§ 1.1.3 The Work1
The world lies between people.2
—Hannah Arendt
§ 5.3 Subcontractual relations
The other day, my colleague forwarded me an email that solved a problem. The email came from deep within the project’s ecosystem. The general contractor’s electrician had subcontracted the installation of the fire alarm system to another vendor. That vendor had in turn subcontracted the design of the system (the location and specifications of alarms, pull stations, and so on to meet code) to yet another vendor. That designer, five contractual levels away from me, had emailed us the answer we needed. If this guy and I found ourselves sitting next to each other on the train, we would assume that we were complete strangers. There would be no way to know that we were, in fact, bound by paper through multiple agreements. That our mistakes could harm each other. That the money for each of our kids’ daycares next month were, in fact, intertwined. We would just be two people on a train, who are incidentally part of a project team so large that many of its members never meet.
But maybe we would have found out, if we had talked to each other for a few minutes. Let’s say we weren’t scrolling on our phones and wearing noise-canceling headphones. Maybe we would have chatted about what we do for work and complained about the construction industry. “Just another beautiful day in architecture and construction,” said with a bit of a smirk, can make an unexpectedly large contingent of Chicagoans laugh and, for a moment, create the sense of being on the same team. In this case, that stranger on the bus and I might have talked about the kind of work we do: about vacant warehouses, construction inspections, labor shortages, and trying to build in neighborhoods where inspectors go out of their way to tell you that projects aren’t going to work. But the contracts that formally bind us would never have come into it. Instead, we would have found that we were connected by something else. Maybe shared frustration. Maybe we have people in common. Maybe we share a desire to see the same kinds of things happen in the future.
§ 6.2 Mutual Responsibility
Who is a party to the contracts that govern construction? In professional practice class, every architecture student in the US is shown the diagram of the “Owner-Architect-Contractor” triangle.3 Its two solid lines and one dashed line represent two contracts, with two parties each: the Owner and the Architect are bound by one, and the Owner and Contractor by the other. The dashed line indicates that the Architect and Contractor are connected through their own respective agreements, the AIA A201 “General Conditions of the Contract for Construction”: a rulebook of procedures, definitions, and project responsibilities.4 This triangular diagram of relationships is supposed to govern every possible scenario that may emerge during design and construction, from engineering mistakes to schedule contingencies to failure to pay on time. It forms the basis of the ubiquitous “Design-Bid-Build” project delivery model and has been hammered out through suites of industry-standard American Institute of Architects (AIA) contracts over the last hundred-plus years.5 Today, this relational structure is presented to students and new architects alike as if it was handed down from above, etched in stone, and is unchangeable—as if it is the law (even though entering a contract is, of course, a voluntary condition).6
However, when you really start to trace the lines, there are so many better shapes than a triangle to describe the relational conditions of any given project: a branching network of forking paths; a rhizome; a tesseract. From the general contractor to their electrician to their fire alarm subcontractor to the fire alarm designer, multiply those connections by 100 along every branch of the team. Multiply that by 1,000 if you include everyone who, by wet ink or handshake, facilitates everyone else on the project’s ability to get out and do their work every day. The Uber driver who brought me to the jobsite. The nanny of the GC’s project accountant who stayed late to send the pay app…
Imagine if all of these people got together in a room and held hands based on who had made a promise to whom about the work they would do and how they would be compensated for it. What would it look like? Who would be getting in a fight? Who would still be owed money? At any given moment, how far would the money have made it out from the center to the edge, from the owner’s construction escrow to the rest? Who had negotiated Net 30 on their payment terms and who was getting paid on the 149th day based on their spot by the wall?7 Who would be friends? Who might fall in love, sometime down the line? Who would be related?8 How big would the room need to be? Would it be the size of the city itself? Would it include everyone?
