Interview conducted in Dutch by Michiel van Raaij on 18.01.2024 and published in Architectenweb on 01.02.2024, further transcribed with Cockatoo, translated to English with DeepL and edited by Oana Bogdan.
MvR: This is architect Oana Bogdan of &bogdan from Belgium, formerly Bogdan & Van Broeck, and architect Jan-Peter Wingender of Office Winhov from the Netherlands. My name is Michiel van Raaij, I am editor-in-chief of Architectenweb and today I am talking to Oana and Jan-Peter about the architects’ fees in Belgium and the Netherlands. Is it fair? In this context, I think it is good to know that Jan-Peter, in addition to his work as an architect, is also a board member of the BNA, the professional association of Dutch architects.
It is not easy to talk about architects’ fees, because every job is different, the role of the architect is different in Belgium and the Netherlands, but here I am sitting at the table with two architects who are very passionate about their profession and, at the same time, concerned. Great concerns in Belgium, but also concerns in the Netherlands. Oana, some time ago you posted on LinkedIn a comparison between architects’ fees and the fees of other liberal professions. And the number of hours that directors work. Can you explain this overview?
OB: It was about a study by the Dutch Architects Association (BNA) on the number of hours worked by agency directors. Belgian architects were in first place. And my own experience is that there were months when I work 370 hours a month. This is the only way to cope with the low fees. And then there is the comparison with other liberal professions. If you take the average of the fees of the liberal professions as 100%, an architect earns 58%, a lawyer 73%, a doctor 130%, a surgeon 196% and a notary 267%. Like a doctor, we have a code of ethics, we must defend the public interest. As I don’t see much difference between architects and doctors, I don’t understand why we are in this situation.
MvR: That’s quite dramatic. And can you explain what this means for the monthly salaries of the architects working for you or for other firms?
OB: In Belgium, the gross turnover of an architectural practice per hour worked is between 45 and 59 euros per hour. The values are indexed to today’s date. We would need at least 80 euros gross per hour. And depending on the type of agency, you can go up to 140 euros per hour. For trainees, the Order of Architects (Flemish Council) has proposed a minimum scale. A self-employed trainee – in Belgium, most architects are self-employed, but this is a false self-employment, tolerated by the state – starts at 13.92 euros gross per hour, excluding VAT. If you are sick or on holiday, you earn nothing. Young architects in Belgium cannot afford a flat, they live like students. The problem is that many of us enjoy our work too much, and therefore are willing to work for such low fees.
MvR: Jan-Peter, you read Oana’s post. What did you think about it?
J-PW: It’s really frightening, because the image of Belgian architecture in the Netherlands is very rosy. We are incredibly positive about Belgian. Everyone revels in the Open Call as a tendering system, accessible to young offices, promising. The contrast between the quality of architecture in Belgium and the architect’s fee is too big. And that was for me the shock of what you posted. And not only you, but also the newspaper De Standaard published an extensive article on this topic. And on the fact that young architects in Belgium are just leaving the profession, because they can’t make a living out of it. It’s a kind of horror scenario. At the same time, I’m aware, and that’s why I came up with the invitation to have this discussion, that in the Netherlands we have a collective agreement with all the architects (CAO). This means that we collectively agree on the salaries of employees, including young employees. This is well regulated in the Netherlands, but we don’t really realise that we have it so good.
MvR: Jan-Peter, we have just heard some figures from Belgium. Can you sketch out what this looks like for Dutch architectural firms?
J-PW: In the Netherlands, most architects are employed by architectural firms. The average all-in fee charged by an architectural firm in the Netherlands in 2022 is 102 euros per hour. Indexed, that’s about 115 euros per hour on average. But there is a range: smaller firms charge between 80 and 150 euros per hour; medium-sized firms, with between 12 and 45 employees, charge between 120 and 200 euros per hour. And top architects, which is a small group in the Netherlands, charge more than 200 and even up to 400 euros an hour.
Since 1 January, we have a new salary scale that starts at around 2600 to 2800 euros gross per month. This has also been indexed a little in the meantime. You can also see that a new job classification was introduced on 1 January, which is linked to the CAO. This was done to simplify the number of jobs and to bring them more into line with actual practice, but at the same time the job classification was also introduced to be able to increase the salaries of the lower scales. This makes the profession more attractive to young architects.
