Architecture degree career paths stretch far beyond the design studio, as a growing number of graduates find that the discipline’s combination of creative, analytical and communication training opens doors in fields from filmmaking to local government, fashion to journalism. A feature drawing on interviews with ten professionals who studied architecture but work in very different sectors makes the case that the degree’s breadth may be its greatest asset.
From Part 3 to film set: the range of architecture degree career paths
The interviewees span a wide spectrum. Dion Barrett qualified as an architect in 2019 after completing his Part 3 directly with the RIBA, then moved into making films about architecture, working with practices to communicate what they do. He credits involvement in the Birmingham Architectural Association with generating both job offers and his first filmmaking client. Eleni Kyriacou, who studied at the Bartlett before going on to textile design at Central Saint Martins, now works as a fashion and costume designer in Athens, describing her architectural education as the source of her critical rigour and her instinct to follow a design process from concept to execution. Her tutor Eyal Weizman, she says, taught her to think as a politically driven designer.
Melina Mei Veropoulou completed her Part 1 at the University of Brighton in 2016 and now works as a set designer on television productions including Slow Horses and Top Boy. She traces her eureka moment to watching Blade Runner and recognising that the protagonist’s apartment was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1925 Ennis House. Her grounding in architectural history, she says, remains one of her greatest strengths on set. Oliver Wainwright has been the architecture and design critic of The Guardian since 2012, having studied at Cambridge and the Royal College of Art and worked at OMA in Rotterdam and Muf Architecture/Art in London before moving into criticism.
On the public sector side, John Stiles is placemaking manager at the London Borough of Brent, leading a team spanning architecture, urban design, landscape, arboriculture, ecology and spatial data. Alpa Depani is about to take up the role of head of regeneration strategic design at the London Borough of Hackney, having previously worked at Waltham Forest. Both describe the ability to move between scales, from brickwork detail to subregional infrastructure strategy, as the skill that architectural training sharpened most.
Manijeh Verghese, chief executive officer of Open City, studied at Wellesley College, MIT, Columbia GSAPP and the Architectural Association before working at practices including John Pawson and Foster + Partners. She points to the ARB education reforms and the introduction of apprenticeship routes as developments she is watching closely, arguing they could open architecture to a greater variety of people and pathways.
Wage data and labour market shifts put architecture degree career paths in wider context
The salary picture adds another dimension to how graduates weigh their options. According to Out of Architecture, the median wage for architects stood at $96,690 in May 2024, compared with $133,080 for software developers over the same period. That gap is one reason growing numbers of architecture graduates are looking toward technology-adjacent roles. UX and UI recruiters in November 2025 reported seeing substantial inbound interest from architects and industrial designers, and the World Economic Forum lists UI/UX designers among the top-10 fastest-growing roles through 2030. The spatial reasoning, human-centred design thinking and iterative prototyping that architecture schools build into their programmes map readily onto those disciplines.
Alberto Villanueva Galindo, head of architecture and built environment at Ravensbourne University London and founder of IDEA architecture office, cites Francis Kéré raising funds and organising a community to build his first school while still a student as an example of treating training as something to act on immediately. He also references Kibwe Tavares moving directly from university into film and animation with Factory Fifteen, and Margaret Tarampi taking her architectural training into psychology to research how the brain perceives space, as illustrations of where the degree can travel.
Danielle Colwood, who graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2019 and joined built environment PR consultancy ING Media, argues that understanding the language of architecture and translating it for wider audiences has proved as commercially useful as any technical skill. Ben Brouard, now a director at Plan A Consultants, a 60-strong design management consultancy operating across London and Cape Town, made associate at Hawkins\Brown before moving into consultancy, and describes the soft skills built during architectural training as equally valuable to the technical knowledge.
What connects all ten accounts is not a rejection of architecture but a broader reading of what the degree produces. As Alpa Depani puts it, studying architecture opens up a way of looking and thinking that is hard to achieve through other disciplines. The ARB education reforms she and Verghese both mention are the next concrete moment when that question of what architectural training is for will be put formally to the profession.