§ 1.4 Interpretation
Ursula K. Le Guin proposed that we get rid of the image of the capital-H Hero carrying a spear as the origin of stories, and instead think about the role of the carrier bag.9 She evokes the anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s theory that the first cultural invention was not a weapon, as popular science might have us believe, but a bag, filled with the day-to-day detritus of living life. Similarly, Le Guin asks us to look for a hunter-gatherer kind of model of telling stories: about the work it takes to keep the village going, rather than the singular macho narrative of being a hero. That carrier bag, she argued, was perhaps less glamorous than the spear but much more rich in its contents. It would be filled with root vegetables, baby bottles, and something to drop off at your neighbors. Or lint, lip gloss, a phone charger, an extra tampon, a laser measurer.
Similarly, instead of that pointy, definitively bounded “Owner-Architect-Contractor” triangle, we can think of the parties to the contracts that make up architecture as the stuff in a carrier bag. Or a sprawling root ball. A tapestry of threads, sometimes annoyingly tangled, sometimes shimmering in the warp and weft. A watershed, made up of estuaries, tributaries, puddles, sewers, rivers, roofs, the water table in the soil itself, winding its way to the sea. A neural network. Any kind of form where we are bound to one another in a way that ultimately makes us more than the sum of our parts. “It is a strange realism,” writes Le Guin, “but it is a strange reality.”10
The practice of architecture consists of a shifting network of agreements exchanged or assumed between the many who comprise a project. A building (or any other joint effort in the built environment) is, in the end, more than a set of instructions, an assemblage of matter, or a manifestation of public and cultural will. It is the material record of the promises—legal, improvised, reluctant, generous, countersigned in PDF or given a thumbs up on SMS—which have formed a bundle in time.
§ 15.1 Claims
Legal theory tells us there are (at least) two different ways to understand the concept of a contract. Jurist, lawyer, and legal scholar Charles Fried argued that a contract is a promise between two individuals who enter into an agreement willingly, and that the promise is tied to the morality of doing what we say we are going to do. Any remedy that follows from my failure to do what I said I would do, for example, would stem from the loss you sustain because you relied on my commitment. “So remarkable a tool is trust that in the end we pursue it for its own sake,” Fried wrote. “We prefer doing things cooperatively when we might have relied on fear or interest or worked alone. The device that gives trust its sharpest, most palpable form is promise.”11
In contrast, legal scholar Grant Gilmore argued that contract law mostly reflects the existing practices, expectations, and norms already operating in a community. From this perspective, a construction project emerges less from the fine print of the contract and more from the accumulated habits and practices on the jobsite. For a non-construction example, take the fact that you are not required to sign a contract before you are served food at a restaurant, in advance of payment. Obligation grows out of showing up, responding to one another, and participating in a shared rhythm of engagement that everyone can depend on. As an architect once told me, “On projects that are going well, you never talk about the contract. If you’re talking about the contract, that project is already burned.”
We can read the practice of architecture through both lenses: structured, on the one hand, by the formal promises we make, and on the other by the informal, communal expectations that guide how we actually work together. In historical barn raisings, for instance, there certainly wasn’t someone on site lugging around a binder filled with AIA agreements. But there were acts of trust and unspoken threats of reprisal.12 If I show up to help raise the wall of your barn, you’ll show up next year to raise mine. If I cook the dinner that feeds the group, the next time I’m sick, you’ll bring something over. But if you don’t show up to lift your part of the wall, we won’t be kind to you at church, or in the field, or across the table. You’ll still live here, but you won’t really be one of us.
Projects today comprise the same collaborative logics. However, in contrast to a barn raising, the groups of people that any project brings together can span vastly different geographies, technologies, and cultures of practice and construction.13 Further, complex projects—like laboratories, quantum facilities, even simply multi-family housing—require incredible specificity in their goals which must be coordinated across the branching rhizomes of a project team.
Subsequently, contracts become coauthored works in and of themselves, rather than only enforcing what is already routine. Consider the standard practice of attaching, beyond boilerplate contracts, multi-hundred-page exhibits—custom, project- or client-specific riders—that are loaded up with anything from an owner’s specific requirements around security to target requirements to hire young apprentices as a form of workforce development, or a confidentiality agreement that specifically says not to share any proprietary documents with AI. In shaping how collaboration happens, how antagonism is managed, and how risk is assigned across immense teams, construction contracts are design projects in and of themselves.
