averaging 3 million monthly views on Instagram alone. Since I started making vertical content on Instagram and TikTok, I have posted approximately 750 videos. Many of these videos go viral (250k views and beyond) and the majority of them average between 20-50k views per video.

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I am The Bear

The Bear is a guilty pleasure of mine. A strange thing to write about a critically acclaimed, Emmy winning television series that is near and dear to the heart of so many. Since its premiere in 2022, The Bear has become a fascination of mine. I love it but I also don’t.

The Bear is obnoxiously structured like a work of prestige television. But beneath the scaffold of modern day episodic television tropes (the cinematic close-ups, the single take seven minute monologues, the audibly intense emotional cross talking, the white knuckle family dinner domestics) The Bear is a TV show about a man with a restaurant who gets upset when people want to eat at the restaurant. It is also a show about generational trauma, grief, addiction, abuse and the true cost of greatness. The Bear is a pick ‘n’ mix buffet masquerading as a 21 course tasting menu. Yes it’s about a lot of things but at its heart, The Bear is about breaking a pattern. The Bear is about me.

We follow chef Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto as he navigates his self inflicted pursuit of unhappiness. Carmen Berzatto is like an old friend I visit every summer. I stay just long enough before the resentment kicks in and when I do finally leave, I ask myself if it’s really worth returning for another visit next summer. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a say in the matter. The Bear comes crashing in to my living room every summer anyway, this bear is not particularly house trained but it is capable of lifting a seven foot mirror and shoving it right in my face.

Do you like what you see? DO YOU?

Spoiler below*

The Bear season finale reveals that Chef Carmen Berzatto is finally hanging up his apron and handing in his knives. At the tender age of 35, he is about to begin an internship at a New York architecture office. His cousin’s husband gets him in the door with zero professional training or formal education. He just knew a guy. If you’re an architecture graduate and you’re reading this, I’m sorry but this is how it works.

He will no doubt be popular in the office amongst his colleagues:

‘this kid sucks at architecture but my god he makes an incredible cup of coffee…’

The calling cards were there, sort of. From Carmen’s intense interest in the renovation of the restaurant to his wonderfully crafted culinary sketchbook from his time in Copenhagen. I can see the vision. Carmen is creative, technically excellent and in many respects an expert problem solver under pressure. Carmy is on a journey of self discovery as he processes his brother’s suicide and reckons with the weight of his own talent and success. He has spent his adult life chasing the validation of others and this chase has consumed him at the cost of every human relationship in his life.

I spent 4 years parasocially aligning myself with Carmy. His journey of self discovery reflected my own at a time when I found myself at a crossroads in life. In 2022 I moved to Stockholm and left traditional architecture practice following a 7 year stint in London where I worked at a number of renowned architecture practices. Think of a ‘Starchitecture’ practice as the Michelin star restaurant of the architecture world.

I saw myself in Carmy, his dedication to his craft and calling often made me reflect on my decision to leave architecture. Have I really given up? Could I go back? The restaurant in The Bear became an analogue for the architecture studio in my head. High standards, extreme stress, chaotic work environment, micro management and high intensity team work and collaboration. I hated it but I also missed it in a perverse masochistic kind of way. I was starting to reconsider my decision, then, in the 2025 season 4 finale, Carmy makes the decision to quit.

Not just the restaurant, but the life. Finally, my own decision to leave architecture was validated. So imagine my shock and disgust to discover that Michelin star chef Carmen Berzatto’s plan B begins with the letter A.

Architecture.

We watch as he shows up at an office building in a suit, the room is filled with carefully curated drawings and models. He sits down for an interview.

‘I was looking for something more creative...’

No. Carmen. Stop.

There’s a ringing in my ear, followed by a flash. Time has stopped.

Suddenly, I am Carmy’s time-travelling avatar, trapped behind the cosmic bookcase of a childhood bedroom somewhere in the fifth dimension of a time prison designed by Christopher Nolan. Don’t do it, Carmen. Don’t leave. The walls are closing in. Hans Zimmer’s organ reverb drowns out the screaming.

Don’t let me leave, Murph. Don’t let me leave.

I don’t know what you’re looking for cousin, but architecture is not the answer.

My Phantom Limb Sensation

It is 2018 and I am not restrained by the intergalactic bookshelf of an American Midwest farmhouse but by the circular confines of an MRI machine at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. My arms have stopped working. I can technically use them, but something is wrong. There is a prickly dull numbness from finger to shoulder on either side of my body.

This has been happening for months now. The arms would suddenly go numb during the middle of a work day for no apparent reason. They would function but they would lose all sensation and feeling. Imagine the complexity of having two dead arms, all day everyday and yet still be expected to produce hand made drawings and models for a living. I had visions of the office no longer having any use for me. They would pay me instead to stand outside the building with my rubbery arms flailing in the wind like a blow up inflatable tube man on the side of a motorway.

‘what’s the deal with that guy?’

‘oh that’s old man crumley, he lost control of his arms years ago’

I was nothing without the work I was producing. I had to get my arms working again.

The MRI scan results told me nothing. Then followed nerve conduction studies, blood tests, medication but still no diagnosis. Eventually, I was sent to a specialist.

‘What do you do for work?’

‘I’m an architect.’

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘Is your job really that stressful?’

His diagnosis: Stress. His prescription: breathing.

12 weeks of appointments, consultations and tests to be told that I was involuntarily not doing the one thing the body is designed to do involuntarily. I was so stressed from work that I would unknowingly hyperventilate. I was starving my own body of oxygen at such a rate that my body was slowly cutting off the flow of blood to my arms.

‘Have you tried yoga?’

I don’t have time for yoga brother, I barely have time for breathing. I returned to the office.

Brothers in Arms

I later explained this to a colleague during a late night session in the model shop.

‘That’s nothing, you should talk to Olly. Last year he collapsed and temporarily lost the muscle function on the left side of his face.’

Olly told me that he had been awake in the office for 4 days straight building a 6ft foam model for a client and couldn’t remember collapsing. The company made him sign a ton of paperwork to ensure that he wouldn’t sue.

‘Sue, why would I sue? I love it here!’

This was a badge of honour and he wore it on his face in the shape of a crooked smile.

We suffered. You must suffer too.

Architecture is a filthy cocktail. A riddled concoction of Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding and survivor’s bias. When you spike it with a drop of working class insecurity you have a recipe for the ultimate dose of mental self destruction.

The Bear touches on this subject heavily throughout the series. We are teased with flashbacks of Carmen’s time in New York under the abusive supervision of Chef Jeff from Community.

The bastard even looks like an architect.

We suffer this abuse and toxicity collectively, therefore it is somehow tolerated. This starts in architecture school where students regularly burn the candle at both ends. 18 hour shifts in the studio on a good week. I once stayed awake for 36 hours just to have my project destroyed in front of my classmates. Thank you sir, please sir, can I have some more sir.

Architects love a self build but there is no greater construction of the self in architecture quite like a self built resistance threshold to stress and pain. By the time we graduate from architecture school, the majority of us are corporation ready. We accept the high stress and low pay because architecture is our ‘calling.’

Welcome to the abattoir.

I was starting to suspect that the sausage was being made with the meat of those who built their stress resistant walls on the unstable grounds of passion and talent, not grit and mental fortitude. The cracks were starting to appear in the defensive wall of my own mind palace. This is not where I want to be.

At 29, Architecture was the only professional life I knew. High stress, low pay and an artificial sense of self worth. ‘I’m an architect, I’m changing the world’ I would tell myself, then continue to digitally pillage and gentrify the derelict remains of an east London neighbourhood, displacing generational bloodlines with new families, better families, Revit families.

Architecture is expensive and it was starting to cost me more than time, it was costing me my health. Then one day, an email appeared in my inbox.

‘To all staff,

It is with great sadness that we announce that Sandra will be leaving the company after 7 years. She has made the decision to embark on a new and exciting adventure. She will be moving to the Caribbean to live and work as a scuba instructor.

We wish her all the best!

Please join us in the staff kitchen next Friday at 7pm for some Caribbean themed goodbye drinks and nibbles.’

Wait. You can just…. leave?

Why does fucking Sandra get to leave?!

Could I leave?

I pinched myself to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. It hurt.

Suddenly, I could feel my arms coming back to life.

Architecture In Medias Res

Is architecture really the solution to all of Carmen’s problems?

Architecture has long been misrepresented in film and television. From Mr. Brady to Ted Mosby by way of George Costanza, the media has trained us to believe that architecture is a wonderful and noble pursuit. It is. But film and television never depict the human cost of a career in architecture. It has long been a passion of mine to write this story, think Industry but for Architecture. I am standing in a pitch meeting surrounded by middle aged men in suits at HBO HQ.