In the collective agreement that came into force in January, there is now a clear incentive to pay these younger employees, and therefore also trainees, better for their work, to ensure that they can simply rent a house and live off it. And that it is an attractive career.
MvR: Are architects properly paid in the Netherlands? And I am talking about architects’ fees.
J-PW: In the Netherlands, the fees that architects currently work for may still be adequate. There is always a need for more. You can also see that the complexity of the profession is increasing, so you simply must spend more time on projects. But if you look at it, I think the fees in the Netherlands should keep up with the market, but they are not very far from the market.
MvR: And are architects in Belgium properly paid? Again, we are talking about architects’ fees.
OB: No, not at all. The fees should be doubled.
MvR: And were architects’ fees and salaries indexed in the Netherlands and Belgium last year? Does everything move with inflation?
J-PW: Salaries in the Netherlands are indexed for employees because we have a collective agreement. And that’s where the indexation is. The fees move a little bit less, and that’s where the problems start.
OB: In Belgium we have a self-employed system. The fees are not automatically indexed, so it depends on the architectural practice. For example, we do it at the same time as the indexation that happens with employees in other sectors. As far as fees are concerned, indexation depends on the contracts, but many of our contracts have no indexation because there was not such a significant fluctuation before. And now we are working on old money while paying people 10-15% more. The unpredictability of the index fluctuation has led clients to limit the indexation of our fee in the case of new contracts. It’s a real drama because our financial situation is going to get worse very quickly.
MvR: What problems does the underpayment of architects in Belgium cause?
OB: It is unliveable, they cannot afford proper accommodation, if they want to have children, it’s impossible. We are also seeing a huge movement of architects leaving our profession. They go into other sectors, IT, whatever.
MvR: I think we can conclude that we are talking about a halving of what you have in the Netherlands. And then something about the causes: why is the fee in Belgium now so low?
OB: Firstly, real estate is simply cheaper. In a 2015 BNA benchmark, to give just one example, the price per square metre in city centres, in a prime location, was twice as high in the Netherlands as in Belgium. It is a long story about why property is so cheap in Belgium, but it is what it is. Secondly, we have too many small architectural firms in Belgium. There is always an architectural firm that is willing to work below price. There are business models among architects that we cannot compete with, such as hobby architects who do not make money from architecture. That is unfair competition. Then there are architects who teach, not in Belgium, because that doesn’t make a lot of money, but abroad. If you teach at a good university, you also get students who want to work for you for free, as interns. If you are an architectural firm which pays everyone and everything correctly, it is difficult. If you also work on public projects, which I think is important – I think we have a social mission as architects -, things get worse, because the contracts are imposed, there is no negotiation possible. The public administration does not yet know enough to set an example, because their budgets are always too low, and so the fees are also too low.
MvR: How are these hourly rates determined? A public project takes so many hours to work on, well then, you have this hourly rate, how can it still go wrong?
OB: We used to have a deontological norm that imposed minimum scales. But then it was decided at a European level that this would be against free competition and those scales were abolished. But we could get them back if the relevant minister signed a decree to impose a minimum fee for the basis tasks of the architect, the ones for which the architect is liable. But no minister wants to take that responsibility. Why not? Because it would have an impact on the construction industry. If our fees go up, other fees and construction costs will also go up. And then the price of real estate would go up, which is something completely against the Belgian tradition. With competition between architectural firms, fees have spiralled down and the workload went up.
MvR: How is such a fee structured in the Netherlands?
J-PW: We used to have the Standard Terms and Conditions SR 1997, which have been abolished by the Competition Authority, meaning that we are in a free market situation since then. We can see that both architects and clients are benchmarking, comparing what are reasonable fees, contracts, task lists. Professional clients know that they need architects, so they just must pay normal fees. There is always some kind of downward pressure on those fees, but this benchmarking helps. You also notice calculations in unit prices, prices per gross square metre for different types of contracts or, for example, price per dwelling when it comes to larger housing developments. That is what is being looked at. Increasingly, I also see architecture firms doing hourly calculations and giving them to their clients: this is the design, this is the team working on it, this is how many hours it takes, this is just the gross hourly rate. There are diverse ways of charging. And, in some cases, it’s still a percentage of the construction cost, that’s still referred to. Particularly in more complex renovations and restorations, I still see that way of calculating fees. And then, of course, there are exotic cases where there is some kind of success fee for the architects, but these are exceptional situations.