According to historian of contracts and general contractors Chelsea Spencer, “Scholars have argued that written building contracts from earlier periods, which may appear so remarkably short and simple to us today, were not expressions of naivete but were enmeshed in a dense web of other unspoken obligations and norms that had just as much binding force as a written contract does today.” In light of this, she asks: “When we speak of practice today, are we conflating complexity and explicitness—a lot of words on paper?”14 If we compare a nod of the head to the multi-hundred-page Contract Documents—the legally binding collection of drawings, specifications, and agreements that govern even the smallest projects today—what best represents the web of promises and risks of reprisal that binds us together long enough to build a building? And what forms of relations carry on beyond, after the last punch list item has been resolved?
§ 8.1 Time; Definitions
Construction and design contracts are always acts of futuring. They are, in a way, profoundly wonkish works of science fiction. In the words of historian and attorney Jay Wickersham, “Architectural contracts are different from contracts that relate to a single event—the selling and buying of a house, for example—because they shape a continuing relationship between the architect and the client. The process of design and construction may go on for years… And because architectural contracts go on for a long period of time, they have to deal with change, with the inevitability that the project will not proceed as everyone thinks it will at the beginning.”15 Like any good work of science fiction, contracts index and are shaped by the conditions of the present day. They reflect today’s hopes, fears, and frustrations in their projections of tomorrow. The AIA B101 standard form of agreement between an Owner and Architect, for example, makes a form of guarantee that an architect can, in a way, predict (or manage) the future in achieving project budgets: future material and labor markets, future development costs, and can design to meet known unknowns.
The contractual act of futuring dovetails with the idea of the architect’s drawings as an instruction-based art, how lines on paper try to speak to an unspecified future builder and whose goal is to be legible to the many who will receive, and be responsible for executing, the drawings in the process of construction.16 A hero’s story (in Le Guin’s metaphor) would position an architectural drawing as a work of the sole genius, Howard Roark–like, meant for an ambiguous public audience. A carrier bag way of seeing the world, conversely, would understand a drawing as a coauthored chain letter from the 1990s internet, passed from one person to the next, taking on meaning as it circulates, captured in revision bubbles, submittal re-drawings, RFI approvals, and eventually a hand sketch on-site on a scrap piece of drywall with Sharpie to solve it—finally, before it is made manifest.
In the US, since the beginning of Trump’s turbulent second presidency, I’ve seen the not-so-subtle emergence of a variety of clauses in contracts inserted by both construction managers and subcontractors to hedge against the volatility of tariffs, labor shortages, and the irregular and unpredictable nature of the national environment. They are, as everyone likes to joke, “CYA” (“cover your ass”) clauses. Of course, people can and probably should try to CYA around the rising costs of HVAC equipment from China due to tariffs, or labor shortages due to ICE raids and the National Guard rolling through neighborhoods, or any other volatility that emerges from the often-arbitrary cruelty of the current political moment.
But these kinds of ad hoc clauses are also a moment to ask: Is there a model of anticipating future conditions that isn’t defensive, that isn’t reactionary to the whims of the administration and its orbit of influencers? What’s the opposite of a CYA clause? For example, “Shared Savings” clauses are currently used to return allocated funds that were unused (because of ingenuity or effort) to owner and builder, or sometimes to one of those parties alone.17 Is there a “Shared Savings” clause that divides potential returns along the tributaries of all contracted vendors, by original fee percentage or previously negotiated risk allocation? Other outcomes, beyond cost savings—from carbon reduction to schedule performance—could be incentivized.
Who and what should be covered by the infinite privilege of the present moment when the future hasn’t happened yet? Can collaborations on projects be organized to “cover” others, as well as ourselves: future generations, the guy next to you on the train? Can they be used to find solidarity across geography and practice with other members of the community of the project? What about the river, which flows a few miles from the jobsite? Can it demand restitution for contamination by a project? What about the silty clay and glacial till that, thirty feet below grade in Chicago’s vacant land, we find again and again to have been contaminated fifty years ago by some unthinking process of demolition? Spencer, again: “It’s worth asking whether the framework of contract itself, predicated on an idea of liberal economic personhood, has brought with it a certain model of social relations that constrained the kind of practice architecture could be.”18
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), a covert group of governmental agents work to redirect our current ecological and economic downward spiral, using every tool in the toolbox: from politics to policy, violence to negotiation, cryptocurrency to influencing national banks. Their ministry’s mandate is to serve those who will, in future generations, either benefit or pay for the consequences of our actions today. If construction contracts are our collective best guess at all the many things that might go wrong—from rising interest rates to delayed schedules to improperly reviewed shop drawings—can they be co-opted to become a collective plan for the best things that should?