‘Succession meets Skins but…. make it architecture.’

Imagine it, instead of everyone being evil, rich and beautiful they are just tired, poor and grossly overworked. An entire episode will take place the day before a giant client meeting. 24 meets Fawlty Towers. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. The episode ends with the reveal that the managing director got the dates wrong. The client meeting was actually two days ago, everyone missed the deadline lol.

‘we failed but at least we failed as a family?’

Everyone laughs. Crash Zoom. Freeze frame. Credits roll. The Cheers theme by Gary Portnoy plays as the onscreen text informs the audience of the following:

2 weeks later, 30 percent of the staff were made redundant.

(Music fades out) ‘Sometimes you want to go where everybody shares the blame’

Now that is television which brings me back to The Bear.

Do the writers believe that Carmen’s journey has been resolved? Do they fully understand what his choice entails? I look forward to them revisiting the series a decade from now. Chef Carmen now runs his own boutique architecture studio. Call it Cousin and Co. It specialises in gourmet burger restaurant design. Every restaurant is designed in the shape of a burger, because that’s how architecture works, right guys?

What will I do next? Maybe I’ll go to culinary school and bring balance to the universe. We can pass one another in the night, a silent nod of respect and admiration.

‘Jeez, wouldn’t want to be that guy’ we both think to ourselves as we pass.

Is this supposed to be a happy ending?

Architecture won’t save Carmen Berzatto much like leaving architecture hasn’t saved me. Like dust we will both float through the ether, aimlessly searching the vastness of infinite space for something that was never out there to begin with.

Carmy knows this. I know it too. We return to the interview. His final monologue is an account of his last night in service. By the end, I can see it in his face. He wants to go back. He isn’t finished yet and neither am I.

‘Sometimes, to break patterns... you gotta break patterns.’

“All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.” – The Puppet Master, Ghost In The Shell

The ‘talent to skill’ gap is one of the many cracks that have riddled the architecture to professional practice pipeline over the past decade. Students are graduating with exceptional grades but are somehow not yet ready for professional practice.

‘I applied for practice A, Practice A use Software X. I use Software Y. Rejected.’

My inbox is flooded with students asking for advice on how to secure a job in this economy and the solution is almost always somehow software adjacent. This is partly why Rebecca and I co-founded CRITBAY. Architects love to build yet no architecture institution or official body has managed to successfully construct a bridge that seamlessly connects students from academia to practice. The bridge that currently exists is so structurally unstable that most students simply opt to turn back. The bridge is going to collapse anyway, best to be on stable ground.

This has led to an online goldrush of influencers and content creators selling their courses to students. This is not inherently a bad thing but it exposes the fragility of the system. A life in architecture is a life of learning but in 2026, learning is expensive.

To put it simply, most students are not sufficiently prepared for professional life and most of this comes down to software.

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Students are obsessed with software because employers are obsessed with software. Meanwhile, Architecture schools couldn’t care less about software. This is the correct approach. University is about critical thinking and critical thinking is important but the last thing in the world a commercial architecture practice wants is critical thinking from graduates. You have been hired to perform a series of menial tasks, not to interrogate the validity of said task. The word ‘talent’ is thrown around a lot in architecture job adverts but in many cases, ‘talent’ is simply code for ‘compliant’ and compliance is the fastest way to climb the corporate ladder to success mediocrity.

All of this creates what I call the architecture graduate void. Students trapped on a cliff edge, staring in to the abyss because the majority of what they were taught in university sort of doesn’t apply to professional practice. So how does an architecture graduate bridge the gap?

The answer is simple: build your own bridge. Here’s how I did it.

Architecture Is Metamorphosis

I graduated in 2013 with no software skills.

I spent my entire final year of architecture school drawing by hand. While my classmates were preparing their final projects with 3D models, photoshopped sectional perspectives and wonderfully crafted graphical presentations in InDesign, I was bent over a crusty drawing board filling in my drawings with a 6B pencil.

French curves may sound sexy on paper but the reality of professional practice is that more often than not, straight edges and right angles reign supreme. I used my pencil as an object of emotional support. The drawing board was a crutch. I was terrified of drawing on the computer, I was scared it was too late to learn and I masked this insecurity with arrogance and bravado.

I’m better than you because I don’t need a computer, I can use my hands.

I’m old school. I’m hardcore. I’m………unemployable.

Yes I got the grades, yes I got the degree and yes, to an extent, I got the respect and admiration of my professors, but I did not get the job. I did not get any job. In many cases, I didn’t even get a rejection email. I spent every day of that summer staring in to the void, refreshing my inbox, waiting for someone, anyone to have the professional courtesy of putting me out of my misery. Take me to the water, put me in the river.

Every internship and placement opportunity within a 40km radius of my university was hoovered up by the graduates who had the skills. Software was clearly the barrier for entry. I had to take action. I wanted an architecture job so badly that I made the decision to re-draw my graduate portfolio between shifts at a call centre. I allowed myself the time to build a bridge in the shape of an ‘employable’ portfolio.

I used YouTube tutorials to teach myself AutoCAD, Sketchup, V-ray, Photoshop and InDesign. I designed my own architectural digital workflow and developed my portfolio to a high enough standard that I was no longer seeking just any job. I was hunting for my dream job. Suddenly, I was turning down job offers. Not bad for an architecture graduate with no professional skills.

In 2013 I could have stood still. I could have simply hidden behind the comfort of the lie that architecture school simply let me down and failed to prepare me for the real world but perhaps the most valuable lesson you can learn from architecture school is that an architect must be willing to seek new knowledge. School can't teach you everything and the architecture school curriculum was never designed to do so.

Always be curious. I was determined to cross the void and on my pilgrimage I reached a moment of clarity:

Software skills matter but the willingness to learn and adapt matters more.

Architecture isn’t about the software, it’s about the architect who is wielding the software. Train your eye, use your hand and take back control.

Build your own bridge and navigate the void. I will meet you on the other side.

The shortest horror story ever written is just two sentences:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

The story ends before the door is opened. It is designed to leave the reader with the very worst manifestations of their own mind: Who or what is behind that door? Knock, by Fredric Brown, is commonly cited as the finest example of minimalist horror literature and is a story I think about often when I find myself staring into the void. A door is very often our first haptic interaction with a piece of architecture. A first impression. A welcome. Juhani Pallasmaa once wrote:

The door handle is the handshake of the building.

But what happens when this handshake refuses to let go, and begins to squeeze, tightening its grip into a closed fist? What happens when the door is no longer an invitation but a warning? A signal. Stay away. In many cases a door is all that separates us from safety and danger, but how do you know which side of the door you’re really standing on? Doors have an intrinsic dual nature. They are both safe and unsafe at the same time, until the door is opened. Infinite possibilities collapse into a single outcome the moment you decide to open it.

My Door Lore, 2014

Doors are architecturally significant, and yet they are now routinely overlooked as such in large-scale commercial practice. Today, doors are rarely designed. They are purchased, ordered, shipped and installed, their uniqueness reduced to an SKU number on a supplier’s website.

So what makes me such an expert on doors?

In 2014 I was working as a 22-year-old architectural assistant (assistant to the Architect) in London on a massive commercial housing project.

• 10 acres of land

• 1,000 apartments

• 50,000,000 bricks

• 30,000 rooms

• 50,000 doors

Big doors, small doors, thick doors, flimsy doors. So Many Doors.

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We were a small team of 7 in a large commercial office, so someone had to draw, document and manage all of these doors. I was the chosen one. Each apartment had somewhere between 7 and 10 doors, and each door required a minimum of four drawings. One plan, one section, and an elevation, front and back. Each had to be precisely dimensioned and catalogued, recorded and managed in an Excel spreadsheet with thousands and thousands of cells.

As a student I had dreamed of designing museums and luxury homes for famous clients. Instead I was the architectural equivalent of a nightclub bouncer. The door manager. Checking IDs and turning people away.

Do not come. Do not study architecture. Do not let the proverbial door hit you on the way out. How did I end up here? Surely the door I opened to get here was not the same door I would have to use to leave this nightmare. I needed to escape through a door of my own creation. Of my own design. I needed an escape pod. An exit. I also needed the courage to go through it because I was scared. How did this happen?

Suddenly, this all felt very familiar.

Doors have been haunting me since I was a child.