In a number of sectors, you see that the fee is too low in relation to what must be delivered, and to the number of hours that go into it. Architects’ fees are too low in school construction. That’s a problem. In housing, they are under pressure because the size of the commission in the Netherlands is decreasing very rapidly. Unlike in Belgium, where the architect’s responsibility is much greater than in the Netherlands in terms of execution and site supervision, we now have the VODO architect, who only does a VO-DO (preliminary design-definitive design). The next step is the SO-VO (sketch design- preliminary design), so we have the SOVO architect. That’s about the minimum, you just submit an idea in a sketch, which is taken over by a contractor or by the builder himself. This problem is particularly prevalent in serial housing construction. You may see that the basis of the fee is not that bad, but then maybe only 30% of the fee is actually commissioned to an architect. Let’s say that in a number of sectors this fee is demonstrably too low at the moment, and the size of commissions in the Netherlands in particular is declining very rapidly. In residential construction, on which many architects in the Netherlands depend, this is really becoming a very vulnerable factor.
MvR: Architects’ fees are kept high in the Netherlands, partly because there is a CAO underneath, which then sets the hourly rates for employees. But you are particularly concerned about this CAO, Jan-Peter. Can you explain why?
J-PW: The collective agreement in the Netherlands (CAO) is made between employers and employees. There is nobody else in between. BNA is representing the employers in this game, although the BNA is much broader because it is a trade association, which means that they are also there for the employees of the architectural firms. Together with the trade unions, they draw up this CAO for salaries, sick leave, but also professional training, for example. What is an internship and what is not? What is the minimum you pay for an internship as part of an apprenticeship? It’s quite a complete package. In the Netherlands, if one of the two parties, the union or the employer, in this case the BNA, represents 60% of the constituency, so of all the architects in the Netherlands, then you can have such a CAO that you agree on together, which is legally valid for everyone who works in architecture firms. It has general legal validity.
The moment you fall below that 60%, and right now the BNA is in a very thin grey area around it, you no longer have a collective agreement that applies universally to all architectural firms. That means that, if you don’t have a collective agreement, you are competing on labour, because laboyr is the main cost of architectural firms. So, what happens in Belgium, which is driven down by the market, is stopped in the Netherlands by this CAO. This means that they compete on other factors: quality, efficiency, services provided etc. The moment the collective agreement is removed from the system, architectural firms start competing on labour costs. That’s how the market works. This means that the race to the bottom that you are now really seeing in Belgium could be avoided in the Netherlands. This collective agreement (CAO) is therefore crucial for a healthy architectural market in the Netherlands. It is also the only price agreement that the Competition Authority allows in our profession. It is particularly important to have it and to keep it. What many architects in the Netherlands don’t realise is that, if they are not members of the BNA, they are actually undermining the support base of a well-functioning sector. Because if the BNA falls below that 60%, there will be no collective agreement.
That is my concern. In short, if you are not already a member of the BNA, you should seriously consider becoming one. When I became a member of the BNA board, I decided not to do any advertising for the BNA, but, in this case, it is a vital interest of all architects working in offices, but also of all architecture offices themselves, to keep this collective agreement intact. And not being a member of the BNA means distancing oneself from this collective responsibility, with the risk that it will go under, and then the whole Dutch architectural market will collapse.
OB: We are very envious of the Netherlands in this respect. We would very much like to have minimum scales for employees/freelance collaborators, for example. Then we could also raise the fees of the architectural firms and we would no longer compete on price.
J-PW: That’s the uniqueness of the Dutch situation. The Royal Institute for British Architects RIBA recently asked the BNA: “How did you arrange this, because this is what we in England would also like very much”. Due of the free market in architecture, British architectural firms are also struggling enormously with fees and with paying people.
OB: The big problem of Belgium is the very fragmented landscape: in a 11 million inhabitants country, there are 3 different regions, 3 official languages, too many organisations to be strong enough, and too many small architectural firms. It is difficult to get everyone behind one organisation, such as BNA, and one collective agreement, such as CAO.