§ 4.1.2 Architect; Duties and Responsibilities
The history of professionalization of architecture in the US was both formed and indexed by contractual distance—defined by what we are not. This process of professionalization was cultivated, over the twentieth century through the establishment of state-governed licensure laws, accredited universities with coordinated curricula, codes of ethics, and professional organizations such as the AIA, which publishes guides of professional practice as well as organizes events and continuing education enforcing professional norms. But these norms were defined by articulating the architects’ identity and expertise in contrast to others. Our identities as architects were carved out from a messy effort to differentiate from the roles of the owner and builder in terms of scope and responsibility.19
For example, early advocates for licensure, led by architect Dankmar Adler and University of Illinois Dean N. Clifford Ricker, wanted to defend laypeople against the works of “quacks” and charlatans by establishing forms of gatekeeping around architects’ experience and expertise.20 Subsequently, the motley group of individuals practicing architecture in the nineteenth century, “a heterogeneous mix of socially positioned gentleman architects; office apprenticed drafters, business-savvy labor contractors; self-assumed designing builders, engineers, and mechanics, and a small but growing number of academically polished designers often lacking adequate construction knowledge” was distilled into the much narrower role of capital-A Architect we know today.21
By midcentury, architectural licensure laws were adopted in the majority of US states, paralleling a similar adoption of building codes in major cities that required licensed architects to stamp plans for construction. Architects’ control over a body of technical knowledge, and its attendant markets, was intrinsically linked to the idea that the gentleman architect would serve as the owner’s on-site representative,22 and never cross into the means and methods of construction, which was the purview of the contractor. Similarly, while even the earliest contracts identify that an architect is responsible for designing to a budget provided by the owner, contracts (and the “real world” practices they indexed) excluded architects participating from building the capital stack that funds a project—whether it is equity, debt, grants, or other sources—leaving that responsibility, as well as the associated agency and return, with the owner/developer/client.
During this time period, outside of the constraints imposed on architects through professionalization, the role of the General Contractor emerged to assume responsibility for cost, schedule, and financial risk. As Chelsea Spencer argues, this was not only a reassignment of tasks from one party to another, it was a fundamental economic rethinking of the production of buildings. Contracting became a practice of capitalization, in Spencer’s terms, transforming risk around the unknown into products (a future promise, with a price). Architects and General Contractors were consequently crystallized as contrasting figures; the Architect defined by technical expertise and instruction-based instruments of service, and the General Contractor by the assumption and commodification of financial risk, in part through the subcontracting of a project’s requirements to a prolific network of other vendors.23
I sometimes work with clients who have never hired an architect before and will likely only work with an architect once: small business owners, non-profits, community residents-turned-developers to meet needs they saw in their neighborhoods. When we help to prepare the Owner-Contractor agreement, I always explain, “Yes, these documents create an antagonistic relationship between me, you, and the builder.” We talk about how the agreement benefits the Contractor who identifies errors or omissions by the Architect, while also allowing Architects to withhold approval of payment and scrutinize the quality of the Contractor’s work; or the games that are played between the Owner and Contractor around schedule extensions to dance around liquidated damages from a project finishing late. These are one of many ways that the three-legged Owner-Architect-Contractor stool is leveled through checks and balances.
But then I have to say, off the record: “But that’s not what will actually happen. We will work together to solve every problem that emerges. Because we are all here to see this done.” Holding hands, whether we like it or not. Ultimately, on a good project, the paper never comes into it. When we are down in that jobsite, and there’s no contingency left, the only way out is through.
