Due Date: On Perishable Bodies and Architectural Labor

“I’ll be one of those hard bitches who takes thirty-six hours of maternity leave, emailing through my vanity caesarean”—Shiv Roy, Succession (Season 4, 2023)

Architecture values the endless laborer: the sleepless, ageless, disembodied worker. It worships endurance, feeding on all-nighters, bottomless over-hours, competitions that consume weekends. The perfect architect is defined by relentless energy, total devotion, suspended in a timelessness where sacrifice becomes proof of worth. The body is a tool for production, never a site of change, tiredness, or fertility.

Pregnancy shatters this myth. It is slow, unpredictable, impossible to schedule. The body swells, leaks, disrupts. As mine expands, I wonder if I have expired—taken this step too soon, before reaching sufficient experience and recognition. In architecture’s timeline of acceleration and early milestones, pregnancy feels like a contamination. How can I meet the demands of a discipline built on exhaustion when I can no longer work twelve hours straight, when my ribs scream from sitting, when I throw up in a bush at the construction site? Can architecture tolerate giving up its exclusive rights to my time and flesh? Even before my child arrives, architecture and motherhood appear incompatible.

Around me, the stories accumulate. Stress-leave at twenty weeks because workloads are non-negotiable. “Reduced hours” as a euphemism for reduced pay. Studios flaunting bespoke furniture but no ergonomic space. A career platform advising women of “child-bearing age” to omit their birthdate to improve employment chances. The discipline’s silence reinforces these experiences; pregnant architects appear deafeningly absent from architectural discourse. Perhaps pregnancy and motherhood have been edited out so the work can finally speak for itself. The thought is briefly comforting, until data shatters the relief. A RIBA survey from 2025 reports that 83% of female architects believe having a child has harmed their careers, compared to 25% of men. The gender pay gap persists—16% in Switzerland, 12% in the EU—and in countries where childcare is costly, the lower earner stays home. To be an architect and a mother still means working in the shadows, or choosing between caring for work or child. Whichever choice you make, it is wrong.

Within these structures, I oscillate between two ways of resistance. One: manic determination. I want to prove I am as capable as before, to work harder, better, faster. Two: stillness. I want to not give a fuck, to surrender to stroking my possessed belly in slow rebellion. Both feel impossible. I await an instinct to fight for my child, a maternal revelation, but it doesn’t come. Instead, I hover in a holy trinity of guilt: shitty architect, shitty feminist, shitty mom.

Protective frameworks for pregnant workers exist, but I wonder if anyone in an architecture office ever dared to take the extra breaks permitted, demand a place to lie down, refuse strenuous tasks. In an industry that often sees itself above the law, too holy for proper working conditions, the fear of showing weakness speaks louder than the right to rest. I am told to listen to my body, but how does one do that after years spent training to ignore it?

According to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we understand the world through our bodily experience of it. I wonder what new understandings my pregnant body has taught me. It is unruly, fluid, uncontained. I bump into things, burn my stomach on the stove, misjudge my edges. Nine months is not enough to detach from the choreographies embedded in my muscle memories—not nearly enough to shift a profession calibrated to bodies that never surprise nor falter.

But perhaps this unruliness reveals something architecture refuses to confront: it depends on real bodies while pretending they don’t exist. Perhaps the “best before” date belongs not to the pregnant practitioner, but to a culture of labor. Architecture’s ideals of productivity and endurance rely on rigid structures of denial—of time, bodily limits, unpredictability. Pregnancy antagonizes this logic, exposing its absurdities with brutal clarity. It doesn’t care about a project schedule. It doesn’t ask if now is a good time. It is nonlinear and disruptive—and maybe that is also its value.

The threat of expiration feels real, but maybe it is a system, not me, that is past due.

Nearing the end of pregnancy, architecture might still not know what to do with me. But perhaps my leaking, swelling body can begin to imagine a profession that finally makes space for bodies—all bodies—that need to rest, change, and grow. Perhaps pregnancy offers a new narrative, not of expiration, but of fermentation: a slow, fertile transformation.