J-PW: In the Netherlands we also have a lot of small agencies. There are 5.000 agencies registered with the Chamber of Commerce, of which between a thousand and two thousand are more than one person. There are a lot of self-employed or small offices that work with freelancers. Architectural firms with employees are between 1.000 and 2.000, and then a bit more towards 2.000.
MvR: I would like to focus on the role of architects in Belgium and how it differs from that in the Netherlands. You could say that architects in Belgium are being given increased responsibility in terms of tasks, while the fees are lagging behind. In the Netherlands, it varies, but in some sectors the opposite is true: architects are given less and less responsibility and smaller, fragmented assignments. Oana, can you describe the responsibilities of an architect in Belgium?
OB: We provide all the documents needed for a building permit, which is the most important first step for any client. We also do quantifications and estimates and handle budget control. Sometimes it is mentioned in our contracts that if the contractors’ bids exceed the budget by more than 15%, we have to re-tender free of charge. Acoustic standards are getting higher and higher as people become more sensitive to noise. We do not do the calculations, but we do the integration. The accessibility standard also requires a lot of work. Of course, the buildings have to be accessible, of course the acoustic standards have to be met. Further, we advise the client on the relationship with the contractor. Then we take care of the proper follow-up of the site until completion, and then we have a year, sometimes two years, between the provisional completion and the final completion. We basically follow everything up.
Then we are liable for ten years for everything to do with the building carcass, water and wind tightness. If there are problems, you as the architect are sued in solidum, together with the contractor, and then an expert comes and takes a lot of time to make a report and decide who is to blame and how much. And a small percentage always goes to the architect, because you can always coordinate better or check better, according to experts and judges. So yes, the range of tasks is wide.
J-PW: And you have the structural design, the technical installation design and the building physics in your architectural brief, as I understand it. Or is that tendered out to consultancies separately from your brief?
OB: For the structure, we work with stability offices. For the technical installations, we work with engineering firms. And then we have an expert in the energy performance of the indoor environment. We coordinate all these engineers and consultants. We also conduct the discussions with the fire brigade, which is overly cautious in Belgium. There are too many interpretations of the standard, depending on the location, although this standard is set at federal level. We are also busy with the water management, the way we collect rainwater, buffer it, reuse it on the site or in the building so that it does not go into the public sewer. We provide input for mobility studies, you name it. It’s really a lot.
J-PW: And integrate. You talk about all the documents that you then do for the building permit application. Do you then integrate the work of these consultants?
OB: Yes, everything is integrated in the building permit application. Furthermore, BIM (Building Information Modelling) is mandatory in public projects, and it brings protocols and even more work. It works in a different way. Citizens’ participation, we are also involved in that. We do not facilitate it, but we will prepare material and meet the citizens to present it. Then there is a lot of consultation with different agencies.
MvR: How does that sound, Jan-Peter?
J-PW: As an integral responsibility. There are two models in Dutch practice. Either you take on the whole assignment and then all the other consultants fall under your assignment. This means that the structural engineer, the installation consultant, the building physics, the fire protection, all the consultants fall under our remit. Then we have a lot of subcontractors to provide an integrated model. That’s really the minority of jobs. Generally, because we have very professional clients, they want to do that coordination themselves. But they want us to integrate all the information that comes out of it into the design, but also identifying contradictions, discussing exceptional situations. For example, as of 1 January 2024 we have a new environmental law that places an extremely high value on participation. This means that the role of Dutch architects in this area will change in the coming years. They will have to explain their design more often. This is one of those tasks that will simply be added because of changing laws and regulations. In that sense, our liability is lower, because in the Netherlands the liability for the project carried out lies with the contractor and not with the architect. Unless it can be proven that the architect has made major mistakes. This is an important aspect. In that sense, the responsibility of an architect in the Netherlands is much lower than in Belgium.
MvR: Oana, I’m curious, what would you prefer? Less responsibility or just a decent fee?
OB: I would just like a decent fee. I would like more money and more time. More time, because everyone thinks you can get a building permit application or a tender file in a blink of an eye, but that’s not at all the case. The better things are coordinated and checked, the easier and cheaper it is to build.
MvR: Let me now take you to the tenders for design contracts in the Netherlands and Belgium. Both in the Netherlands and in Belgium, you have four or five design teams who work out a proposal at a high level of detail. And then the contract goes to one of these design teams. What you then see is that the requirements for these proposals are quite high and the fees that you get for them are disproportionately low. What is the relationship between the costs incurred and the reimbursement? Can you both comment on that?
