The Succession Crisis: Why Architecture Firms Can't Scale Knowledge

Monday, February 2, 2026

#pedagogy #professional-development #architecture

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You sit in a design studio critique. A senior architect stares at the project, pauses, says: “The proportions feel wrong. The entrance doesn’t work. This corner needs more weight.” The student scribbles notes. No one asks why the proportions feel wrong, what “working” means for an entrance, or how one measures architectural weight. The verdict has been delivered.

This scene plays out in architecture schools worldwide, and we call it education.

A Comfortable Myth

Architecture operates under one foundational assumption: design judgment is fundamentally different from other professional expertise. A structural engineer can explain why a beam fails. A surgeon can articulate an incision path. Architectural judgment? That lives beyond explicit knowledge, accessible only through experience and intuition.

This assumption runs so deep we rarely examine it. When we cannot explain why a design works, we blame the inherent nature of design rather than our pedagogical failure. Design knowledge is tacit, we say. We know more than we can tell.¹ Donald Schön gave us “reflection-in-action” to describe knowing that professionals cannot articulate,², and unfortunately most architects have turned these frameworks into their excuse for not trying.

The problem is not that tacit knowledge exists. It exists everywhere. The problem is treating its existence as an epistemological stop sign rather than a pedagogical challenge.

Other Fields Chose Differently

Fifty years ago, engineering design operated much like architecture does today. Senior engineers made decisions based on “feel.” When asked why, they spoke vaguely about elegance and efficiency. Engineering methodology was apprenticeship. Knowledge transfer was osmotic.

Then Pahl and Beitz spent decades systematically documenting engineering design processes.³ They observed expert engineers, broke down decisions into reproducible steps, created frameworks novices could follow. Engineering design is now taught systematically: clarify the task, establish function structures, search for solution principles, develop layouts, define construction. Each phase has explicit methods and evaluation criteria. Firms can now hire graduates who make competent decisions within months, not years.

Or consider UX design. Thirty years ago, UX did not exist as systematic discipline. Interface design was intuitive, the domain of graphic designers working by feel. I watched this transformation during my studies in graphic and interactive design. What was mystified became systematic. UX designers now teach explicit laws quantifying human cognition: Fitts’s Law relates target acquisition time to distance and size. Hick’s Law describes decision time increasing logarithmically with choices. Jakob’s Law explains why users prefer familiar interfaces. Miller’s Law constrains working memory to seven items, plus or minus two.⁴

These are not metaphysical principles but falsifiable, testable relationships from empirical research. A junior UX designer applies them to make defensible decisions without a master looking over their shoulder.

Even music developed explicit pedagogical frameworks. Figured bass notation allowed Baroque musicians to teach harmonic improvisation systematically. Harmonic theory made composition teachable. You can teach musically untrained people to compose passable four-part harmony in a semester. The result may not be inspired, but it will be competent and structurally sound.

These fields recognised that tacit knowledge is not ontologically different from explicit knowledge. It is knowledge not yet adequately articulated - the difficulty of such articulation does not prove impossibility.

But Architecture Choose Mystification

Architecture has the same underlying principles these disciplines formalised. We know certain proportional relationships create visual stability. We understand how ceiling height affects spatial perception. We recognise that light quality influences emotional response. We identify when circulation patterns support or hinder behaviour. We seem to know these things, yet we refuse to systematise them.

This refusal serves several functions. First, it maintains master architect authority. If design judgment cannot be taught explicitly, the only path to competence is prolonged apprenticeship. This creates artificial scarcity and preserves hierarchies.

Second, mystification protects from accountability. When design decisions cannot be explained, they cannot be effectively challenged. A vague appeal to “feeling” or “experience” short-circuits critical examination.

Third, it lets the profession avoid hard pedagogical work. Systematic teaching requires systematic thinking. It demands examining intuitions, decomposing judgments, building frameworks others can learn. This work is intellectually demanding with little immediate reward. Easier to hand-wave about ineffability.

This is research that confirms this. Lara Schrijver observes that architectural knowledge often lacks explicit frameworks found in other disciplines, making it vulnerable to relativism and difficult to measure.⁵ When researchers ask architects to explain design success or failure, answers consistently include tacit dimensions without elaboration: “Too big.” “Wrong proportions.” “Doesn’t feel right.” These become conversational dead-ends rather than starting points.

