WITH LITTLE action on residential sites and builders holding off on larger schemes, it was just a matter of time before architecture firms were forced to make some hard choices.

The word on the street is that firms are “slimming down” by up to 50 per cent. Some firms contacted by Around The Block were coy about rumours that they were shedding staff.

James Pike from O’Mahony Pike Architects, however, stuck his head above the parapet. In the last six months the firm has been “shrunk” by 25 people – a reduction of 20 per cent, he said.

A “fall back in demand for architects is inevitable” with the slowdown in the residential market and the beginning of a slowdown in the commercial sector, he said. “We have been through this before,” says Pike, who maintains that slowdowns come in 18-year cycles.

Jerry Ryan from HKR Architects says that his firm is one of the last companies in Dublin to cut staff in response to the “dysfunctional market”.

The Dublin office has been reduced from 165 to 152, he says. He is keen to point out that the group as a whole, which has three offices in the UK, will grow from 300 to 320 by the end of the year.

RIAI president Seán O’Laoire is taking a philosophical stance on matters. Architecture is a mirror of development and has the same tendencies to cyclical boom and bust, he says.

For decades Irish architects were forced to go abroad to earn a living, he says.

“The most extraordinary feature of the last 10 years in Ireland has been the continuity of work available to architects.”

Things have changed dramatically and now, instead of recruiting staff from abroad to keep pace with demand, the majority of architectural practices are “looking with caution at the immediate future”, he says.

Unlike other downturns, when architects could skip off to the next big honey pot, “the perfect storm” of a global downturn means that “there is no where to hide”, warns O‘Laoire.