OB: Things are going badly in Belgium on the level of the fees. According to the accounts of several architectural firms in Belgium, the absolute minimum you need to spend in an architectural competition (this is how we call tenders in Belgium) is 700-800 hours. And then you get between 7.000 and 10.000 euros as a competition fee. That is 12.5 euros per hour. It’s like asking five contractors to build a structure and then you come and look at it and say: “these four are not as good, please demolish them, we’ll go with the contractor who build this structure, and you four will get a tenth of the cost to build this structure”.
J-PW: It is similar in the Netherlands. The discussion here is: do you choose an architect or do you choose a plan? This is often an important question in tenders. Fortunately, I see in the Dutch market that this question is increasingly being asked. But the BNA benchmarks show that the average cost in tenders is 160.000 euros. That means you are investing 25% upfront in something you don’t know if you are going to get. If you lose two in a row, you have to make up the money in the third tender. That’s almost impossible. The fees for participation in tenders are often very low in the Netherlands, between 5.000 euros and 7.500 euros. In some larger public tenders, they are higher, but sometimes there is no compensation at all. That is out of proportion. You can see that for Dutch architects, tendering for public contracts is a huge risk for their business.
MvR: No, because when I talk to architects about this, they say: “In order to continue working there, I have to win 1 out of 3”, but often 5 teams do that. That calculation never comes out, so it doesn’t work at all. So, what should be the solution? Should we have lower entry requirements, or should we raise the fees, or should we have fewer design teams entering? Or all of them?
J-PW: All of them, all the knobs you can turn. We should start with the question: are you looking for a plan or an architect? And I now see tenders where this question is properly asked. For example, what has to be submitted is very modest: three A3 sheets with a vision. It’s no longer a question of developing a fully tested plan. There are certainly opportunities there. You also see that in some tenders there is sufficient compensation for the deliveries being asked.
However, if everything that has to be delivered and judged against is not critically reviewed by a competent jury guiding the client, the situations is going to derail. I also think that there is a big difference with the Open Call system in Belgium, for example, which allows architects to look critically at how the tender is formulated and what is being asked for.
In the Netherlands you often see that this does not happen. Most often the clients themselves do the tendering. There are about 20 architectural firms that help clients with this – they largely determine the tendering market in the Netherlands. They want to be of service to the client and are not responsible for ensuring that the architects’ tenders are written correctly.
In the Netherlands there are now high standards in terms of references. If you haven’t designed a town hall in the last few years, you have no chance of designing one today. Experience is valuable, of course, but the closed nature of these tenders is not good. It creates a closed market. We have just been talking about the need of architectural firms to diversify in order to function economically in the long term. The tender culture in the Netherlands works completely against that because it encourages specialisation. Recently, a public tender for a small fire station was put out in the region of North Limburg. It’s a kind of wonderful brief that you think it is for young architects and for firms that would really like to do this kind of building, but the whole evaluation was focused on how many fire stations you had done, and I think you could get the most points if you had done eight fire stations in the last five years. That was the essence of the tender. Such clients in the Netherlands should also be helped to get these tenders out to a sufficient extent. It cannot go on like this.
MvR: And to take this a step further, Jan-Peter, with your architectural firm, you’ve sort of squeezed in, because you didn’t have any town halls, town halls, and you’ve now designed the town hall for the municipality of Leiden. Can you tell us how you found a back door?
J-PW: Often it is strategic cooperation between architectural firms to have the required reference, you see that a lot in the Dutch market. It is also often about choosing the right tenders. There are indeed tenders with realistic requirements, where you don’t have to have built eight similar references in the last five years. There are decent clients who write tenders in a very sensible and intelligent way. We were able to intervene in the case of Leiden City Hall because it was a very well-written tender. It worked out that we won it and now we are on the market, so to speak. But the bottom line is that it becomes an exclusive market. It also works very much against the chances of young architects and start-ups. There is also a difference to the Open Call in Flanders, where one of the five is often a young office. In Germany, competitions often have a special category for start-up offices, which are expected to submit far fewer references. So, one of the five architectural firms is a young one that is allowed to take part, just to open up the market for new architectural firms. We just haven’t reached that point yet in the Netherlands. I hope we can really get things moving in that respect. I think it is one of the most important spearheads for us as a professional group to get this movement going. If we don’t do that, the public tenders and the construction of public buildings will become an exclusive business in the Netherlands. And that is very painful and unbelievably bad overall.
