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Onscreen—across genres, but mostly in the rom-com-sphere—a few key professions dominate the working world. If you’ve spent any meaningful length of time with a Hallmark movie marathon or sifting through Netflix for the latest love story offerings to add to your queue, you know the ones. When the protagonist is a writer or a journalist? Literally of course she is. (Write what you know, right, screenwriters?) With regards to the career of the average love interest, these are not the doctors and lawyers your mother would like you to end up with (yawn). A baker or chef regularly captures the heart of the lead, which feels simple enough to parse as the sex appeal of the culinarily gifted is beyond obvious. But among the most overrepresented jobs in the romance genre, and for love interests in general, is the architect. Somebody has to build a wholesome B&B in our main character’s hometown, someone who might even charm her away from her high-powered, high-pressure NYC job—a job she never really loved, as it turns out. Someone capable, clever, artistic, and for some reason, toned, because in this universe I guess he’s sketching out the blueprints and building the place top to bottom with his own two hands. Swoon!
The trope’s origins
The foundation for this archetype was laid by the likes of Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle and Keanu Reeves in The Lake House, though the pieces had been in place since the 1969 debut of certified family man Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch. Nowadays, I see the trope surface most frequently in the dime-a-dozen holiday movies on streaming platforms that, more often than not, lack the juice to forge the cultural staying power of a Hanks or Reeves vehicle. But since audiences eat them up like Christmas cookies every December, studios continue to churn them out. (It’s me, I’m audiences.)
Hard to say whether this is a trope screenwriters stole from real life or the other way around, but it seems to hold true both in the movies and IRL. Late last year, Vogue’s very own Jack Schlossberg posed a question to his 500,000+ Instagram followers via Stories—specifically to “anyone sexually attracted to men”: What’s the hottest career path? The Kennedy scion narrowed the options down to architect, famous musician, famous VC/PE, and famous chef. The odds were stacked against our hero with three of the four options given the “famous” edge. But the architect still prevailed with 40% of the vote. In an informal survey of my single friends, responses ranged from “yes” to “hell yes” when asked whether they’d be into someone with the title. Apparently, it reads as the perfect blend of left- and right-brained, like a smart—crucially: employed—artist.
The lying/aspiring architect
The architect is such a hot sell onscreen that there is an established canon of characters who have pretended to hold the title specifically to impress a potential date. True Seinfeld fans know George Costanza lies like a rug, but one of his favorite fabulations that pops up in a handful of episodes is his desire to be seen as an architect. (As he complains in the acclaimed season five episode “The Marine Biologist” after one of Jerry’s own lies gets out of hand: “Why couldn’t you make me an architect? You know I’ve always wanted to pretend that I was an architect!”) A chronic job hopper and frequent firee, Costanza doesn’t want to design a new addition to the Guggenheim; he wants to nap under his desk. But he’s looking, as always, for the easiest way to cheat the dating game, and architecture sure seems like an elegant façade to hide his true self behind.
Matt Dillon, as the sleazy private investigator Pat Healy in the 1998 absolute all-timer There’s Something About Mary, attempts to construct the same front for essentially the same reasons. Better: He’s not even the only one in this rom-com posing as an architect to impress the titular dream girl, played by Cameron Diaz. Her pal Tucker (Lee Evans), operating his own long con, had been laying identical groundwork for years to win the affections of the brainy beauty, who has a soft spot for design.
When Mary realizes the pair of them are as phony as Healy’s cartoonishly massive veneers, they both lose her for good. But a real architect, one who knew the difference between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, probably could’ve given Ben Stiller’s plucky protagonist Ted, a writer, a run for his money.
Why we fall for the hot architect—and why the job looks so good onscreen
Rom-com aficionado Ilana Kaplan, a journalist and the author of Nora Ephron at the Movies, acknowledges that there’s something sexy about the idea of an architect. But what is it about the profession that does it for us? “Designing a home is such a massive task that I feel like the person who does it has to be incredibly methodical,” she says. “When I think of an architect, I literally picture Keanu Reeves. I picture Steve Martin in It’s Complicated. To me they’re not “villain” [types]. This job is not ‘villainous’ to me like some other career paths.” Jessica Callahan has an insider’s perspective on why viewers don’t see bad guy potential in architects. As Hallmark’s VP of programming, overseeing rom-coms across all platforms, she knows a thing or two about crafting a love interest people will buy.
