An examination of these documents has led to two general observations that are relevant to my argument. First, there were something on the order of 7,000 documents, and these were only those that had been in the archive of the architecture firm, that made it to the historical society. Second, what was going on to very large extent, is that the firm was attempting to maintain complete control over every aspect of the project. No detail escaped their authority, ranging from the design of the cigar cases in the office, to the blowers in the mechanical room, to the details of the handrails. In other words, aspects of authority that in previous decades might have been left to craftsmen or engineers were being consolidated under the all embracing purview of the architect.
The mode of architectural production exemplified by the Metropolitan Club was about to change. Two or three decades after its construction, articles with titles like “architecture is a business” or “how to run an architects office” began to appear in architectural publications. (Silverman, 1939) These articles made it clear that the era of the gentleman architect was over, that efficiency and profit was the new lingua franca, and that time was indeed money. At around the same time, buildings in the clean modern style, devoid of ornament, began to appear. The famous exhibition “The International Style,” curated by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1932 (Johnson and Hitchcock, 1932 [1966]). Although the modern movement in America lagged behind that in Europe, modernist sensibilities were beginning to take root in American soil.
A well-known San Francisco architect, Joseph Esherick, who was trained in the Beaux-Arts system at the University of Pennsylvania, but then went on to design simple and informal modern buildings, once described how, for the design of a house, he first met the client on a Saturday, designed the house over the next week, and put the drawings in for permit approval a week from the following Monday. (Esherick, 1977) Esherick’s early buildings were very simple in their details, and his point in telling the story was that this level of efficiency could not have been achieved if the details had been more elaborate, neo-classical in nature, or requiring a high level of collaboration with craftsmen or subcontractors.
This relationship between simple process and simple form is not true only for small buildings, but permeates all scales of the environment. It is no coincidence, for example, that American zoning ordinances, which are written so that they can be administered without the need for any discretionary judgment, result in urban environments that are generally banal and simplistic. The rich complexity of traditional cities happened as the result of processes that were themselves culturally rich. The mechanistic processes of city planning, design and construction are not neutral with respect to their built result.
The simplification of practice described here is indicative of a more general trend in the development of contemporary architectural theory and practice. Coming to a climax in the twentieth century, there was a gradual separation in architectural thought between “art” or what was seen to be the exclusive creative province of the architect, and “science” which was the increasingly stringent context of standards, regulations, explicit constraints imposed by materials availability, and engineering, within which the architect had to work. Twentieth-century architecture is a socially-constructed balance between these two poles.
At one extreme there are architects who see themselves as artists, and want to be seen that way by the public. People such as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas are emblematic of architects for whom artistic form is dominant, and for whom the technical issues of putting a building together are of secondary consideration. These architects will do what they can to supersede or reinterpret technical issues in the service of their artistic concept. In many cases, they work with other architects who are legally responsible for the building’s construction; this allows them to concentrate on “art” and to avoid liability. This kind of procedure is often what allows these architects to do extensive work internationally: the local architect of record is the one who really understands local codes, materials and construction procedures, and who deals with most issues of the building during construction.
At the other extreme are architects who are firmly entrenched within systems that are at root modern technological systems, and that seriously constrain their ability to be “artists.” These systems include the contexts of building codes, zoning regulations, development finance, construction law, liability insurance, and the manufacture of building components, among others. These are all rationalized systems that took on much of their present form during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the industrial paradigm finally replaced craft production. These systems leave limited room for discretion on the part of the architect.
Most architects understand that they need to incorporate both attitudes into their work, and the curricula of architecture schools attempt to maintain the idea that architecture is both an “art” and a “science.” This turns out to be an uneasy marriage, in the profession as well as in the schools. Professional firms feel caught between their desire to do good design, and the fact that schematic design - the phase of their services in which the basic form of the building is determined - represents only 20% of their fee, or even less. A good percentage of an architects’ time, during and after that initial phase, is spent satisfying explicit requirements, including those imposed by the threat of litigation.
There is a strong relationship between the transformation of practice with respect to process and the increasing split between “art” and “science.” Modern technological systems, including statutory legal systems such as building codes and zoning regulations, leave little room for discretion on the part of the architect. To varying degrees, the architect is a manager, coordinating these various requirements and incorporating them into the building. Of course, this varies from architect to architect, and architects are different in their degree of inventiveness even in the context of these requirements, but most will agree, when asked to account for their time over the course of a week, that their job is not nearly as creative as they might have thought it was going to be when they first entered the profession. There is room for creativity and invention, but many would argue that this is only superficial, leading to superficial differences between buildings.
Yet, the early nineteenth-century architect/builder like Isaiah Rogers was working within an intellectual framework that allowed him to make many implicit judgments. This system was also one in which design and construction were much more intertwined than they are today, allowing for a dynamic relationship with the emerging building all through the course of construction.
The emergence of institutions of control outside architecture itself - building regulations, zoning, insurance, building finance - had the effect of taking the ability for discretionary judgment away from the architect. To the extent that the architect remained an “artist,” his authority was greatly reduced, but even within this reduced authority he tended to remain unwilling to give up even the illusion of being a creative artist.