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.