Video Game Summer School, 1997

Long before architecture school and long before professional practice, I spent countless nights in the summer of 1997 sitting wide awake, terrified at the thought of doors and rooms. This was the summer I was introduced to Resident Evil on the Sony PlayStation console by the older brother of a childhood friend. Resident Evil shaped my entire personality as a child. Not just because it frightened me and would keep me awake at night with its low-poly horror, but because it was my first exposure to what I describe as affective virtual architecture. Resident Evil didn’t just rely on monsters to scare you. It had architecture, and more notably, it had doors.

The entirety of Resident Evil takes place in the fictional Spencer Mansion and the game is designed as an elaborate architectural puzzle box with traps and monsters hiding behind every door. The load screens were visualised as animated door elevations. Every door had its own unique visual style and was designed to slowly reveal the horrors that were hiding in every room.

I was scared. I was excited. I was entertained. I was curious. I was addicted. I’m also fairly certain I was unlocking a part of my brain I didn’t know existed. My entire understanding of three-dimensional space was developing in new and strange ways, simply through playing a video game. If hyper-regulation and the pitfalls of late-stage capitalism are responsible for the door schedule that haunted me as a 22-year-old, then who was responsible for the virtual door schedule that haunted me as a child?

The answer is Shinji Mikami, the architect of survival horror.

Shinji Mikami is the legendary game designer best known as the creative mind behind Resident Evil, the franchise that redefined survival horror and established many of the tropes now synonymous with the genre.

When I was a child, Resident Evil was all I ever wanted to talk about. Mikami was my hero. I first read about him in a video game magazine and I have followed his career ever since. I was inspired. I would scribble half-remembered floor plans of the environments in sketchbooks and re-enact parts of the game with friends during those late summer nights. I even sketched my own maps and designs and kept them in a folder that I would hide under my bed at night.

Many children feared the proverbial monster in the closet growing up, but I never had a physical closet in my bedroom, so I relished the opportunity to imagine myself as the monster in the closet of others. Constantly working up designs for complex rooms and twisting hallways with zero architectural logic. I was so obsessed that I once changed the family computer’s desktop wallpaper to the Resident Evil 2 promotional key art in anticipation of the sequel. We are a Resident Evil family now, I declared at 9 years of age. This eventually led to an intervention when my grandmother signed on to check her email and was greeted by the photorealistic rendering of a rotting zombie corpse. Don’t worry, he will grow out of it. And I did.

By the age of 11 I was no longer exclusively a Resident Evil fan, I was a video game connoisseur. From Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill to Grand Theft Auto and GoldenEye. I consumed video games like it was a full-time job, printing off FAQs and walkthroughs from web pages in the early 2000s and organising them into neat little folders on the bookshelf of my childhood bedroom. What if my console breaks, what if there’s a power cut? I must have a physical record of the game in an archive somewhere. I was preserving the culture. Video games were my passion.

From Super Mario to Super Metroid, I supercharged my way through adolescence, double jumping and knee sliding through hours, years and decades of virtual architectural decadence. Haunted Mansions, Military Outposts, Impossible Sci-Fi Structures. I flew on spaceships, I climbed the pyramids. I once role played as a pansexual barbarian elf and negotiated a peace treaty between two warring factions in a fictional high fantasy realm.

Video games were not just a hobby, they were an art form and not just any art form but the all-embracing master art. The Germans have a word for this: Gesamtkunstwerk. The synthesis of many art forms. Drawing, Painting, Modelmaking, Music, Architecture, Interior Design, UI/UX design, Animation, Motion design, Graphic design, Film Making, Writing, Coding etc etc. Like a sponge I spent my youth soaking up every drop of pleasure and fun this art form had to offer, from midnight releases to online multiplayer lobbies, so that when adulthood arrived I would be prepared for my final quest. It was time to discover an outlet where I could direct the creative energy I had spent my youth consuming.

Architecture School is a Metroidvania, 2010

A Metroidvania is an action-adventure video game subgenre focused on interconnected world exploration. Named after the classic Metroid and Castlevania franchises, players navigate a large map where progression is gated by acquiring new abilities or items, requiring natural backtracking to unlock previously inaccessible areas.

At 19 I was accepted into an architecture school program through a backdoor when I applied a year late after a failed stint at film school and an obsessive online multiplayer habbit. Crumdog_91 hit triple prestige in Modern Warfare 2 before the end of the autumn semester but he never learned how to operate a camera. I was invited to attend an interview as part of an internal transfer within the university. Film School didn’t work. Architecture school was my last chance at an education and possibly a career.

The school must have seen potential because to this day I cannot believe I passed the entrance interview with a wild assortment of monster sketches and door designs. To an extent, the school even encouraged me to pursue this way of working within the confines of the curriculum. I skipped almost every building technology lecture and seminar but I never missed a design class. Who cares what the building is made of, to me, it just had to look cool and be fun to explore.

Architecture just made sense. Grind for the upgrades, complete the side quests and stay up working late into the night smashing Mountain Dew with the boys. This is how you improve. Apply the skills you acquired as a gamer then apply it to everything else in your life. Just remember to have fun while you’re doing it. I was roleplaying. Building out my skill tree. Acquiring upgrades. Part Architect / Part Digital Alchemist/ Part Satanic Dark Elf. I grew my hair out and I only ever wore black. I struggled through the first semester of architecture school then graduated 7 years later at level 99. On the day of my graduation I triumphantly galloped through the cast-iron gates of the university atop a 6ft ironclad stallion, dual wielding a pair of magical flame enchanted katanas as I rode off into the night to begin a career in Architecture. Architecture school? Completed it.

What a disappointment it was to get my foot in the door of professional practice only to quickly discover that real buildings have to actually work in the real world and not as entertainment or fictional narrative devices of my own making. Architecture is serious and architects are serious people. They do not consume themselves with silly childish games, they are wilfully bending the built environment to their own will.

‘Mario the plumber? You mean the Italian mechanical and electrical engineer at Arup?’

I stopped playing video games. I stopped sharing my passion with others. I was embarrassed to even admit that I had once been a gamer. I wanted the profession to take me seriously. I wanted my colleagues to respect me, and I became horrible to be around.

What do you do in your free time? Oh, you know... Architecture...and stuff

To make matters worse, I wasn’t even drawing anymore. I was manually tagging doors in an AutoCAD file then recording the tags in an Excel spreadsheet. I would have been better off working in data entry somewhere performing the same sort of monotonous work but getting paid better for it. At least I wouldn’t be calling home every Friday night to dry beg for an emergency money transfer. The writing was on the wall, somewhere along the way, I opened the wrong door.

Practice was corrupting me, I no longer had an outlet. I wasn’t having fun. I was trapped. I needed to escape. I needed to spend 75 percent of my next pay cheque on a PlayStation 4. And that’s exactly what I did. All of a sudden, the clouds began to clear. I locked myself away at night after work in a 7-bedroom house share in North London. Me, my TV and my video games. I was coming back to life. I had spent a number of years out of the game. What should I even play? I opened the digital storefront and there it was. Another door. The promotional art for Resident Evil 7.

Nature was healing.

Resident Evil was the art that inspired me and harmed me at the same time. It kept me awake at night because, simply put, it terrified me. A vector for safety and danger. It was fun and it was horrible. It was architecture, but it wasn’t. Architecture as a profession has a similar split personality. It is both theory and practice. Drawing and Building. That is what contemporary practice has become, for me at least. A simultaneous source of wonder and frustration, but at a certain point, the wonder began to dissipate so I built a door and in 2022 I made the decision to walk through it. I have spent the last 4 years sharing my love for all things video games through the lens of architecture with everyone and anyone who will listen.

I still get sweaty palms at the thought of re-entering the survival horror of traditional architecture practice on a permanent basis, but some doors have a funny way of swinging in two directions. I never needed to throw away the key, I just had to be comfortable walking between two different rooms from time to time.

The door is not just the icon of spatial horror. It is the architectural constant that links my passion for architecture as an adult to my passion for architecture as a child. Maybe the answer isn’t to escape but to double back and double down. Keep exploring.

Resident Evil begins with a disclaimer:

This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore.

Architecture as a profession should come with its own disclaimer.

This profession is not for the faint of heart. Are you sure you want to open this door?

As a child, video games taught me to see architecture as more than brick and mortar. Architecture is a riddle. A puzzle that needs to be solved in order to progress through the game, and by extension, through life. This attitude has served me well, but in professional practice the game changed. I encountered a difficulty spike so great that I was no longer finding fun in trying to overcome it. It was simply miserable. Practising architecture might just be the one game I never complete.

Add it to the backlog.