MvR: I think so too. Oana, with your firm &bogdan recently designed a fire station for the first time, we talked about it. How did you get the opportunity, given that it was a new category of building for you?
OB: This tender, architectural competition, as we call it in Belgium, was organised by Brussels Region’s Government Architect (Bouwmeester), Kristiaan Borret. Five teams were preselected. Two of the five had no experience of the fire station programme at all. And those two were the first and second. Why? Probably because the others had experience with fire stations, but in a different region in Belgium, with slightly different programmatic and functional requirements. Maybe they were a bit quicker in reading the competitions specifications. And we won. So that’s a perfect example of how clients don’t really understand the nature of our profession. There are very few programmes that really require specialisation. Being able to deal with the context, with the complexity, with the mixed use, with all those things, all that is much more important.
Another aspect is the importance of overseeing the entire process: a Bouwmeester who monitors the quality, research by design that happens in advance to ask the right questions in the architectural competition brief. The wrong question always leads to bad projects. You can be the best architect in the world, but with the wrong question, the wrong location, the wrong programme, you will get nowhere unless you are able to change everything. Having a Bouwmeester who is able to translate the complexity to the clients, to the end users, to the other people on the jury, is crucial. And then you see that such a choice of an architect or an architectural firm, rather than a plan, is possible thanks to the Bouwmeester. But it is not obvious. It is much easier to decide based on a plan, because you can do it economically or mathematically: “Ah, they respected that, so many square metres, that’s the building cost”.
J-PW: An economist is the safest choice in the frame of juridisation of the public procurement, which is the case in the Netherlands, because it’s all quantitative and objectifiable. It’s a kind of power play that’s in there. I think it’s very good that you mentioned that. We are looking at the Open Call system, but the Bouwmeester is the crucial link in that Open Call. You can see in the Netherlands, for example, with the Groningen Municipal Architect, that a young, inexperienced firm is given a fantastic opportunity to build a cultural building. At that moment, such a city architect is crucial. In the Netherlands, this is happening in sectoral areas, for example. The police bouwmeester, the railway bouwmeester and to some extent also the government bouwmeester, who interact with the architectural firm which is formulating the brief and are helping the tenderer to decide on a good public procurement procedure. There are real opportunities in the Dutch market to integrate the excellent components of this Open Call into our somewhat different public procurement practices. There are elements that we can learn from in Belgium, and it really doesn’t mean that you have to turn the Dutch procurement practice upside down or change it. It’s really just a matter of turning a few dials.
OB: There are two very important aspects. One is that the bouwmeester has to be really independent, and that is not obvious. At least in Belgium, depending on the elections and the political colour, there is pressure on the bouwmeesters. It is not obvious to maintain their independence. And secondly, the bouwmeester has to have a team of 15 to 20 people, all experts in certain areas, such as social housing, landscape, public space. With such a team, the bouwmeester can do design research, ask the right questions, guide the client properly, maintain a visionary role and rely on his experts to then make the right decision and advise the client in the right way.
MvR: Yes, asking the right questions. How good is the network of bouwmeesters in Belgium? I know there are in Brussels and Antwerp, but is it the same elsewhere?
OB: Also in Ghent and in Charleroi. On a regional level, Flanders and Brussels have bouwmeesters, but not Wallonia. On a political level, there is no desire to have a Bouwmeester there. We should not forget that urban planning, urbanism and architecture are very important for politicians. That’s where they can really exercise their power. At least in Belgium they don’t want to give up that power. And such an independent bouwmeester can sometimes become a problem.
MvR: In the end we are better off with more bouwmeesters.
J-PW: Well, that’s a very clear plea, also from the College of Government Advisors, but then I put on my BNA hat for a moment. First and foremost, these bouwmeesters are a crucial link between the big public projects that are needed in the Netherlands and the big public procurements, formulating a good invitation to such a public procurement, formulating good tender specifications and requirements, choosing the right architects for the right job. That’s where there is a game changer. You also see that more and more cities have bouwmeesters. When it comes to sectors (railway, schools, police etc.), we are setting things up at a national level. It is a kind of warm plea to take it further.