§ 13.3 Rights and Remedies
The stakes of construction contracts are not metaphorical: they are life and death. A professor once told me that an architect’s knees should shake each time they stamp drawings; if they don’t, they have already drifted too far from the stakes of what they are taking responsibility for. After a tragedy, everyone looks back at the paper trail as though it might reveal some secret culpability. Yet a contract, however thick, cannot absorb loss. It can only redistribute it.
In 1981, a series of design and construction mistakes led to the collapse of two suspended bridges at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, killing 114 people. An avalanche of lawsuits and investigations followed. In the end, the cause was a sequence of overlapping failures, aligned like holes in layers of Swiss cheese. A phone conversation stood in for a signed shop drawing. An early, preliminary detail—two rods instead of four—was built as though it were final engineering. The engineer approved the sketch without recalculating the loads. On-site workers noticed the beams bowing days before, even avoiding those crossings with their heavy wheelbarrows, but didn’t flag the issue. All of this was happening against the backdrop of a steep rise in interest rates, where every day that the project wasn’t open was a (non-liquidated) damage and resulted in pressure from the developer to just get it done. The choreography of risk—the shifting of liability from one party to the next—proceeded as usual, until it revealed the most fragile agreement of all: the assumption that someone else had actually done the work or taken the responsibility.
Because of this tragedy and many others, contracts have become increasingly detailed and complex. Since the 1980s, the AIA has published the 1,000+ page AIA Contract Documents Legal Citator, a multi-edition resource on LexisNexis that catalogs significant federal and state decisions following key cases on construction law. Consequently, new editions of AIA agreements are formed like a carapace over the scar tissue of all projects past, informed by one dispute after another, with each clause forming a new glittering wall of risk management. They are shining scaffolds which, through increasingly specific “what ifs,” enforce increasingly fixed and careful relations within a building project. And who would deviate, with everything at risk?
§ 3.8 Allowances
As an idea, contracts assume that people come to the table in a certain way, and that they will remain unchanged throughout the duration of the work. But it never happens like that. Encounters with others always change us, disturb us. Day-to-day, we do our best to remain the same, which is, after all, the most efficient way of being. What little changes occur from the impact of encountering others are almost invisible, undifferentiable from the kind of change that happens to any person’s outlook over the course of a few years. In the words of Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, “Demanding encounters, like paying attention to a lover, a friend, a colleague, worker or disciplinary agent—anyone whose satisfaction matters—force us to confront how little we want to disturb ourselves.” Yet those changes can be potentially generative, potent: “The great pleasure of any collaboration,” they continue, “is multiplying idioms and infrastructures for further thought that neither of us could have generated alone.”24
That production of new forms of relation, alliance, and approach can happen with as little as a conversation, with listening and responding. Even more so when engagement deepens, what Berlant and Edelman call a “demanding encounter.” And what is more demanding than when we count on someone else to show up with the lumber, raise the wall, weld the flange, engineer the bolts, or review the rebar? Nowhere is this more obvious than when you see a site superintendent work with multiple trades to coordinate a detail to be executed within one-eighth of an inch. Everyone has to adjust their language, way of engaging with each other, and assumptions around measurement, drawing, building, and sequencing, to make that happen.
A carpenter and I once stood on-site, looking at the rough framing of an interior wall, baffled—before realizing that we were looking at the same thing in completely different ways. His union carpentry training had taught him to read dimensions and snap lines to the face of the wood stud, which assumes that finishes are often still being decided during framing. Architects, however, concerned with the completed integrity of overall assemblies and the alignment of visible materials, are trained to dimension to the finish face. We sorted it out. I marked the drawing and added a note to our office standards on dimensioning; he and his guys moved the wall. But as a result, we started chatting about our respective training, about the kind of learning that happens on a jobsite, not at a computer. We suggested an annual meet-up of carpentry trade leadership and architecture school deans to sort out the dimensioning issue, once and for all. It’s unclear whether such a summit has ever occurred between those who train builders and those who train architects—and even if it did, it’s highly likely that no one would agree. But acts of translation—which already occur dozens of times a day on projects everywhere, as people negotiate the immovable conditions of matter and materials—have the potential to invent new forms of relationality both small and large.