"I would advise against taking the main gate into the castle" - Gostock the Gatekeeper

I have spent over 300 hours in the world of Elden Ring since its release in 2022, and without a shadow of a doubt, Stormveil Castle is one of the most architecturally unique environments I have ever experienced in a video game. It’s easy to be seduced by the awe and grandeur of its gilded towers and Gothic spires and conclude that Stormveil is the architectural centrepiece of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s magnum opus, but I’ve now played through the main campaign on five separate occasions and have recently come to the following conclusion:

The architecture of Stormveil Castle is bad. (And that’s the point)

Hold the Door

When I was an architecture student, I had a professor who would start my weekly design critiques with the same question:

‘Where is the front door?’

It was a litmus test of sorts, his way of checking that I was designing for the people who would one day use my design as an actual building and not have to endure it as a personal expression of my own architectural fascinations.

The user comes first.

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Stormveil Castle doesn’t have a front door because Stormveil Castle is the front door.

Now I know what you’re thinking:

‘it’s a castle, you aren’t supposed to just walk through the front door. Stormveil Castle is a defensive bastion.’

Of course. But think of it this way. FromSoft have had to design Stormveil as an impenetrable fortress then calibrate its defensibility to enable a player to access it, explore it and ultimately conquer it should they choose to do so. As far as defensive bastions go, Stormveil is the architectural equivalent of a thin slice of Swiss cheese.

The castle is just bad enough that a player can unravel its architectural complexity whilst simultaneously enduring the intense pressure of surviving the hostility of its twisting hallways and hidden depths. It also doesn’t help that everything here is trying to kill you.

Stormveil is an architectural threshold masquerading as a castle. Think of it less as a building and more as an elaborate hallway, an architectural turnstile of sorts. It exists to move you from one place to another. Many castles in the real world operate this way. They act as choke points and demand payment from travellers attempting to pass through. They are inevitable and unavoidable.

Up close and personal, Stormveil is a giant castle. But when you study it within its surrounding context the castle reveals itself as a minuscule piece of connective tissue straddling the gap between Limgrave and Liurnia.

Stormveil is a corridor connecting two different parts of the map. The magic of Stormveil is that it presents itself initially as a final destination then performs its greatest trick by revealing the world beyond it. By completing Stormveil, you have been transported to another side of the map.

So it isn’t a destination. It’s a transition. Which raises the obvious problem: if there’s no front door, how do you get in?

If we trace the footprint of the castle and the grounds around it, we can identify six potential front doors:

1. The walkway opening, where we get hit with the location title

2. The gatehouse threshold

3. The side door beside the gatehouse

4. The walkway opening along the western elevation

5. The grand entrance by the Divine Tower to the east

6. The back entrance toward Liurnia

Six entrances / exits. Each with its own series of challenges and constraints. These are the six ways you can access the castle but I would argue that none of them are the clear and obvious ‘front door’.

The quickest and most punishing route through the castle is the direct one: straight through the gatehouse, across the courtyard, and a sprint to the Godrick boss fight. You can do it in about three minutes, if you’re brave enough.

The second route is the scenic one, and it’s the one I usually take. You are filtered past the gatehouse along the cliffside and toward the castle’s narrow external walkways, herded through a sequence of corridor-shaped kill boxes, before arriving on the upper level of the castle walls. At this point the path diverges and you can opt to traverse the castle rooftops or drop through the cathedral below and explore the corresponding interior spaces before reaching the Godrick courtyard.

There is also a third route and you can skip the castle entirely.

Stormveil can’t keep you out or insist that you pass through it. As a piece of defensive architecture, Stormveil is a failure but as a piece of game design, Stormveil is exceptional.

The Architecture of Indifference

You are a visitor in this land. Stormveil is built to remind you of that. There is no greeting, there is no red carpet. Only pain and suffering. Welcome.

Stormveil is one of the most architecturally interesting environments in the game, arguably one of the greatest dungeons FromSoft have ever designed and you can skip it because Stormveil is a microcosm of Elden Ring’s open-world design philosophy.

And even if you opt out of the castle itself, you still have to bypass it by hugging the exterior wall along a cliff edge. You’re occupying the same part of the map. You are not skipping the castle, you are skipping the challenge and the game reminds you of that as the castle condescendingly holds your hand along the way.

Stormveil doesn’t care whether or not you find the front door, because Stormveil was never designed with the player’s interest at heart.

So is it bad architecture? Absolutely.

But the worst architecture often makes for the best game design.

I have explored every inch of Stormveil Castle and to this day it continues to surprise. It is a masterclass in architectural storytelling and remains one of the greatest achievements of modern level design. It is not just the blueprint for the rest of the game but a blueprint for the entire game industry. Stormveil is an architectural marvel even if it is an architectural failure.

Explore at your own risk and you will always be rewarded for doing so.

Just don’t expect anyone to welcome you when you arrive.

I am hyperventilating in the underlit en suite bathroom of a 1930s apartment in Central Stockholm. There is an aggressive knock on the door. Someone is waiting. I knock over the Loewe hand-soap on the sink as I reach for the brass faucet tap in the dark.

‘just a minute’

I check myself in the mirror and begin to manically scrub the cold sweat from my forehead. Breathe. The room is vibrating. I can hear the DJ in the lounge. Dance Yourself Clean. If only it were that simple. I am filthy with guilt and shame. It happened again.

I am at a birthday party on a Saturday night in Central Stockholm. My wife and I were invited by the friend of a friend of a friend, I am underdressed and I don’t know a single person here. Every man is wearing a three-piece suit. They all work in finance. Probably.

Shoes off at the door please. I notice a small hole in the sock on my right foot. This is going to be a long night.

‘so what do you do?’

‘I’m an architect’

‘ohhhh….i hear architects make a lot of mon-’

Let me stop you right there. I hastily make my way to the bar for another shot of straight vodka.

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I have so far met three investment bankers, a writer, two lawyers, a software engineer and the creative founder of an app that aspires to become the Spotify for beat poetry. My wife is incredible in situations like this. Confident, charismatic and charming. I am the opposite. Socially anxious and avoidant. I hover behind her. I am a 6ft, ungroomed spectre of social anxiety. I am of course an architect attempting to build my own architecture business and the business is not going well.

‘so you’re an architect, tell me, are there any architects in your family?’

I have been asked this question three times in my career: once in a job interview, once during the architecture school application process, and once by the owner of a reputable commercial architecture practice in London.

I hate this question. You may as well be asking me if ‘architecture’ runs in my family like male pattern baldness. I always feel compelled to answer this question through gritted teeth.

‘No’

The answer is always ‘No’.

I used to worry that this would always be held against me in some way. On one occasion I am certain that it was.

‘Unfortunately we are not able to offer you a position at this time. You do not match the profile we are currently looking for at this practice’.

The question triggers something deep within me. Fight or Flight. I run to the bathroom and lock the door.

I am a first generation architect.

I am also the architect of a lineage that will probably start and end with me. In 2010 I was the first person in my family to go to architecture school. I have spent the last 16 years blindly navigating the profession ever since and this fills me with both pride and resentment. Pride in that I have worked extremely hard to get here, resentment in that it could have been much easier had I just known the right people along the way.

There are no architects in my family. I was forged in the fires of the architecture studio system. I earned my place in this profession with hard work and grit. 12-hour shifts at the local supermarket routinely followed 24-hour shifts in the architecture studio. Architecture school is not cheap. Imagine having two bosses tell you on a weekly basis that you simply need to ‘work harder to fulfil your true potential’.

Which potential though? As a shelf-stacking supermarket assistant in the pet food aisle of a local supermarket or as an overworked and underpaid ARB drone at a commercial architecture practice? All roads lead to a life of subservience anyway so what’s the difference? For most first generation architects they become one and the same. If we are not owners then we are workers. At least the supermarket pays for overtime.

This is why I decided to start my own business in the first place. I am determined to break this cycle but I quickly found myself staring at the abyss upon the launch of Studio Cathal Crumley.

Who do I call? Where are the clients? What am I doing?

Anyone who has been in my position will recognise the odd space that we first generation architects occupy within the profession. We are knowledge and experience rich but somehow still cash and opportunity poor. There is no professional blueprint for the first generation architect. No cheat sheet, no industry connection, no family business to work at in the summer between semesters and certainly no wealthy uncle to bankroll a boutique architecture studio. There is no support network for the first generation and because of this we must either build our own network or fall somewhere between the cracks of obscurity.

We lack the familial support network that will guide us within the profession so we seek this connection through professional validation instead and spend years, sometimes decades, operating within the churn of the industrial architecture complex.

Think factories with knock-off Vitra furniture. We work hard, we put excess pressure on ourselves, we go above and beyond, we work on weekends, we never complain but we always burn out. Welcome to commercial architecture practice #54356. We are a family here.

