The most important room in the building

This article is the first installment of The Other Drawing Set, a series on leadership and self-advocacy in architecture.

I walked into my home office one afternoon to find my son drawing at my desk. He had pulled up a photograph of Santa Claus on my computer and was reproducing it freehand on paper with a pencil. He was in elementary school. The drawing was close to perfect:

Nobody had taught him to do that. No class, no instructor, no critique. He had been drawing since he could hold a pencil, quietly and consistently, because he loved it. By the time he finally signed up for an art class his junior year of high school, his teacher was not impressed that he had shown up. She was frustrated that he had waited so long. Her question to him was something close to this: Can you imagine what you could have created with just a couple more years of instruction behind you?

I have been thinking about that question ever since, but not regarding my son, who is fine and whose gift is still very much intact. Instead, I have been thinking about it in relation to my profession—and what that profession does to the people who arrive in architecture schools carrying something real.

Teaching design and deference

Architecture studio culture is more humane than it was 30 years ago. The crits are less brutal, and the all-nighters are fewer. The fundamental training, however, has not changed. It still takes students who arrive with creative instincts and spends five years calibrating them to draw, defend, and revise anything. That is genuinely valuable. It is also only half of the job of an architect or designer.

Most architecture programs require a professional practice course, and some handle it well, covering business planning, ethics, and what it means to lead in the practice. And accreditation does ask for leadership. One of the NAAB’s program criteria is called Leadership and Collaboration, and it asks schools to show that students understand leadership in multidisciplinary teams and can apply collaboration skills to complex problems. That is leadership defined as working well with others. It is not what I mean here. 

When I use the word “leadership” in this series, I do not mean running a firm or chairing a committee. I mean holding your position in a room full of rich, powerful people with skilled lawyers—and not apologizing for being there. Schools satisfy that criterion with a narrative description of how they address it. They are not asked to produce student work that proves they cover it, the way they are for design synthesis. Most treat it as background noise behind the more urgent business of design.

Architecture school teaches you to take the critique. It rarely teaches you to give one back in a room that is not a studio. It teaches you how to make a drawing set for a building. It does not teach you the other drawing set: how to walk into a room and make your case to people who are wealthier, more politically powerful, or more institutionally influential than you. How to hold a fee when a client pushes back. How to sit on a planning commission and not defer to a developer just because he has a sharp-tongued lawyer and a not-so-sharp idea.

In architecture school, you learn to subordinate yourself to the work. That is a reasonable design philosophy. You also learn something nobody puts in a syllabus, which is to subordinate yourself to whoever is holding the room.

When I went back to school for a second undergraduate degree, I was older than most of the people in my studio, and I thought that would protect me. In my second year, I put everything I had into a final review. I had animated the building, which was still a new thing to do then. A professor made a crack at my expense, and the room laughed. I do not remember a word I said after that. Twenty-seven years later, I remember the laugh.

He was not wrong about the animation. The building was fine. But the crack was not about the building; it was about me, and I spent the rest of the review playing catch-up. Nothing in that program taught me how to recover from a moment like that. What you learn instead is to go back and second-guess the design, which was never the problem.

And what you learn over a career is that the safest thing to do in a room is take up less space. That is a workable habit in a studio. It becomes an expensive one when it governs how you negotiate your contract, whether you pursue your contractual protections, and whether you decide that this fee conversation, or this zoning hearing, or this argument with a client about the right thing to do is worth engaging in.

Impostor syndrome throughout the profession

"I think we are both full of impostor syndrome." 

Roy Decker, FAIA, said that to me in March, sitting in the studio that he and Anne Marie Duvall Decker, FAIA, have occupied for years on North State Street in Jackson, Mississippi. I had just interviewed them after their firm won the AIA Architecture Firm Award, AIA’s highest honor for an architecture firm. Their firm’s name is being carved into the granite Wall of Honor at AIA’s headquarters alongside some of the most consequential firms in the history of American architecture.

I did not find Roy Decker’s confession surprising. I found it clarifying because I know that feeling. I have felt it most of my career, and I suspect anyone reading this who is being honest with themselves has felt it too. I felt it when I hesitated for years to submit my own Fellowship application, convinced my work was not enough and that I could do more. I felt it when I walked across town to ask a friend who directs an MBA program for advice on finding a business coach because I wanted someone standing beside me, helping me feel like I was making the right calls. I felt it in 2008 and 2009, when the economy collapsed, and I decided to open my own firm anyway, in the middle of the worst real estate crisis in a generation.

Those feelings do not disappear when you receive the highest honors our profession offers. But Roy and Anne Marie have a quality unique in the profession: They refuse to let their impostor syndrome make their decisions for them. They built a 22-person practice in Jackson, a place other architects left, and spent 28 years doing public work, community work, and the kind of architecture that serves people who are rarely served well. They did that while feeling like impostors. That is not a footnote to their career. That is the career.

The rooms beyond the studio

The profession does not have a design problem, a talent problem, or a technical problem. It has a leadership problem. We are training young architects to be excellent designers and, at the same time, training them to defer. The people coming out of architecture schools are extraordinarily capable, but we as established architects are sending them into a profession that requires skills nobody taught them, then expressing surprise when they defer in the rooms where it matters most.

This series is about those rooms. The fee negotiation where an architect folds before the conversation starts. The planning commission meeting where the developer’s attorney does all the talking. The client call from someone with more experience than you, asking for your help, and the queasy feeling you get before you pick up the phone. The Fellowship application you have been putting off because you feel your work is not quite ready yet.

The most important room in the building is not the studio. It is the one down the hall that nobody taught us to walk into. It is the conference room, the council chamber, or the client’s office where the numbers get decided. The studio is where we are supposed to get ready for that room. Right now, we are not.

Jeff Seabold, FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP, is the founder of Seabold Architectural Studio and S5 Construction in Jackson, and he serves as an AIA at-large director for 2026-2028.