By Anna Kross
Working in architecture for a not long time I still have accumulated some experience, which is to confront the reality where your age is seen as the definitive metric of your professionalism, and unfortunately not with a positive connotation. How old are you? What experience do you have? We are looking for a person with 5 - 10 years experience. So far these types of expressions appear to be rooted in the world of architecture.
Anna Kross (b 1995) is a landscape architect working with architecture, interior and textile. She studied landscape architecture in Norway (AHO, graduated in January 2020), environmental engineering in Finland and the history of art in Russia. The mixture of these experiences is reflected in her works.
As a young architect, whether trying to make on your own path or working in an established company, you stumble upon two huge obstacles: braking of the system and prejudices of humans. A few examples here. In order to build a simple private house, one has to get permission, which is given to architects only after 4 years of experience (I am talking about Norway, in other countries, the timeframes, of course, can be different). In order to have a better chance to win a municipality competition any company, young or mature, is interested in having more experienced employees in their profile, as the assessments are most often based on the employees’ CVs where years of experience play a significant role. I think there is no need for any examples of human prejudices about age in the construction world, as most architects reading it probably have their own and colourful ones.
Why is it happening? Maybe it's time to reconsider our approach to the value of experience and education in architecture? Most of the top architecture schools are very theoretical whereas most of the junior positions in architecture firms do not give you bigger experience than that of drawing door detail. How will the four-year experience with door details help me construct a private house?
As a result, we have a bias in education and professional training, broken dreams and departure of talents from the field. What is this: cementing the pillars of the profession, a school of survival, an action of goodwill in favour of urbanism?
Inexperienced does not mean unskilled or incapable. Because of the rapid technology and information space evolution, young architects of today have tools to learn much faster. That is also helped by them having a slightly different concept of time, approach to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of social control. Most probably they won’t build something that they are not sure about, and when they are not sure, they will ask more experienced colleagues, because they have so many good ones. So why not let young architects build at least a building of first difficulty level? Why not create a system of guardianship instead of the system of obstructions? Maybe architecture, particularly in Norway, will become more lively, and more attractive as a profession?
Meanwhile, we the young architects are left waiting and hoping for the blessing of experience.