Now think about that question again.

‘Are there any architects in your family?’

What is really being asked? Is this individual vulnerable? Are they desperate? Are they willing to give this company its pound of flesh?

Remember, the predator class do not become architects. They hire architects. The architecture profession weaponizes the concept of family for recruitment purposes. Cults and criminal enterprises do it too. First generation architects, beware, this thing of ours will cost you.

There is another knock on the bathroom door. I quickly wash my face and rejoin the party. I go looking for my wife.

‘oh there you are. there are some people here who would love to meet you. Their family is thinking of building a house and they wanted to know if I knew any architects... so I told them about you!’

I once had a professor tell us that the key to a successful life in architecture was to marry rich. Good advice. I did even better. I married smart.

‘Are there any architects in your family?’

For 16 years I have had to answer that question with a reluctant no. Tonight, my wife gets to answer with an enthusiastic yes.

Architecture is not something you inherit. It is something you offer.

Architecture is family.

I recently received some disappointing professional news. I had overcommitted to a project and once again succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy. The project needed to work out. It needed to succeed. I had spent too much time and money for it to fail. It failed anyway.

My wife and I like to hold what we call “mini corporate retreats”, where we go to a pub and discuss our hopes and dreams for the future over a pint of Guinness. Consider it relationship therapy for aspiring creative entrepreneurs. On this occasion, I was still sulking from the latest setback in a long line of professional setbacks, so my wife suggested I take a step back and observe the problem from afar.

“Maybe you need to turn back for a little while,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I already burned the boats.”

I am, of course, referring to the story of Hernán Cortés and the infamous expedition to Mexico that led to the conquest of the Aztec Empire. Upon landing in Mexico, Cortés instructed his men to “burn the boats”.

There will be no retreat. We will either conquer this land or die.

The story has recently been co-opted and misinterpreted online by the LinkedIn manosphere grind-maxers. You probably see the phrase everywhere now. In 2026, the myth has been reduced and distilled into a catchphrase of sorts. Think Get Rich or Die Tryin’ for the crypto brotherhood. Joe Rogan : Burn the Boats, a 2024 Netflix special sits on IMDB with a whopping 5.4. You get the point.

Building a business is challenging and building an architecture business in this economy is near impossible. Everything is a bet and you have to commit, but how do you commit when the very fabric of the profession is beginning to fray under consistent stress and decades of neglect. Architecture is in a constant state of wear, tear and disrepair. The profession almost exists as a bricolage of alternating fabrics and patterns like a bespoke makeshift yurt you’d expect to find at a music festival. We are all hiding in our own little tents trying to wait out the storm. The campsite is flooding. I hear imagine dragons playing somewhere in the distance. I am in hell.

I have decided that the best course of action is to look back before looking forward. What have I learned? Is anybody following, if so, how can I make the journey easier for them?

So consider this a pause of sorts. A tasty little collection of breadcrumbs that you can use to follow me in to the abyss.

Here are 5 tips for navigating the industrial architecture complex in 2026.

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1 - Do it for the money

I originally titled this “Never work for free”, but that would have been hypocritical of me considering I have worked for free on a number of occasions. We all have, let me explain. Architecture as a profession is designed to extract unpaid labour from its workers beneath the guise of camaraderie and para-social familial trauma bonding. Asking for more money, discussing salaries with co-workers, and refusing to work unpaid overtime are viewed as “red flags” by many employers in the architecture industry. This is because, historically, architecture has been a middle- to upper-class professional indulgence of sorts. Many of your colleagues don’t practice architecture for the money. Their livelihood doesn’t depend on it. Yours does.

A salary and a contract will not protect you from value extraction. Unpaid labour comes in many shapes and forms. The most egregious example is the late-night studio culture we were all conditioned to tolerate in our formative years at architecture school.

Toxic work culture may be the obnoxious elephant in the room that is keeping you awake at night, but it is the spider in the corner that will kill you in your sleep. 24/7 slack messages, incessant emails on your phone, the surprise lunchtime meetings and the pressure to reply to an “urgent” text from your boss at 01:34 am on a Saturday morning. This is death by a thousand notifications and this stress will manifest in your gut. Years of hard work with nothing but an NDA and a stomach ulcer to show for it.

Remember: a genuine emergency will never arrive via text or email. It will come crashing through the planet in the form of an asteroid, by which point we are already dust in oblivion anyway.

Times are tough, and the world does not need any more of the struggling artist archetypes. Do not lower yourself to e-begging for handouts on the internet because your boss just purchased a second holiday home. Go and get yours instead, whether that be in architecture or any adjacent field.

You deserve better.

2 - Architecture is NOT a calling

You are not Luke Skywalker. You are not Neo. You are not Mozart. You were not chosen. You are not special. You are not the one. You are just another one. The gods did not bestow you with the talent required to skilfully design the built environment around you. If the gods were capable of such divine intervention, they certainly wouldn’t empower you to design yet another phallic glass monument to late-stage capitalism.

Be wary of false prophets. The sycophants and the evangelicals are not to be trusted. Any architect who tells you that they were destined to become an architect is simply forging their own version of reality. They are equating architecture to professional athletics or advanced mathematics. It is a way of manufacturing scarcity in a profession that is getting high on its own (over)supply.

The truth is that they simply acquired their skill through years of hard work and training. You can acquire it too. Some architects are better than others, but the idea that certain architects are predestined for success because they played with Lego as a child is a myth.

Remember, you were not put on this planet to learn Revit.

3 - Respect Your Colleagues

When I was in school, we were discouraged from pursuing the trades. They were considered inferior to the professional pathways that were, at the time, only accessible via the expensive and time-consuming “higher education” pathway set out by New Labour-era education policy in schools across the UK and parts of Ireland circa 2004.

A consequence of this is that the trades were often used as a deterrent in schools to keep “high performers” on the straight and narrow. I was a product of this policy. Many of us were.

Three degrees and a decade of professional experience later, I found myself on a building site asking a labourer to explain to me the difference between a conduit and a pipe. The trades live in reality; architects live in the abstract version of the reality they create for themselves. The very best architects understand that tradespeople are our colleagues, not our subordinates. Remember, in many cases the builders not only know more than you, they earn more than you too.

If you want to test the true competency of an architect then ask them to hang a shelf.

This is my way of saying that architecture is not fabricated as a consequence of sole genius and passion. It is the aggregate of multiple professions and trades working together in synchronicity. The real miracle of architecture is that anything gets built in the first place.

Work with others.

The architect is not a single point of failure.

4 - Find Your Method

Being an architect is a lifestyle, not a life sentence.

I broke out of traditional architecture practice 4 years ago. I have continued to tangentially work in architecture through a series of elaborate side quests that have taken me through the architecture competition gauntlet, the film and animation industry, the content creation quagmire, and a series of creative entrepreneurial start-up ventures. On every step of this journey, one thing has remained consistently clear.

Architecture is not what you do but how you do it. Architects solve problems and they communicate their solutions visually. I embraced this a while ago.

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Artist. Visualiser. Public contrarian. Draftsperson. Designer. Writer. Dungeon Master. Content creator. Photographer.

I am not any of the above. I am all of the above. I am an architect.

These are simply the mediums with which I identify problems and communicate my ideas to clients and my wider audience. Sometimes I even build things.

Find your own method.

5 - Architecture is broken, but we can fix it together

Passionate, creative individuals are attracted to the architecture profession like moths to the flame. Be wary of burnout. Passion does not attract money but money might allow you to pursue your passions later in life.

Practicing architecture might very well be the most expensive hobby a person can have and you will need a lot of money to do it, so marry rich, win the lottery, or rob a bank but do not think you can lock in and grind your way towards financial security in architecture. That is a fool’s game. There is no ladder to climb. Your boss pulled it up years ago. If you want to climb high, build a rocket instead. It’s faster, and two of you can go at once.

So, when you build your rocket, invite others along for the journey.

Your friend from architecture school just launched an interior design business. Help them out. Like. Comment. Share. Engage.

Support one another. Share work.

To my fellow architecture millennials who are struggling: we are not competing against one another as there is nothing left to compete for.

It is time to leave.

We are seeking new land, and when we arrive there will be no need to burn the boats.

‘Hello architect.... you want me don’t you? You want that prize.....the prestige, the glory, the fame. Come to me. Win me. I will be your little trophy. You can bring me anywhere you want. I will open doors for you that you can’t even imagine. You can even take me to the bank.’ Ka Ching!

Architecture competitions are sexy and seductive.

