Free the Interns!

James Biber
8 min readJun 13, 2022
Cartoon of a Roman slave fanning a master who is saying ‘the word slave is so degrading, why don’t we call you intern’
© David Sipress from The New Yorker magazine

There are only one or two circumstances in which an architecture student can, in my view, legitimately be asked to work in a for-profit professional office without monetary compensation: when a visa specifically prohibits payment, and (in my opinion) when an architect is working on an unpaid competition and couldn’t otherwise afford to participate in the competition.

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James Biber

NYC architect: making (buildings, dinner, interiors, spoons) writing (essays, articles, post it notes) teaching (students, dogs) living (NYC, Upstate NY, LA)