§ 3.4 Labor and Materials
Contracts, promises, and cooperation of any kind are, at their core, acts of compassion. In addition to a moment in which a shared goal is established, they also begin from the empathy required to acknowledge that in the future there likely may be antagonism, friction, and even potentially unresolvable conflict. For the duration of a contract, you agree to the idea of another party’s goals and desires. That they exist. You agree that their considerations have trade-offs.
Compassion in architecture has long gone disguised under the term “coordination.” Somewhere a senior technical architect chides a young designer to avoid a common mistake: not accommodating enough room above the ceiling for the necessary downward slope of plumbing pipes, ignoring the planometric distance required to allow water to move from point A to point B. These are the kind of things that older architects have learned after years on jobsites, after the punishing embarrassment of realizing that it was your drawing that was wrong in the face of the material reality.
But what is coordination but compassion for the plumbing engineer, imagining their requirements to fulfill their design goals? What is coordination other than, ultimately, a deeply held compassion for water itself, and the distance and speed it takes to continue going down? The kinds of architects who know these things best are likely the last ones to put “compassion” on their resumes, but what is more profound than resolving the pressures of conflicting systems into a coherent whole? A well-coordinated vertical shaft in a tall building is a conspiracy of compassion.
§ 1.1.7 Instruments of Service
Friendship is both an analog of a contract and the opposite of one. What I mean is that, on the best projects, contracts and friendships sometimes overlap. But friendships also transcend contracts: they embody compassion, parity of consideration, and obligation to one another, but without any rehearsing of the things that might go wrong or the calcification of identities.
In Words in Air, a compilation of the decades-long correspondence between twentieth-century poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, their friendship appears almost like a time-lapse: the early flirtations, the brief possibility of something else, followed by their respective marriages to other people, moves across continents, recognition and awards, tragedy and loss, as well as Lowell’s periodic institutionalizations.25 Additionally, their letters are filled with lovely, witty observations of the everyday: food, travel, literary gossip, music, cities. What remains constant across their thirty years of epistolary exchange is the sense that each recognized a kind of dance partner in the other: someone who could engage their velocity of thought as well as the richness of a life well-observed, ultimately, amplifying both.
In their letters, they are always considerate, but there are rollercoasters of emotion between them: desire and affection, criticism and judgment, admiration and collaboration. From their friendship, I find that feeling, when allowed to flourish and also be disciplined by discourse, can become something world-altering. Feeling, to date, is not part of the contractual calculus of projected benefit and risk. But friendship can be a force that enlarges the world: it requires you to respond, to co-create the stage on which you then must live.26
Construction projects always embody the potential of failures, across many scales, from disappointment to tragedy. And those failures will happen at some place or time, despite the contracts. But from what relational stuff, in lieu of the AIA’s literal ledger of past failures and broken promises, can we create empathy, solidarity, and perhaps even friendship between the many who come together to do a project? What matter makes up the ties that bind? Ana Miljacki invokes writer Richard Powers’s call for a “crackpot realism” in response to the classic logic problem of “the prisoner’s dilemma,” in which prison wardens encourage collaborators to sell each other out by invoking everyone’s fear of the other’s self-preservationist instincts. “The only way out of this bind,” Miljacki writes, “is to completely abandon the selfish individualistic grip of pure logic and act in a way that is best for everyone… By not selling each other out, they ensure a relatively lenient sentence served with integrity and, most importantly, they can count on having their community of friends.”27
Aristotle believed that philia (friendship among citizens) was necessary for the thriving of a city. Not simply warmth and relation, but discourse: “only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis.”28 Without friendship, we are stuck with latest iteration of the AIA A201 General Conditions as the definition of the boundaries of the world, the future, and our relationships within it. One might argue that the endless refinement of contracts to mitigate risk of past failures will lead, exponentially, to a kind of lowest common denominator model of collaboration and engagement. And we know what architecture comes of that: repeated franchise buildings, with the same footprint in every strip mall, in every suburb; “fast casual” housing projects in city centers, where the architect is a stenographer of the developer’s pro forma; six-foot, double-loaded corridors and not one inch more; data centers, rolled out as if from an assembly line, each with a relentless hunger for energy in the unfathomably scaled computation race.