The sad reality is that most architecture competitions will leave you broke, depressed and somehow strangely crying for more. Consider it a shame kink of sorts. A humiliation ritual. You have been hustled. I say this with no bitterness. I have been a winner and a loser on multiple occasions in my short and turbulent professional career in architecture, so let me take your hand when I say this. I will even whisper it gently;

‘Architecture competitions are a massive f***ing scam.’

I often describe architecture as an academic blood sport. The architects scrap it out in the Coliseum as the Emperor and his friends watch on gleefully. We are sold the promise that if we can kill enough fellow architects, that we too may get a seat in the gallery.

The problem is that this sport is pay-to-win. Think Fortnite battle royale. Train as hard as you can, but the kid with daddy’s credit card will always win the game. Noob_rizzler_91 just used his v-bucks to buy the special edition Rem Koolhaas skin, he is building himself a fort as the rest of us scrap for resources. The map is closing in around us.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of competing in architecture.

Competing. Winning. Beating someone else. Measuring your skills against the skills of others. Architecture is an incredibly abstract, opaque and subjective profession. There are few metrics by which you get to measure yourself within the profession beyond your employment status and your (probably made-up) job title. I was an ‘experienced part 2 architectural assistant’ for 3 years. I was pathetically proud.

We hear it all the time in architecture school;

Did you know Antoni Gaudí was only 31 when he redesigned the Sagrada Família? Did you know Zaha Hadid won first prize in 1983 for The Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong? She was 33 years old. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the 1971 competition for the Pompidou Centre. They were 33 and 37. Jørn Utzon won the 1957 international competition for the Sydney Opera House at 38.

Well, at 35, I discovered the clown make-up filter on TikTok. I use the filter to make ‘funny’ videos for teenagers. I beg strangers on the internet to subscribe to my sub stack.

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We love and adore these stories. We fetishize them, in fact. Think Architect David vs Architect Goliath. Even the little guy has a chance when it comes to architecture competitions. At least that’s how it used to be.

Today it is Architect Goliath vs Architect Goliath while tiny Architect David sits in the cuck chair, obediently waiting for a turn that will now probably never come. David designed this chair. He turned to furniture design in the hope that it would someday lead to larger commissions. He invoiced the client months ago. He still hasn’t been paid.

The competitive nature of architecture was spiritually beaten into us as students when our professors would pin our grades in descending order on a freshly printed piece of A4 paper, delicately pinned to the dusty concrete column of the architecture studio. We lined up in an orderly single file so that we could find our name and student number beside a lettered grade. Another humiliation ritual of sorts.

At the very bottom of the next sheet it read;

‘Here lies Cathal Crumley - F’

I finished my first semester of architecture school in the bottom 5 of a class of 70 students. There were 4 students below me on the list. Wow. At least I didn’t finish in the bottom 4. That would have really been pathetic. As embarrassing as it is to admit, this experience ignited something inside of me. I would never finish that low again. A competitor was born that day.

I believe it is in our nature to compete as architects.

Not just to satiate our ego but to improve. Architecture school had the right idea, even if the execution was questionable. In order to improve, you must see what others are doing to understand what separates the great architects from the not-so-great architects. Many of the great architecture practices of today were once forged in the red-hot depths of despair that we now recognise as the industrial architecture competition complex. This is admirable to an extent, but the problem today is that clients now understand this and will exploit the competition system for free design work.

I mean, Why pay for one architect when you get 623 architects to work for free?

And this brings me to Helsinki.

For those who are not in the know, an architecture competition was launched in 2024 for the A-D Museo, the new Museum of Architecture and Design in Helsinki, Finland.

A dream job for any Architect.

And then in September 2024, it was announced that the competition had received 623 (six hundred and twenty-three) submissions from architects and designers across the globe. The submissions were made public via the competition website. I had to check it out.

What a depressing, tragic waste of design and resources. I started reviewing each of them in order to bring a bit of lightness to the situation. I thought, maybe I can try to say at least one nice thing about each submission. The very nature of this competition was absurd and as such it demanded an absurd response from an absurd individual.

Architecture is absurd after all.

What started as a bit of fun on my Instagram account evolved into a year-long production on my YouTube channel. My Helsinki playlist currently consists of 38 videos, each of which average a run time of about 50 minutes to an hour.

623 reviews later, 60 hours of work, 38 long-form YouTube videos, 156 Instagram reels, 2 radio interviews and thousands of comments later, here is what I learned;

Nothing.

Architecture competitions were bad before Helsinki and they remain bad post-Helsinki. The greatest irony of all is that I refused to enter this competition on the grounds that I could not afford to do so. I estimated that it would take me 160 hours to design a proposal and that I would likely never see a single penny in return for my labour.

The flip side is that I have since only spent approximately 60 hours reviewing the competition on YouTube. Through Google AdSense revenue on YouTube, the Helsinki Series has grossed me approximately £560.00.

I still lost money, so to speak, but I had way more fun losing it this way.

I technically received a cash prize for my efforts and built an online social media audience of 75,000 people. I didn’t even have to enter. So what does that say about the pathetic state of the industry right now when there is a greater appetite for content about architecture and design than there is for architecture and design itself?

For context, Inside David Harbour & Lily Allen’s Brooklyn Townhouse on the Architectural Digest YouTube channel is sitting with a whopping 8.2m views. At present, the AD Museo Instagram account has 3,722 followers; its announcement of the winner has 338 likes. If you are going to go to the trouble of putting on a competition like this, then at least market it. Hype it up. Show the world why this matters. If we are going to waste so much creative energy on these competitions, then at least put it on show for the world to see what architects are capable of.

I don’t say this to gloat but to highlight the frightening lack of interest in architecture as high culture in 2025. These numbers reinforce my belief that architecture is now for other Architects, not for everyday people.

Why isn’t a competition of this scale primetime entertainment? Can we get Davina McCall or Graham Norton on to evict architects from the competition every Friday night? I would watch this!

As of February 22nd 2026, I am still yet to hear from anyone associated with the organisation of this competition in any official capacity. Not even a letter from a solicitor.

‘Stop making fun of us, silly man, you’re making us look bad.’

If there is a lesson here for young architects, it is probably that we should just stop playing by the rules. Let’s play by our own rules. This competition was launched to ensure that the client had the very best architect for the job. It turns out, the very best architect for the job was a local architect just down the road.

Massive congratulations to the winner, of course, but c’mon, what are the chances?

Architecture as a profession should be leveraging its vast technical expertise and unique ability to solve problems in the fight against social inequality, housing disparity and impending climate collapse.

Instead, it is wasting thousands and thousands of hours self indulgently pushing pixels, creating silly shapes, mis-quoting esoteric architectural texts and superimposing victorian .png cut-outs into parametric dystopian hellscapes for competitions that these studios never had any chance of winning.

Dear lord, what a sad little life, Jane.

May 31st, 2019, London

19.34 pm

I have not slept in 32 Hours. I have never felt so alive.

I am standing in the model shop of a prestigious architecture design studio. It is nearly 8 pm on a Friday night. The studio is almost full. A number of project teams are still working. In the staff kitchen below there is a huge party breaking out. The studio just won another competition. Congratulations. The celebrations will be going for a couple of hours yet. Plenty of time for me to finish up and join the afterparty at the pub later.

The studio is buried deep within a construction site in central London. It is on the third and fourth floor of a fifteen story commercial office development. Architecture practice in-situ. A dusty concrete cacophony. Think Balenciaga ruin porn with inconsistent wi-fi and sponsored corporate retreats. The studio currently has over half a million followers online. Accessible and identifiable in every way imaginable until it comes to locating the front door. An architectural abattoir of sorts. This is where the sausage is made. It’s windows are hidden behind scaffolding and weathered tarpaulin. Industrial slaughterhouse chic is the new vogue.

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I have been working here for just over a month now. HR call it a probation period. I call it an initiation period. I have been cutting foam for 3 days straight. Air pods and headphones are not permitted in the workshop. The radio is playing. 70’s Art Rock;

Disposable darling
Can't throw you away now
Immortal and life size
My breath is inside you

The celebrations vibrate beneath me. Back to work. I am building a 1/20 scale model of a new art gallery. The building will be 6 stories high and the main gallery will have an intricately coffered ceiling grid. I am working on option 37B. I am terrible at making models but according to my new boss I am even worse at making drawings.

Architecture is a team sport. My colleague draws it. I model it. My boss hates it. What is architectural iteration without professional obliteration? Rinse and repeat. This is how we do things here. I have been cutting foam for days now but I love it. It is intoxicating. It is exhilarating. THIS is Architecture.

21.14 pm

Break time. I head to the downstairs bathroom before tactically passing the party in the kitchen. Who is the new guy? They whisper. He is so cool. They probably say. Look how hard he works. He is hardcore.