Another important aspect of this Bouwmeester institution in Belgium, but also in Germany and Switzerland, is that bouwmeesters, or at least independent architects, play a key role not only in the formulation of the public procurement, but also in the evaluation of the submissions. In the Netherlands we very often see public procurements where the content weighs heavily: 50, 60, 70 per cent of the points are given to a plan or a vision, but, if you look at an evaluation committee on the other side of the table, there is not a single architect there. It is still a bit of a mystery to me how they come to a substantive, informed assessment of the proposals. I don’t even know if they can read a drawing. I can’t read music notes, so if somebody were to give me a score and tell me to evaluate it, I am not competent to do that. And in Dutch procurement practice it is very strange that in that many cases the evaluation is not done by competent people at all, or people who are not professionally advised in their assessment. This is also something you could learn from this Belgian practice. Ask people from spatial quality committees, ask a bouwmeester, ask a sectoral Bouwmeester in the evaluation committee. In the case of the railway sector, for example, the bouwmeesters play a key role because they can provide this professional assessment and advice. That is why the standard of Dutch railway architecture is rising considerably.
OB: That’s why, as a bouwmeester, you need research by design and a well-formulated question to make an assessment in a public procurement. Then you are involved in all the juries of architectural competitions for public commissions and in guiding important private developments in the city. Bouwmeesters are selected through a long and difficult process. You don’t become a bouwmeester overnight. You need to have a clear vision for the development of the city, for which you are held accountable at the end of your term. Every bouwmeester comes with a nuance and feeds the public debate about the future of the territory. I think that is very important. Actually all architectural competitions feed that public debate, because they are published. There is transparency in the decision, there is a report, there are discussions, which is so important for architectural culture.
J-PW: This is also one of the differences with the Netherlands, where the results of public procurements are not published as a matter of principle because, from a legal point of view, people are very afraid of claims or objections or things like that. So, everything is sealed. You get a sort of completely anonymised list of points in a report. And that’s it. However, the architectural firms publish their own submissions on their website or on social media, so the anonymity is broken, which shows that this legal argument is really nonsense. But it just doesn’t happen in the Netherlands. And this, for example, is something that can be easily enforced by the clients. They are the decisive factor in facilitating and promoting this.
OB: In Belgium there are two possibilities. In the Open Call in Flanders, architects are asked if they agree to attend the presentations of others. If everyone agrees, then it is completely open, everyone can come and listen to the others, and everyone gets a report. If not everyone agrees, then you just get the report. In design and build competitions, where we work with developers, contractors and engineering firms, and all the other competitions that are organised outside the Open Call, you get a report explaining the scores of the different teams. You don’t get images, just text. And then you have two weeks to complain, for whatever reason. But after that you can’t complain anymore, and it’s solved. The competition entries are then published by the bouwmeesters on their website, and the participants are free to do that as well. We learn a lot from these competitions. The quality of architecture in Belgium has been raised dramatically thanks to them.
J-PW: That would be a fantastic way to solve the problem in the Netherlands. So again, these are small steps that would open up the Dutch procurement practice, make it more transparent and much more interesting for architects to participate in than it is now. It’s not a kind of systemic change that we need to move towards in the Netherlands, but it’s organising the rules of the game a little bit differently. And we have to start enforcing it, and the only ones who can enforce it are the architects themselves. We should stop looking at the government. We should stop looking to the Dutch Architecture Institute. Dutch architecture has been very spoilt since the 1990s. Everything was arranged for architects in the Netherlands. As a result, Dutch architecture has become “hospitalised”. When something needs to be changed, we all know how to complain very loudly to everyone, but to ourselves, the architects. There is only one group left that takes care of architects, and that is the architects themselves. They are really going to have to enforce this movement. And there, I think, is a huge change of attitude that Dutch architecture will have to make. The architectural firms and the people who work in these architectural firms have to realise that, if we don’t do this together with the architects and through the organisations that represent these architects, then nothing will change, and we will slowly slip further and further off course. In this sense, the activism of architects has become very urgent today.