Failure, Measured

The consequences are measurable. Architecture students report lower confidence in decision-making compared to students in other design disciplines.⁶ They describe constant need for instructor validation, inability to trust judgment without external confirmation. This is not imposter syndrome. It is rational response to an educational system refusing clear evaluation criteria.

The master-apprentice model was recognised as pedagogically problematic decades ago. In the 1970s, CalArts pioneered post-studio art education moving away from master-disciple hierarchies toward communal learning.⁷ Architecture remains largely unchanged, still operating where individual instructors hold near-absolute authority over student work.

Critics note that architecture teachers are “largely autodidacts with respect to pedagogy” rather than trained educators.⁸ We hire architects who can design buildings, not people who know how to teach design systematically. Then we are surprised when teaching quality varies wildly and students emerge without robust frameworks.

The Succession Crisis

Market consequences are equally clear. Architecture firms flourish under visionary founders and flounder in the next generation. Walk through any major city and you will find practices thriving for decades under singular design leaders, then struggling or dissolving after that figure retired or died. This pattern is so common we treat it as natural rather than catastrophic.

Compare this to engineering firms, which routinely outlive founders and maintain consistent quality across generations. They achieve this through externalised methodologies: design manuals, calculation frameworks, decision trees, review checklists. A mid-level engineer at a well-run firm accesses decades of accumulated knowledge without having worked alongside those who developed it. Firm expertise is structural, not personal.

Richard Rogers Partnership, Foster + Partners face this challenge. The brand persists, but can design thinking transfer systematically, or does quality depend on increasingly rare personal involvement of the founding architect? When Norman Foster dies, does Foster + Partners maintain design sensibility, or become a large firm executing in vaguely Foster-ish style?

We approach generational transition in architecture. The stars of the late 20th century are retiring or dying. If their knowledge dies with them because we never made it legible, we will have failed catastrophically.

Why Firms Cannot Scale

This is not just succession but also scaling. Engineering and consulting firms grow to hundreds or thousands of employees while maintaining quality because their methodologies are explicit. A junior employee is productive within weeks because firm knowledge is documented and accessible.

Architecture firms rarely can do this. We scale by cloning the master-apprentice relationship: hire talented young people, have them work closely with senior designers for years, hope they absorb right lessons. This is inherently unscalable. A firm is limited by how many people senior designers can personally mentor. Growth beyond certain size inevitably means diluting design quality as founder influence weakens.

This has competitive consequences. Architecture firms remain relatively small while competing with massive engineering and project management firms that solved knowledge transfer. We lose influence in the building industry not because architects lack valuable knowledge, but because we cannot deploy that knowledge at scale.

The Rationalisations

When confronted with these problems, architects offer rationalisations. Architecture is different, we say. More complex, more contextual, more dependent on judgment resisting systematisation. Every project is unique. You cannot reduce design to formulas.

These arguments are identical to what engineers said fifty years ago and UX designers said thirty years ago. They were wrong then and we are wrong now.

Yes, architecture is complex and contextual. So is medicine, which nonetheless teaches diagnostic frameworks helping residents make better decisions faster. Yes, every project is unique. So is every legal case, yet law schools teach systematic approaches to legal reasoning. Complexity and uniqueness do not exempt a field from obligation to develop teachable methodologies.

Another deflection: explicit frameworks stifle creativity. This is demonstrably false. Jazz musicians improvise brilliantly precisely because they internalised harmonic structures. Poets create within formal constraints. Engineers innovate while respecting physical laws. Explicit knowledge does not constrain creativity; it provides foundation on which creativity builds. You cannot break rules artfully until you understand them systematically.

The deeper issue: we confused the difficulty of articulation with its impossibility. Yes, articulating design judgment is hard. It requires careful observation, rigorous analysis, iterative refinement. But hard is not impossible. We simply have not invested the effort.

Making Knowledge Legible

The tools to change this exist. We need to professionalise architectural pedagogy, hiring and training people who can teach design systematically rather than merely demonstrate it. It means investing in research making tacit knowledge explicit, similar to what Pahl and Beitz did for engineering.