Champagne and canopies. I swallow a glass, drink an espresso and steal a cocktail sausage for good measure. One of the directors is giving a presentation. Architectural Corpo-speak. Something smells like team spirit mumbo jumbo.

I teleport back to the bottom of the feature concrete staircase that connects the third and fourth floor of the studio. I am skipping every second stair. Can I consume this entire sausage by the time I make it to the top. No time for digestion. I arrive back to the workshop. I find my boss and his boss and his bosses boss standing beneath my hulking mass of foam and card. Frankenstein’s monster bleeds glue as doctor Frankenstein bleeds monster energy drink.

Where have you been? Who cares. We have another idea.

The radio has been turned off.

Architecture is strength and resistance. I prepare for another set of 12 reps. The sun is setting across London. I can see the city skyline fade from soft pink to black abyss though a crusty stained window in the back of the spray booth. This is my tomb. They leave. I will never leave.

11.15 pm

My phone rings again. I swipe to mute. 7 unanswered calls. I have twice returned to the kitchen. The party is dying off. Flat prosecco good. I am floating now. This must be my seventh wind. High on fumes. Drunk on Architecture. High design is my exotic cocktail of choice. I return. On the workshop bench sits a drawing. An incomprehensible miasma of gestural markups. A post-it on the drawing reads;

‘For Monday. Have a good weekend - F'

I turn on the radio and I get to work. Load the drawing. Source the foam. Activate the machinery. Cut the card. Spray the parts. Build the model. Live the dream.

03.12 am

I am alive. Architecture is a system of parts and the system is finally working. One model. Many pieces. Every gallery has been meticulously curated. I have been cutting and sticking tiny 1/20 scale Rothko paintings for over an hour now. Is this one upside down? I don’t even think Rothko would know the answer. Does the client even own any Rothko’s? They probably do. The build continues. I wonder if there are any leftover sausages in the kitchen. Stop. Food is for winners. Focus.

05.31 am

Finished. I stand back and observe. How do I get it out of here? The model is bigger than the door. I’ll figure this out later. I climb on to the step ladder. I peak inside.

Magic.

For just a moment, the space is real. The model is borrowing second hand light from the sunrise as a new day begins. I will never visit this building when it is actually built but the real building will never look this good. This is a moment. This is phenomena. This is what it’s all about. This is Architecture.

A tiny Rothko sits crooked in the east wing. It had not been fastened to the model correctly. I reach in to the model and accidentally slice my hand on a misplaced offcut. I bleed. I cry. I laugh. A house of craft cards undone by a single papercut. I bleed in to the white foam. An infusion has occurred. I am the model. The model is me.

We are the model now.

I quickly take a series of photographs and I send them to my boss. I am sure he will respond with some constructive feedback before the ambulance arrives.

Architecture is blood sweat and tears.

I sit. I wait. The bleeding has stopped. I have stopped. The work never stops.

The workshop door opens. I freeze. My boss has returned. No. Its just the cleaning lady. She looks at me. I look at her. We both look at the mess around us.

She shakes her head and leaves. That was pity.

Don’t pity me. I’m an Architect.

I wonder if the others are still at the pub?

When I was a second year architecture student I bought a book called ‘On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles’. It was an impulse purchase. I was standing in the architecture and design section of a Waterstones in 2012 with a £20 gift voucher.

I had been standing there with my neck bent at a 90 degree angle for the best part of 30 minutes as I tried to read the title on the spine of each and every book. I was starting to get dizzy. The taste of burnt coffee in my mouth didn’t help either, the entire experience was making me nauseous. I better hurry up and decide which architecture coffee table monograph would best match the décor of my mould-ridden windowless student bedroom.

‘Put it in the corner over there, by the empty beer cans and the rotting pile of dirty laundry.’

Every architecture student had a ‘floor-drobe’ right?

I reached for an oddly sized book on the top shelf. I liked the graphic on the cover. I had always been taught to never judge a book by it’s cover but architecture books may be an outlier. We are an image obsessed profession after all. Many architects begin a project by designing the façade first.

I liked this cover in particular. It was white with a glossy grey spiral motif denoting the iconic interior form of the Guggenheim museum in New York. The book is 400 pages long and is filled with the most stunning sketches and drawings of both built and unbuilt works by Frank Lloyd Wright. The book covers the architects’ origin from child to world famous architectural celebrity through a series of architectural essays.

I couldn’t read the book. I tried. I made it past the first couple of chapters but it just couldn’t hold my attention. It didn’t make any sense to me as an architecture student. I just liked the pretty pictures and I think this is fine. About a year ago I was visiting my parents. My mother keeps a box of every sketchbook I ever owned as a student. In the same box there was a small collection of books. Towards a New Architecture, Learning from Las Vegas, The Poetics of Space, On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles.

The book looked tired and old. It had a depressed, yellow sadness. The glossy cover had lost its shine. Coffee stains and scratches. Time had not been kind to this book. What was once a shiny, unspoiled object that represented my enthusiastic pursuit of higher architectural knowledge now lay as a rotting husk of lost time and unfulfilled potential.

I was this book I thought. I am this book.

In the margins of the opening pages there were faintly written notes in pencil. Words were circled, passages were underscored and a single page had a softly folded corner. THIS is where a 21 year old curious version of myself left a riddle for my future self to solve. Written at an angle down the right hand side of page 37 were the following words in my own hand writing;

‘is THIS architecture?’

It is unclear what I was specifically referring to on this particular page but the question hits just as hard as I write this in 2026. Even at 21 I was starting to become a sceptic. Why would I write such a nothing question? Did I know that I would be reading this again 13 years later? Was this Architecture? What even IS Architecture?

I write this post having spent the majority of my adult life looking for the answer. My entire ‘personal brand’ (yuck) is centred around the concept that EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE if you look at EVERYTHING in a specific ARCHITECTURAL way. Architecture is whatever you want it to be. Being an Architect isn’t about making architecture. Its about being able to identify the architecture in things that are made.

Architecture is seeing.

This is why many Architects believe that they can transfer their architectural training into adjacent professions. Some even believe that a license to practice architecture is a license to kill (figuratively) or in an oddly specific example a license to fly a commercial airplane. I recently had a friend joke that he would be able to confidently and safely land an airplane in the event of an emergency because he went to architecture school. Maybe this speaks more to our delusions as Architects than to any form of transferrable professional competency we manage to acquire.

‘help, is there a doctor onboard?…. no… but we have an architect’

Architecture is knowledge but more importantly it is the practical application of this knowledge in the pursuit of solving complex problems. The eye is for seeing but the hand is for making. Something, something Juhani Pallasmaa…

We acquire this knowledge in school, in libraries, in cities and from the people around us, in the books we read and in the entertainment we consume.

How we choose to apply this knowledge is up to us. At age 11 I wanted to be a stand up comedian. At 18 I wanted to be a film director. At 21 I wanted to be an Architect. At 29 I wanted to be an artist. At 35 I found a way to be all of the above in one way or another by designing my own life through content creation.

‘Architecture is communication and video is the new meta.’ he says in a written 1,000 word sub stack post.

To my past self; Architecture is not what you do but how you do it.

Just keep going and remember, there is always space within the margins. It is ok to exist there. Architecture is problem solving. Architecture is culture. Architecture is a way of living and seeing the world. Sometimes it is even buildings.

Architecture is Everything.

Imagine going to a restaurant and ordering a burger. You order the burger. You eat the burger. Then you pay for the burger. Good burger. A week later, the waiter from the burger restaurant shows up at your door. You have another bill. You have to pay for the burger again.

BUT I ALREADY PAID FOR THE BUR-

F**K YOU. PAY ME!

This is how it feels to be an early career architect in 2026. I am 34 years old and I am STILL paying off the interest on a burger I ordered 17 years ago. If you are an architecture student reading this now, then take note: you are only renting the burger. That loan you took out at 18? That’s just the down payment. You will be paying for this burger for the rest of your life. A mortgage for a burger that you already ate.

The burger was just fine.

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The Shape of the Industry

This is the long term cost of an architecture education in 2026. The deeper I wander into this profession, the more its true form begins to reveal itself to me. The industry is not a burger. It is a leftover samosa. A stale Dorito. Imagine an equilateral triangle of sorts, equal in logic, unequitable in spirit. The money and the success are at the very top, but we consistently find ourselves at the bottom.

What could I possibly be describing?

Times are tough. I get it.

Tuition fees are going up, salaries remain static, and the simple cost of calling yourself an architect, legally, in 2026 is rising annually. (See my previous post.)

