Why Don’t Architects Retire?

On Work, Purpose, Creativity, and the Unfinished Line

Most professions have a natural stopping point: an age, a pension, a clean boundary after which one’s days can be handed back to oneself to kick back and admire the fruits of their labours.

But architects curiously, stubbornly? Don’t really ever retire. They may close their companies, reduce teaching hours, or hand the practice to younger partners, however the work itself continues. The sketching. The thinking. The rearranging of space in the mind. The dreaming.

• Frank Gehry worked into his 90s.

• Oscar Niemeyer designed until 104.

• Balkrishna Doshi won the Pritzker at 90 in 2018.

• Denise Scott Brown is still lecturing with sharp elegance well into her 80s.

• Frei Otto, Louis Kahn, Zaha Hadid, among others passed away mid-project.

Architecture is full of careers that simply never end, the ball is rolling and there is nothing to stop it. So, Why? Well, Architecture is a way of thinking. Architecture asks you to interpret the world. To be an architect is to look at a street corner and see proportion, shadow, movement, heat, wind. It is to notice thresholds. It is to understand human behaviour through corridors, staircases, sunlight and void. You don’t stop seeing these things at 60 or 70 or 80, if anything, you have had more practise. You can no more retire from it than from breathing.

Gerontologists often speak about the purpose curve: the idea that having a defined sense of meaning, a reason to be needed, to create, to contribute, is strongly correlated with longevity, health, and cognitive resilience.

It is no accident that some of the longest-lived creative professionals are architects. Creativity is a circulatory system. Turn it off and something essential collapses.

Architecture is a slow art and its practitioners learn patience:

Unlike musicians, dancers, or surgeons whose professions depend heavily on physical capacity, architects move through time differently. Architecture is at a glacial pace.

• Ten years for a civic project

• Fifteen for a masterplan

• Several decades for a major cultural precinct

Architecture is a rare field where experience accumulates, deepens, and becomes more valuable. Young architects bring energy, conceptual clarity, and digital fluency; experienced architects bring wisdom:

• how to navigate clients

• how to negotiate bureaucracies

• how to balance ethics with constraints

• how to hold the line against mediocrity

• how buildings succeed over decades, not just opening night

• how not to sweat the small stuff

This blog is in honour of Frank Gehry, 28 Feb 1929- 5 Dec 2025