But ultimately, architecture happens not because the contracts were bulletproof. Instead, architecture happens because its contributors/designers/builders/makers learned, however briefly, to inhabit a shared world. Because we looked at the stranger next to us and found something to carry forward together. Architecture remains as evidence that such a relation was, for a time, possible. Instead of relying on the contractual stability of mitigated risk and the hardening of professional roles and processes, it is through the work of friendship that we might have the opportunity to produce that incandescent magic of a place characterized by evolving, maximal difference per square mile. Or to affirm the words of Michael Sorkin and become coauthors in the city: “the greatest collective work of art ever conceived.”29
Section titles are (with poetic license) derived from the AIA A201-2017 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction, which is a document that works as a rule book for how a construction project is run, including payments, roles and responsibilities, relationships between parties, and so on.
“The world lies between people, and this in-between—much more than (as is often thought) men or even man—is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all countries of the globe,” from Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 4.
For a foundational critique of this contractual relationship focused on the diminishing of architects’ agency, see: Peggy Deamer, “Contracts of Relation,” e-flux Architecture, November 2017, ➝.
There were no General Conditions in the first “Uniform Contract.” The first “General Conditions of the Contract” were part of the AIA’s 1911 first set of Standard Forms to supplement the Uniform Contract which also included: Invitation to Bid, Instructions to Bidders, Form of Proposal, Form of Agreement, Form of Bond. The AIA’s Report of the Standing Committee on Contracts and Specifications of the American Institute of Architects on the Standardization of Documents (1911) notes that “General Conditions” is the same term used by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The first “Uniform Contract” for construction was published in 1888, coauthored by a committee comprised of the American Institute of Architects, the Western Association of Architects, and the National Association of Builders. (AIA, Uniform Contract, 1888). The first edition was successful and sold over 65,000 copies (Deamer, “Contracts of Relation”). More on the builder’s perspective on the first Uniform Contract in: Chelsea Spencer, “Fine Printing,” Places Journal (December 2021): ➝.
Most architects are aware that contracts are not law, but instead agreements freely entered into by independent parties. Yet this distinction does not always seem to be clear to emerging architects, who perceive the AIA contracts, because of their tenure and ubiquity, as a kind of de facto condition of engagement on construction projects. As described even by the AIA: “Because construction involves permanent improvements to real property rather than fungible goods, it falls outside of the Uniform Commercial Code. Although there are many statutes and regulations that affect the construction industry, such as mechanic’s lien laws, building codes and regulations, and licensing laws, construction remains largely in the realm of the common law of contracts, torts, and real property.” (AIA, Official Guide to the 2007 AIA Contract Documents: 3). For more on how contracts are intended govern construction as well as their history, architects may find the following book helpful: American Institute of Architects, The American Institute of Architects Official Guide to the 2007 AIA Contract Documents (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
One of the core ideas around the creation of AIA standards contracts is they produce a form of equity across parties who may otherwise have uneven access to legal teams to advance their individual interests. As early as 1915, a testimonial from the President of the National Association of Builders' Exchanges on the standard forms was: "If I should use just one word to designate the character of the new documents and their difference from all previous documents, I should say Certainty. If I were to add another word, I should say Justice” (William Stanley Parker, A Review of the New Contract Forms: The Standard Documents of the American Institute of Architects. Washington DC: The American Institute of Architects, 1915). This perception of uniformity as a form of justice continues today. As described by the AIA in 2007, “{AIA uniform contracts} tend to level the playing field between the large and the small, the rich and the poor, those who can afford lawyers to scrutinize every transaction and those who cannot. By reducing transaction costs, they promote transactional economy” (AIA, Official Guide to the 2007 AIA Contract Documents: 4). Yet other forms of inequity besides access to legal services obviously proliferate. They become evident in each “fill in the blank” section--from payment terms to liquidated damages--in which, like all negotiations, those with a stronger negotiation positions (across any socio-economic definition) will dictate the terms.