OB: Activism and solidarity. We really need to show solidarity, then the situation will be better for everyone. I have to say that I have been a huge fan of Dutch architects since my student years, back in the 1990s. At the same time, I agree with what you say about “hospitalisation of Dutch architecture”, which is why I was happy with the global financial crisis of 2008, which was a time particularly difficult here, in the Netherlands. I thought, okay, now is the time for reflection, now Dutch architects are going to wake up, now comes the second wave of inspiring Dutch architects.
J-PW: Things have changed a lot since 2008, but we are not yet out of the hospital phase with Dutch architecture. We’re all still far too much on a kind of constructed government bed and a constructed comfortable environment that’s long gone. And the last pole in that is, for example, a CAO. I don’t even think that architects deliberately choose not to be members of the BNA. I think they just don’t realise what’s happening. They don’t know, and that is the frightening part of the situation. They don’t know that, if we don’t collectively start to defend the importance of our profession and get the ground right on which all of us as architectural firms and architects do our projects, we’re not going to get anywhere.
OB: It is particularly good that you have the BNA. The role of the Order of Architects in Belgium is to protect the client, to guarantee that the architect working for the client respects the code of ethics, is competent and has completed the compulsory 2 year apprenticeship after the studies. For what BNA does in the Netherlands, we have the NAV, but that is the network of architects in Flanders, not in Belgium. On a federal level there is the federation of Belgium’s architectural associations (FAB), which, due to fragmentation, does not have the leverage that BNA has.
J-PW: Belgium is a special country, but this is the only way to change our industry. I really believe that. And it’s after 12 o’clock.
MvR: Perhaps as a final question, Jan-Peter, do all architectural practices in the Netherlands adhere to the collective agreement (CAO)?
J-PW: The painful answer is no. There is such a thing as corporate social responsibility in the Netherlands. And as far as I’m concerned, complying with the collective agreement is part of that. When I do a public tender, let alone an open tender, I fill in a form that clearly states that I have paid my taxes, that I have paid my social security contributions. But I don’t have to tick a box that I comply with the collective agreement. This means that in the Netherlands you can get contracts from the central government without complying with the CAO. And there are paths in the Netherlands that firms take to avoid the bottom of the market by registering as an urban planning firm, for example, because then you don’t have to comply with the collective agreement for architects. And there is absolutely no one who checks whether you comply with the CAO. In other words, these are companies that are starting to compete on labour costs. Or, for example, not paying interns or letting them work during their studies. These are widespread practices. Another escape mechanism is that, if you only work with freelancers, you don’t have to abide by the collective agreement. You can push the freelancer’s fee all the way down. So again, you see parties starting to compete on labour costs. And finally, you also see architectural firms, for example, starting to separate their technical departments, their drawing departments, from the architectural firm. That becomes a separate company. This separate company does not have to abide by the architects’ collective agreement. There are all sorts of paths in the Netherlands where you can see architects moving around this collective agreement. This has a crumbling effect, because they start to bid lower in tenders than their colleagues who abide by it. And that becomes a very ugly by-product in Dutch practice. So, it really is a price crash with this kind of mechanism.
MvR: Yes, we have to start paying attention to that as well. And we must start excluding that. Do you want to have a healthy industry? And who is going to monitor that, do you think?
J-PW: The clients have a responsibility, and we, architects, should be solidary. Enforcement is basically just a matter of filling in one of these forms and declaring “I abide by the collective agreement”. Today we do not have his uniform self-declaration in the tenders. And that’s just the procurement process in architectural design. I see social capital organisations, housing associations, developers for pension funds, who do not even ask the architects if they are registered or paid their social security contributions, let alone if they abide by the collective agreement. In the Netherlands, architects are largely unchecked by their clients. We need a control mechanism, there is no other choice. It is very unfortunate that this has to happen.
OB: I would also like to see such a form in Belgium.
J-PW: You have it. In the Open Call you also must fill in a self-declaration.
OB: Yes, but not about the fees of the employees/freelance collaborators.
J-PW: And that’s the problem here. It’s not in the Netherlands either. So, it’s a very strange gap that I see in our practice. I think, yes, but why isn’t this just regulated? It would be a much fairer competition. There’s nothing wrong with architects competing with each other, that’s part of our profession, but it has to be fair.
MvR: Exactly. But should the architectural register/order of architects still play a role in this?
J-PW: No, the clients and then the BNA have to start doing that, together.
MvR: Thank you, Oana and Jan-Peter, for this long but good conversation.