The financial crisis has pummelled architecture. But could it push young designers to new creative heights? We talk salaries and skylines with architecture students

Stirling prize-winner Stephen Hodder in conversation with Manchester architecture students

If university courses were Olympic events, architecture would be the steeplechase: a long, gruelling slog with many tricky obstacles along the way. And for this year’s graduates, there’s little prospect of a medal at the end of it.

Of course, studying architecture offers plenty of scope for creative expression and development – but it’s a vocation as well as an art. To qualify takes seven years: there’s the normal three-year undergraduate degree, followed by a year out at an architects’ practice; then there are another two years back at university, followed by a further year out. And after all that comes a final round of exams and assessments.

So by the time architecture students come out of university, their debts are usually worse than those of other students, in some cases up to £50,000; and the profession isn’t as well paid as, say, medicine or law, also lengthy courses. To add to the pain, architecture students have to go out and find work not once but twice during their education. In the current economic climate, that’s becoming extremely difficult. The construction industry has been hit hard, building projects are stalling or being cancelled, and most architectural practices have been firing staff and downsizing, if not going under. Norman Foster’s firm, for example, is shedding hundreds of staff worldwide.

At Foster’s alma mater, Manchester School of Architecture, students are apprehensive. MSA has a reputation for turning out well-rounded students with good employability – but this year, it seems, there are simply no employers. “I only know one person out of my whole year who’s sorted for a job in September,” says third-year Emily Hale, a 21-year-old from Sheffield. “And that’s in London, through a family friend. I know quite a few who worked in places during the summer holidays and had jobs lined up for after their degree, but now those jobs aren’t there any more.”

Fellow third-year student Ben Gough, also 21, from Devon, agrees: “A lot of people have sent out letters and CVs to 70 to 100 places and have just had no response. At best they’re saying, ‘We might be able to give you a job, but we won’t be able to pay you. People are very dispirited, and feel there’s no point in even applying.”

Hale and Gough are currently preparing for the end-of-year degree show. At this stage, students are encouraged to be more experimental and conceptual, rather than design for the “real world”. Hale’s end-of-year project proposes a futuristic high-rise “feeding station”, where crops would be grown hydroponically (without soil) over several storeys, and animals bred to grow organs for human transplant. Traditionally, potential employers come to the degree shows to assess new talent. In previous years, it was common for students to get business cards or notes pinned to their work offering them jobs for their year out. No one expects that to happen this year.

In a perfect world, Hale would work for Future Systems, makers of the famous, space-age media centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, or one of the cutting-edge Dutch practices such as MVRDV. But, she says, “I’m quite resigned to the fact that I’m probably going to end up working as a waitress or something rubbish for four days a week, while volunteering at a practice one day a week before I get a proper full-time job.”

Gough’s end-of-year project is a more direct reflection of the economic climate. He has designed a system for temporarily inhabiting concrete structures left half-built due to the recession. There are several such examples of these around Manchester. Using a kit of standardised parts, such as shipping containers, these “gaps in the city” could be made use of, he says: “I think my project’s feasible. I’d really like to study it further.”

Gough isn’t sure what he’s doing next year yet: “I’d love to work for Richard Rogers or Nicholas Grimshaw. But I’ll get casual jobs over the summer, probably, like selling fruit at festivals. It’s a bit of a waste of a degree, but that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes. I’ve got loads of debts.”

But if the third-year students have it tough, those now looking for work, having completed their course, aren’t shedding too many tears for them. “They’ll come back to uni next year,” says Mike Walsh, 24, from the Isle of Man. “They’ll have more student loans and a couple of years to ride out the recession, so that puts them in a good position.” The final-year students are also putting their degree shows together, but with little hope for what awaits them.

And by now, they’ve already had a taste of the real world. Walsh worked at a large Manchester practice after his third year, and didn’t totally enjoy the experience: “Everything they did was more or less the same – and that was more or less crap. They were in the middle of boom conditions and everyone wanted to make as much money and build as many buildings as quickly as possible. I just did repetitive redrawings of schemes with very minor changes. There was rarely a moment when you actually sat down and designed. In architecture, there rarely is – you don’t really know what architecture’s about when you go into it. I know I didn’t. It takes three or four years to find out.”

Walsh’s piece is a proposal for a new university library on the site of the BBC’s Manchester building, intended as an investigation of the relationship between architecture and graphic design. His drawings and paintings are mounted on the pages of open books, and depict dramatic interiors lit by giant light wells. Walsh, who would prefer to stay in Manchester and make a name for himself there, has four pet projects on the go at the moment, including some community work restoring a local chapel, and some graphic design: “But none of them are paying for everything, so I would also like a job.”

Jinita Batavia, at the same stage as Walsh, has had a slightly better time of it. She’s a rarity: a student who’s got a solid job lined up, in which she will actually get to build her end-of-year design. Last year, the Londoner was doing voluntary work at a hill station (a high-altitude settlement) in south India, surrounded by coffee plantations. She approached Illy, the company who sourced coffee there, and they agreed to sponsor her project and cover the costs of her degree show (which explains the coffee machine next to her display).

Batavia’s project is about developing a low-cost, self-sufficient village on the plantation, incorporating the best aspects of shantytowns and vernacular architecture with environmentally friendly trends such as biofuels and water management. She has designed a village made up of five sizes of house, based on traditional Indian designs, and will soon go out there to work as a “design consultant” (she can’t call herself an architect yet), overseeing the implementation of her ideas, including the construction of prototype versions of her houses.

The project is something of a contrast to the rest of her year’s work, most of which offers solutions for cities of the future, with lots of huge organic skyscrapers. “This is what they prefer,” says Batavia. “I was up for a distinction, but because my project is low-cost housing, it doesn’t tick all the boxes for some reason. I was told these kind of schemes never get distinctions. It’s frustrating and annoying – but I wanted to do something that I was passionate about and that I could see getting built.”

Comparisons are being drawn between these students and the “lost generation” of would-be architects who graduated during the recession of the early 1990s. Faced with similarly hostile conditions, many of them went into other professions or switched courses. Today, say the students, many graduates are taking the view that, if there’s no work, they might as well go off travelling and see if conditions improve later. A significant proportion will never return. Architecture likes to think of itself as “the mother of the arts”. Those who study it are well placed to branch into other areas: the arts, design, construction, the public sector and beyond.

It has been suggested that this is a good time to study architecture. Recessions trigger creativity, according to popular wisdom, and create exciting opportunities. Out of these conditions, the next Norman Foster might emerge. Of more immediate comfort to students is the fact that in hard times cash-strapped practices often replace older employees with fresh graduates whose salary demands are lower.

What’s certain is that only the most determined will complete the course and survive the challenges. “Ultimately, if you want to be an architect, you’ll carry on no matter what,” says Gough, who, since our meeting, has found a paid six-month job with BDP, a large Manchester practice.

Hale agrees: “I think maybe the true architects will stay and persevere, which is a good thing, I guess. A few months ago, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, working hard in order to get a job as soon as we finished. Now we’re more like, well, it’s not the end of the world.”