I recently attended a meeting where two competing vendors of security shutters presented their bids. In the fifteen minutes before the meeting started, while everyone was making small talk, we learned that the two vendors were actually cousins. Forms of relation (by blood or choice) proliferate; often with a little bit of air they arise very quickly.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Denise Du Pont, Women of Vision (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
Le Guin, “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”
Charles Fried, Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2015).
See Erin Besler, “Participation Points,” Building Assemblages (e-flux Architecture, 2026).
More on what does (and doesn’t) bind workers across disciplines and places, and the potential production of solidarity in the era of globalized labor in: Mabel O. Wilson et al., “Working Globally: The Human Networks of Transnational Architectural Projects,” in Peggy Deamer, The Architect As Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Chelsea Spencer with Bryan E. Norwood and Jay Wickersham, “Contracts and the Evolution of Architectural Practice,” Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service, 2025.
Spencer with Norwood and Wickersham, “Contracts and the Evolution of Architectural Practice.”
“The architect’s final act results not in a completed work of art but in a set of instructions that enable the intended assemblage to be realized. {...} Architects remain both legally and morally accountable for what follows from their instructions,” Farshid Moussavi, “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art,” “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard graduate School of Design, August 25–October 15, 2024, ➝.
Some of these considerations are part of ongoing discussions around Integrated Project Delivery. However, a decade or so out from the initial momentum around this approach, only a dozen or so projects have been completed using this model. More in: Phil Bernstein, “A Way Forward? Integrated Project Delivery.” Harvard Design Magazine, 32: Design Practices Now, Vol. I., 2010 and Deamer, “Contracts of Relation.”
Spencer with Norwood and Wickersham, “Contracts and the Evolution of Architectural Practice.”
For more on nineteenth- and twentieth-century professionalization of the discipline, see: Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Dana Cuff, The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and George Barnett Johnston, Assembling the Architect: The History and Theory of Professional Practice (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).
Ricker in Brickbuilder magazine: “The average citizen is frequently unable to distinguish between scientific physicians and quacks: he is still less likely to appreciate the great difference between a competent architect and one ignorant of sanitation, of the principles of construction, relying entirely on Divine providence to sustain his buildings until after the collection of his commission.” N. Clifford Ricker, “Results of the Illinois Licensing Law,” Brickbuilder 10 (February 1901): 28–31, cited in Woods, From Craft to Profession. I wrote more on licensure and ways that it should be expanded, rather than narrowed, in the forthcoming: Ann Lui, “A Hundred Forms of Licensure,” in Junior Architects: New Paradigms in Design Education, ed. Suzanne Lettieri and Anya Sirota (Park Books, 2026).
Johnston, Assembling the Architect, 1.
In the 1888 Uniform Contract, the owner and the contractor are the signing parties. The architect is designated and identified as an “Agent of Said Owner” (AIA, Uniform Contract: 1).
This essay is (as I hope is clear) is written from a professional’s point of view in a speculative mode. Most historical content was drawn from and inspired by the deep historical research and breadth of ideas that are captured in: Chelsea Anne Spencer, “The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building” (PhD diss., MIT, 2024), ➝.
Lauren Gail Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and anchovy paste,” Cabinet Magazine, Winter 2009–10, ➝: “With a single good friend, we are in good and diverse company. In such a deep friendship, we multiply, create, and discover our actual and potential selves, not fall back stubbornly into the claustrophobia of our supposedly “true self.” Friendships are extensions of ourselves into the realm of liminal adventure.”
Thank you to Ana Miljacki, who introduced me to many of the sources in this text, whose thinking on coauthorship obviously inspired much of this, and whose own writing (including the following) have always been heartening to me in moments of disillusionment with both the practice and the discipline: Ana Miljacki, “Some Crackpot Realism, Please!” Log, no. 5 (2005): 117–21.
Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 24.
Sorkin expressed this belief in almost all his writings on urbanism, this specific quote oddly comes from: Karissa Rosenfield, “Artists Seek Alternatives to Proposed Guggenheim Helsinki,” ArchDaily, September 10, 2014.