“In the Hallmark world, the lawyer is always the guy that doesn’t get the girl. The architect gets the girl…. CEOs don’t get the girl,” she says, adding that “developer” is another bad-guy-coded job. “I think the fantasy around the architect is that he’s both creative and mathematical. It’s very solid. You can build a home with this guy—literally and figuratively—that’s the romance of it. This is a job that people feel is attainable, but aspirational; you could know an architect, or at the very least, it’s a job that you’re very easily able to define what it is in your head.”
In all likelihood, the average viewer can readily call up a picture of the architect at work in their mind’s eye. Maybe not accurately…but you can picture something. That slanted desk (a.k.a., a drafting table)? Biting a pencil, agonizing over sketches and blueprints? It certainly makes for a more telegenic workstation than whatever the rest of us are doing craned over a laptop, if you ask culture critic and screenwriter Hunter Harris, who pens the newsletter Hung Up and co-hosts Wondery’s Lemme Say This podcast.
“Visually, it’s very rich. You can have models, you can have sketches, and that is better to ‘show’ than just ‘tell.’ Obviously that’s the big screenwriting advice,” she says. “I think about Wesley Snipes [as an architect] in Jungle Fever. There’s this one really beautiful shot of him and (Annabella Sciorra) where they’re having sex or making out on his drawing board and it’s just such a great visual. You couldn’t do that with a doctor; I don’t want to be on an operating table having sex.”
Fantasy is the real driver here. While the rom-com world may boast a job market composed of roughly 70% architects, there are tragically fewer in off-screen life, so most of us will never actually date one. I asked a couple of IRL architects how the job’s movie magic translates to real-world romance, and apparently it’s quite common for those within the profession to find their way to…each other.
“Fellow architects understand each other’s messianic ambitions and their all-encompassing work schedules,” says Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Amale Andraos, an architect at the firm WORKac, has observed the same. “I have often heard people say they didn’t date architects in college because all they did was work. It might explain why many architects date other architects,” she says.
The onscreen depiction of the architect as desirable is no secret to those in the industry. Renfro, who grew up in the ’70s, cites the Brady patriarch as one such example that impacted his own trajectory. “Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch was my first introduction to an archetypal architect. The Brady Bunch was a revelation in many ways: It was about a blended family—a radical idea for American television, which until then only promoted the idea of a natural, nuclear family. It was one of the first TV series in which contemporary architecture was an unvoiced character: The family’s stylish and unconventional home became a symbol of social progress.” The portrayal of Mike as such an all-around good guy left a lasting impression on Renfro, who felt he could follow that same virtuous path regardless of how his future family might compare to the Bradys. “I didn’t understand it at the time, but somehow I intuited that architecture and by extension being an architect would make being gay okay. I didn’t have the hots for Mike Brady. (Maybe his son, Greg). But Mike could feed his family of eight in style and was always calm. For me, Mike Brady established architects as good partners.”
While men loom large as the trope’s most well-known examples, women clock in to mock up models and fall in love as well. The 1996 romantic comedy-drama One Fine Day casts Michelle Pfeiffer as an architect, opposite George Clooney’s male journalist love interest (!). Though she doesn’t get the formulaic suave persona written for many a rom-com dude: She’s a busy, frazzled mom, and trying to navigate hectic big city life is a balancing act between her demanding work schedule and her young son’s needs. Andraos doesn’t think the stereotype skews male per se, in fact one of the most recent examples she can recall is of Jennifer Garner in the 2023 Netflix body-swap comedy Family Switch, which sees the 13 Going on 30 star as a big shot architect on the cusp of making partner at her firm.
“It seems to me that the architect as depicted in movies and films is precisely one able to soften the gender stereotypes, where the characters are seen as being able to be ‘both/and,’” Andraos says. “If you are Jennifer Garner [as Jess in Family Switch], you are both an independent and highly accomplished professional while also having this creative side which still allows you to connect with people—your team, your daughter, et cetera. And if you are a man like Steve Martin in It’s Complicated, you are both able to compete with the super macho ex-husband character played by Alec Baldwin while still being sensitive and the object of Meryl Streep’s character’s desire.”
But in their single days, was being an architect a draw on the dating scene? Andraos has been married so long now, she can’t quite remember how it was read. As for Renfro, he’s been with his concert pianist husband for over 13 years. While the job may or may not have played a part in securing a few real-life happy endings, at least studio execs can rely on the blueprint of the hot architect to get us giddy over a man with a floor plan in the movies.
