An architect is for life.
November 24th, 2009 | by awinston |News Junkie has been told by many architects that they will never retire and there are certainly a fair few still practicing well into their twilight years…
…and to prove you can’t keep a good architect down, the 101 year old Oscar Niemeyer has returned to work just weeks after surgery for gallstones and an intestinal tumour.
This week reporters in the BD office have interviewed at least four architects well past retirement age who are still practicing, writing about and deeply involved with architecture.
This is both impressive and admirable but, given that young architects are constantly going on about how hard they have to work to survive, it is also odd. Most people with similarly demanding jobs would look forward to retirement. So why can’t architects let go?
Answers in the box below please.
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11 Responses to “An architect is for life.”
By Svea on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
How many of these ‘oldies’ are still working 9-6 with only 20 days holiday a year? And therein lies the answer….it’s more a hobby than a job at that stage – something to do but without the stress perhaps than younger architects face in their daily grind.
By Peter Hurcomb on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
During my student years I was told an architect spends five years of study learning the questions and the rest of his life finding the answers. After fifty years around architects’, assorted designers’ and contractors’ offices I’m still enjoying trying to find them. I will concede, however, that I find many of the questions being asked now are becoming more and more stupid!
By Peter Jeffree on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
Architecture is very demanding but for many it’s not a job in the normal sense, its a creative way of life. The urge to create doesn’t diminish with age. If anything the opposite happens as experience, which can only be accumulated with age, generates even more creative possibilities and long may it continue.
By Athena on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
As much as I admire Neimeyers Work, it doesn’t sound reasonable he should be working at such age. All the great masters of this world (be they artists, musicians or in this case architects) have reached their creative peak before their fifties. Take Corbusier or Van der Rohe for example. The Villa Savoie or the Barcelona Pavillion do not compare to their later works. It is therefore a shame that this Great architect should abate his reputation by leaving behind work unequal to what he has been able to produce in the past.
By Ronnie Ramirez on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
An Architects’s is a facts of life, once you get in, you can not get out once you get out, you can not get in. It’s an infinite!
By Lead Balloon on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
Not all.
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive”.
Hokusai
By Sqlar on Nov 25, 2009 | Reply
I’m sorry but i absolutely cannot agree with the statement “All the great masters of this world have reached their creative peak before their fifties”. Corbusier built Ronchamp at the age 67, ten years before he died. Though the are both masterpieces, in my humble opinion Villa Savoie doesn’t hold a candle to the Notre Dame du Haut. Frank Lloyd Wright worked on the Guggenheim until he died at 91. Bach wrote his Mass in B Minor, the Art of the Fugue, and the Musical Offering, along with a number of his finest Violin and Harpsichord concertos in the last 15 years of his life (he lived to be 65). There is just no evidence that ‘all great masters’ peaked in their fifties.
I think there are many stages of an architect. When young, the architect is capable of producing designs, drawings and renderings in large quantities, later on it becomes more important to strategize, inspire clients and your team, craft a vision etc. One of the reasons i decided to enter this profession is exactly because there isn’t just one thing to do and the job can grow along with you. I’m only 34 and i don’t think I can ever imagine not doing this work, learning new ways of doing things every day, and hopefully from those very architects who have refused to retire!
By Alan Campbell on Nov 26, 2009 | Reply
I think that in many cases the reason is financial and not creative as many of us have never been able to afford a pension plan and, if you have to keep your Professional Indemnity Insurance going for 7 years after retirement you have to keep working to pay for it – Oscar Niemeyer’s premiums could be enormous?
Thank goodness I actually enjoy what I must continue to do for ever until I collapse over the drawing board and impale myself on my pencil.
By Astonished on Dec 3, 2009 | Reply
How the elite croon, what about those Architects for which it is a job?
How many architects over 65; how many below 65 unemployed?
By Harry P on Dec 4, 2009 | Reply
That’s why young architecture offices have no projects… because all the old mummies simply won’t rest.
Niemeyer, FL Wright etc…what about us “normal” architects?
Don’t we deserve some projects ?
By John Cottam on Dec 4, 2009 | Reply
I continue to work,age 66, on the dross that Developer and Private clients here in Cyprus demand, at I might add, at penurious fee rates.
Why?It is little different from the projects for public and private Clients, that I worked on,(with one or two notable exceptions) as a salaried architect in the UK for 30 years or more.Why continue?
When I return to the UK (or France)next year, I intend to create the house that has been on the drawing board, all my professional life.
Client?…Yours truly.