We need frameworks decomposing architectural judgment into teachable components. When a designer says proportion feels wrong, we should ask: what is the ratio? What are the sight lines? How does scale relate to human dimensions? What examples succeed with similar proportions, and what differs here? These questions lead to articulated knowledge.

We need design languages allowing meaningful critique without appeals to authority. Instead of “this doesn’t work,” we need “the entrance sequence creates threshold ambiguity because sight lines from the approach allow no clear reading of facade hierarchy” - the second statement can be discussed, tested, and refined, whilst the first is merely assertion.

Architecture must embrace evidence-based design. The tools to quantify architectural experience exist. Roger Ulrich’s 1984 study showed surgical patients with nature views had 8.5% shorter hospital stays, needed fewer strong analgesics, and had fewer postsurgical complications than those facing brick walls.⁹ This was measurable clinical outcome, not aesthetic preference.

Evidence-based design has matured considerably. Research quantifies how architectural elements affect outcomes: single-patient rooms reduce hospital-acquired infections by up to 50%,¹⁰ ceiling height influences abstract thinking versus detail-oriented cognition,¹¹ daylight exposure in hospital rooms correlates with reduced pain medication use.¹² Neuroarchitecture uses EEG, fMRI, and mobile brain imaging to measure how spaces affect brain activity, stress levels, and cognitive function.¹³

Studies using electroencephalography show that architectural elements produce measurable neurophysiological responses. The ratio of alpha to beta brain waves changes predictably in response to ceiling height, aspect ratio, and window area.¹⁴ The anterior cingulate cortex responds to spatial complexity in quantifiable patterns. The parahippocampal place area processes architectural scenes through measurable neural mechanisms.¹⁵ Mirror neurons generate empathetic responses to architectural forms that can be tracked through brain imaging.¹⁶

A 2021 comprehensive review of neuroarchitecture and its precursor approaches documents how the field has matured from its roots in geometry, phenomenology, and environmental psychology into a rigorous experimental discipline.¹⁷ The review synthesises findings across 612 studies, tracing how virtual reality combined with neuroimaging techniques allows researchers to manipulate architectural variables systematically whilst recording objective cognitive-emotional responses. This methodology overcomes the limitations of self-report measures and non-immersive representations that plagued earlier research.

Architecture has equivalents to UX design’s laws, simply not yet codified: proportion relates to perceived stability, ceiling height affects cognitive performance, natural light impacts circadian rhythms and healing, spatial sequence influences emotional response. These relationships are quantifiable. We have not invested in systematically codifying and teaching them.

Integrating research methodologies into design education and practice becomes essential. When a designer says “the ceiling feels oppressive,” the next question should be: what is the ceiling height to floor area ratio? What does research tell us about psychological effects of this proportion? What measurable outcomes are we optimising for? What do EEG studies show about similar spatial configurations?

This does not eliminate judgment or creativity. It grounds judgment in evidence and makes creativity teachable.

Existing practitioners need professional development. If your firm wants to survive your retirement, document your design methodology. Not your portfolio, your methodology. What questions do you ask approaching new projects? How do you evaluate competing schemes? What principles guide decision-making? Write it down. Test whether others can apply it. Refine based on their questions. Train mid-level staff to teach these frameworks to juniors. Create internal design manuals codifying firm knowledge. This is hard work, but necessary for firm longevity.

Gatekeeping or Compounding

The choice before architecture is clear. We can continue treating design knowledge as mystery accessible only through prolonged apprenticeship, preserving hierarchies while our influence in the building industry erodes. Or we can do what engineering, UX design, and other disciplines did: systematically articulate what we know so each generation builds on the last rather than rediscovering principles intuitively.

Systematic knowledge and intuitive judgment are not opposites but stages in expertise development: novices need explicit frameworks guiding initial decisions, whilst experts have internalised those frameworks so thoroughly their application feels intuitive. But internalisation requires frameworks exist in the first place.

The question is whether we want knowledge compounding across generations or maintain a system where each architect rediscovers basic principles through personal trial and error. The first path leads to a profession growing more capable over time, whilst the second leads to stagnation disguised as tradition, and eventually, a sunset profession.

UX design made the transition in three decades. Engineering did it in two generations. How long will architecture wait?

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