Not that I've worked with building architects, but I have worked in an HVAC engineering firm that does work with architects. My sense is that the original author's view of a real architect's life is shaped by whatever is shown on TV. In contrast to fictional architects, a real building architect owns her own hard-hat for the almost daily visits to the job site. When something goes wrong with the build, she's involved with coming up with a solution, whether it's really an architectual problem or not. (Example, the cement contractor got a bad batch of cement that isn't curing right. It would take a month for him to get the right aggregate to fix it. Instead of delaying the build, could we make the walls less thick and add in supports elsewhere?)

Also, most real-world architects rarely get to build from scratch. Those types of jobs are the dream jobs and tend to be taken by the owners of the architectual firm.