But the enshittification of architecture didn’t just happen overnight. It’s been a slow, painful development, over a decade in the making.

Slow Rot

I started architecture school in 2010 B.I. (Before Instagram). If you wanted to learn about buildings, you either had to go outside and touch grass, or better yet, visit a library. Remember those? Knowledge lived in books, not the comment section of a Reddit sh*t post. If you went to architecture school between 2010 and 2020, your algorithm is likely already primed to deliver architecture to you as content.

If this is your first exposure to my content, then the algorithm is working. Proof that social media companies want you to consume architecture, and by extension culture, as bite sized entertainment. Mindless clickable memes that we share with one another as disposable pseudo intellectual dopamine.

Architecture as content is the fast food of high culture.

At the time of writing, I have posted 549 vertical reels on Instagram, 240 TikToks and 42 YouTube videos. This is my second written post on Substack this week. I stream to a small live audience of architecture students once a week and I occasionally stream myself playing video games on Twitch. I am a content creator so I fully acknowledge that I am very much a part of the problem that I am attempting to tackle in this piece.

Architecture is Content Now

If you’re a student, it’s likely that your favourite building is probably just your favourite photograph of a building. Something you found mid doom scroll. Somewhere you will never visit. Scrolling is infinite, and exhausting.

We are addicted to content. If you aren’t making it, then you are at least consuming it, and if it’s free, then you are likely the product.

So how is this new form of cultural currency disseminated, you ask?

Well, that’s up to you. Every like, every comment, every post, and every share of a model, a meme, or a pretty sketch is your contribution to the Industrial Architectural Content Complex.

The free content is simply the gateway drug. The real hit comes from the subscription model. Remember, this is on top of the astronomical tuition fees students are already paying to universities. Students and graduates are paying a fortune now to build a portfolio that employers consider ‘good enough’ to then be offered a salary so low that they will likely not even begin making student loan repayments for the first part of their professional career. You would think that after three years of university education and £30k in tuition fees, an architecture graduate would already be considered employable.

Not exactly.

In the past, architecture students needed to know how to draw. Today’s graduates also need to know how to draw, in one of 15 different software packages. They also need to know 3D modelling, rendering, and the entire Adobe suite, and all of this software is locked behind a subscription model.

In Adobe’s case, this is often a lifetime subscription if you fail to read the fine print.

Daddy Issues

Architecture graduates need to get employed fast, and will often travel across the globe to secure an internship due to the competitive nature of the profession. But all of this is irrelevant, of course, if you don’t have an Architecture Daddy.

Architecture Daddy is connected and will get you your first job in the profession. He will also subsidise your disgustingly low income. Before anyone accuses me of sour grapes, I never needed an Architecture Daddy. I had talent.

Nepotism and the ‘old boys’ network’ are nothing new in the architecture profession, but we are seeing the decimation of entry level roles in real time, with the rise of generative AI and the stagnation of wages across the industry. How do graduates stand out today if they likely don’t have an Architecture Daddy?

The answer is content. The personal brand is the 2026 equivalent of knocking on employers’ doors and hand delivering your CV. Only now you’re showing up in their pockets and in their homes. Make enough content and you might even be the last thing these employers see at night.

‘Get ready with me as I spend another day trying to secure an unpaid architecture internship’

A director at a large scale architecture practice could be watching your content at this very moment. Welcome to OnlyPlans, where young architecture graduates can sell access to themselves in exchange for cash. Coming 2030. Probably.

In other words, you never know who could be watching.

The situation is so bad that my own inbox is inundated with architecture students asking me for help. One of them recently asked if I would be willing to be their Architecture Daddy. I had to kindly decline, but not before pointing them in the direction of my own architectural EdTech start up, CRITBAY, where you can pay me to help fill in the gaps. Subscription coming soon. No Seriously. We all have to eat.

Gridlock

This obsession with content is no longer exclusive to the architecture student class. The grown ups are doing it too. We hit peak absurdity when architects stopped designing for the betterment of the urban grid and concentrated their efforts on the curation of the Instagram grid instead. Circular windows dominate Pinterest, and it appears that the post digital drawing era will never end. We just love pretty pictures. Today, it doesn’t even matter if the project gets built, as long as the CG image goes viral.

Kontextur, Architectural Magazine | based in Leipzig + Berlin

Architecture practices are popping up all over the internet with identical branding: beautiful model photographs, elegant line drawings, professional CG imagery.

‘we are disruptive. we also do what everyone else does’

Beautiful and clean but often sterile and unremarkable.

Archi minimal core is the aesthetic of choice. The Helvetica of architecture studios is the architecture studio that loves Helvetica. I know this because I tried to start one in 2023. Studio Cathal Crumley, we hardly knew ye. The algorithm loves this content, so the content mutates and spreads until the entire profession is indefinitely locked in a millennial grey echo chamber of its own creation.

Architecture is digital marketing now. Nothing is real, and we are losing our grip on the profession.

One post at a time.

There is only one thing I despise more than the exploitative, morally duplicitous nature of the architecture profession, and that is being forced to pay hard-earned cash just to remain a part of it.

The salt in the wound is that you don’t just pay once.
You pay annually.
Every. Single. Year.
Forever.
Until you die.
At least, I hope so.

“Here lies Cathal Crumley, loving husband, reluctant architect.”

I imagine a future where my obituary is digitally revised within twelve months of my death because my corpse is no longer able to afford the annual ARB* retention fee.

*The ARB is the UK body that controls who can legally use the title “architect” in business or practice.

My Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions will also be cancelled.

The Adobe Suite subscription will never be cancelled.

“Oh, but Cathal… the ARB maintains the Register of Architects. Didn’t you know?”

What register?
I’ve never seen it. Does it even exist?

For £225 a year, I’d at least like a physical trace of this mystical register somewhere.

Oh, it’s a website? A digital database of sorts?

So I’m paying for the maintenance of something that already maintains itself and also sort of doesn’t even exist.

When I first heard the term “Architects Register”, I imagined some kind of sacred, dusty tome like the Book of Kells. An ancient leather-bound relic hidden in the candlelit ruins of a long-lost mountain monastery. Accessible only to architects of a particular social class, those worthy (wealthy) enough to make the pilgrimage across sky, land, and sea.

Can I just say how disappointed I was to discover that my retention fee doesn’t even go towards the hourly rate of a night watchman with a cool uniform and a whistle. You know, someone who would at least stand in front of the thing to protect it.

Maybe the ARB should use some of our money to buy a dog. Arch-ie the guard dog. Get it?

A mascot we can at least rally behind. Archie wants our money because Archie wants to protect the title.

Not the function, of course. That would make too much sense.

You will have seen in the news recently that RIBA President Chris Williamson has decided not to renew his ARB registration. Why is this significant?

Well, technically, the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects will no longer be legally entitled to use the title “architect” in business or practice, because he has chosen not to remain on the ARB Register. He will, however, remain the public face of the profession, and remain a co-founder of WW+P, a practice that says it has more than 400 staff across 12 studios worldwide.

In other words, for someone in his position, there appear to be few practical consequences to taking this stance, beyond relinquishing the title.

In a post-Grenfell context, the ARB should be going above and beyond to protect the public from bad actors and cowboy operators, not taxing its members with an ever-rising retention fee.

The fee is beginning to feel like a tip jar for an organisation that should be working more closely with government to ensure that it is we, the architects, who are not relying on tips and handouts to survive.

Meanwhile, over on LinkedIn, everyone is calling themselves an architect.
IT Architect. Software Architect. Solutions Architect. Minecraft Architect.

So naturally, you begin to wonder:

Why are some people allowed to use the title freely, while the ones who are most trained and educated are forced to pay a tax?

And how is this tax calculated?

In 2022 the fee was raised by 25% from £119 to £149.
In 2023 it rose again to £179.
In 2024 it hit £199.
In 2025 it landed at £205.
This year it has climbed to £225, a 9.8% rise.

That’s £119 to £225 since 2021: an increase of about 89%.
And according to ARB’s own published prosecution table, there are no convictions listed for misuse of the title “architect” dated 2022 to 2025.

What are we paying for again?

It’s like a secret police enforcing laws that only punish the people who actually follow them. Meanwhile the rule-breakers run around freely, undercutting “real” architects, and go about calling themselves whatever architecture-adjacent title they can think of.

Meet Dave. Dave is delighted to announce his promotion from “trained architectural designer” to “architectural designer trainee”.

Dave makes four times more money than most ARB-registered architects. Probably.

It’s hard not to feel like we’re being punished for playing by the rules.

The architecture profession is a subscription service now.

You will pay forever.