The Collaborative Divide: Steven I. Doctors

INTRODUCTIONIt is beneficial to clarify at the outset that the topic of this dissertation is neithercollaboration nor architecture as practiced. Rather, it is the architectural profession as imaginedthrough the lens of collaboration. More specifically, the object of study is a discoursepromulgated by architects for much of the twentieth century that assigned transformativeattributes to collaboration relative to the purpose and potentiality of the profession.Underpinning these aspirations was an assertion of the fundamentally collective character ofarchitectural production, yet realization of the purported transformative promise of collaboration-- variously aligned with the arts and sciences, and with historicism and modernism -- recurrentlyfell short of its idealization. My intention here is to examine this divide by considering:motivations fueling the idealization of collaboration; its engagement in the crafting ofarchitectural identity, authority, and authorship; the mechanisms of professional and stateauthority employed in its promotion and dissemination; and the barriers of practice precludingrealization of its transformative promise. 1 The implication is that, absent full consideration ofthese problematics from the past century, the twenty-first century re-emergence of collaborationas a transformative mechanism -- notwithstanding its intimate engagement with information andcommunication technologies -- is bound to perpetuate the collaborative divide.Collective Action and TransformationBefore delving into this collaborative divide, however, I must begin more broadly withcollective action, that is, an array of practices and relationships by which individuals operatetogether.2 These collective practices and relationships past and present -- exemplified bycollaboration, cooperation, contribution, coordination, teamwork, and association -- areubiquitous in the physical, social, and political sciences as well as in the literary, visual, andperforming arts. Collective action was as prevalent in the nineteenth-century ascent of themodern professions when social clubs and shared-interest societies were the predominant venuesas it is in the twenty-first century when such practices are just as likely to be conducted in virtualsettings. Indeed, the very structural manifestations of professionalization -- formalization anddissemination of specialized knowledge through training and journals, regulation of entry bylicensure, and advocacy by a representative organization -- may be seen as the outcome ofcollective action coupled with motivation to transform the status quo. While these structuralmanifestations bear similarities across disciplines, the principal context of transformation -social, economic, political, spiritual, physical, behavioral, ethical -- varies widely, often findingcommonality only in its elusiveness.In his study of the early legal profession, for instance, Michael Burrage depicts collectiveaction as the means by which practitioners in the American colonies sought to articulate a1By identity, I refer to the articulation of a distinct body of knowledge and services distinguishing the architect fromother participants in the design and construction of the built environment. By authority, I refer to the socioeconomic and legal privilege to dominate and control the process of architectural production. Finally, by authorship,I refer to principal attribution in the public and professional realms for the outcome of that process.2For a discussion of formal theoretical models of collective action and a review of collective action theory since theseminal work of Mancur Olson in the 1960s, see Pamela E. Oliver, “Formal Models of Collective Action,” AnnualReview of Sociology, vol. 19 (1993), 271-300.1

distinct identity amidst a confusing array of British barrister and attorney models of practice.3Susan Dorr Goold theorizes compelling patient-centric arguments for collective action amongmedical practitioners on matters of compensation, autonomy, and working conditions, but notesthat prevailing economic, political, and ethical forces engaged in and acting upon health carenonetheless preclude such actions in practice. 4 Jill Dolan speaks of collective action from yetanother perspective; a paradigm seeking to transform the neutrality of theater into a performer/participant venue for “meaning-making and imagination . . . of a better world,” despite apparentobstacles to motivating audiences gathered as ephemeral communities.5In the realm of architecture, collective transformative endeavors are no less diverse andseemingly no more realizable than their counterparts, operating on a breadth of scale fromindividual object to vast regional intervention. Such quests to create or alter spaces for “futureforms of social life,” as David Harvey characterizes the transformative essence of architecturalproduction, bring to mind William Morris’s aspirations for a society in which architecture is bothcontributory to and reflective of a “new era of social cohesion and a new code of humanvalues.” 6 Magali Sarfatti Larson notes an early modernist obsession with the “transformativecapacity of the arts” in fostering a “new society,” while Susan Buck-Morss writes of a Cold Warvision of global proportions, an “optimistic vision of a mass society beyond material scarcity,and the collective, social goal, through massive industrial construction, of transforming thenatural world.” 7 More recently, editors of Artforum published six proposals for the re-buildingof post-hurricane New Orleans by Huff Gooden, UN Studio, Morphosis, West 8, andHargreaves Associates. Although deemed “visionary,” the editors presented the proposals “in thespirit of possibility and in a long-standing tradition of collaborative, idealistic endeavors in thearts, which have in previous era provided the germ of inspiration for public works.” 8This transformative potential of architecture -- Alberto Peréz-Gómez argues it can “beparaphrased poetically but . . . impossible to explain systematically” -- may be furtherexemplified by the insatiable modernist notions of ‘complete building’ or ‘total design.’9 KarstenHarries offers that Walter Gropius, while aware of its fantastical nature, nonetheless argued for3Michael Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession: England, France, and theUnited States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9.4Susan Dorr Goold, “Collective Action by Physician: Beyond Strikes,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics,vol. 9 (2000), 498-503.5Jill Dolan, “Utopia in Performance,” Theatre Research International, vol. 31, no. 2 (2006), 164.6David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 200; andPhillippa Bennett, “The Architecture of Happiness: Building Utopia in the Last Romances of William Morris,”Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, no. 4 (Spring 2007), 115.7Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 32; and Susan Buck-Morss, “The City as Dreamworld andCatastrophe,” October, vol. 73 (Summer 1995), 3. For a discussion of the CIAM program linking architectural,urban, and societal transformation, see Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (Cambridge,MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002).8 Ascited in Yates McKee, “Haunted Housing: Eco-Vanguardism, Eviction, and the Biopolitics of Sustainability inNew Orleans,” Grey Room, vol. 30 (Winter 2008), 92. For a discussion of three models of architectural utopia, seeThomas R. Fisher, The Scheme of Things: Alternative Thinking on the Practice of Architecture (Minneapolis andLondon: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 13-18.9 AlbertoPeréz-Gómez, Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing After Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA andLondon: The MIT Press, 2008), 143.2

the ‘complete building’ as a principal motivation for architecture engaged in societal reform.10Mark Wrigley insists that ‘total design’ -- manifested either as the “focusing of design inward ona single intense point” or “expansion of design out to touch every possible point in the world” -is an idealization of collective action with the architect in control of “centralizing, orchestrating,dominating” spatial and societal transformations.11 In each instance, as with the accounts byHarvey, Morris, Larson, Buck-Morss, and editors of Artforum, the improbability of realizationseems not to dissuade architects from a faith in the transformative power of collective action.12This sets the groundwork for several initial premises. First, that architects have longembraced collective action as a transformative mechanism motivated by diverse societal,environmental, stylistic, and professional outcomes; secondly, that of a litany of signifiers forcollective action -- cooperation, contribution, coordination, teamwork, etc. -- collaboration hasbeen the most problematic, attributable to a sustained and expansive divide between itsidealization and realization; and thirdly, that this collaborative divide serves metaphorically notonly to depict a gap between idealization and realization, it also characterizes the assertion ratherthan easing of disciplinary boundaries between architects and non-architect ‘others’ embedded inthe twentieth-century promotion of collaboration.In the aggregate, these premises foreground a fundamental paradox. Collaboration is, onthe one hand, a persistent and persuasive reminder in the professional consciousness thatarchitecture is not produced in isolation, yet it is simultaneously a recurring reaction againstnormative architectural practices that privilege individual identity, authority, and authorship overthat of the collective.13 Compounding this paradox is the collapse of semantic distinctionamongst various signifiers of collective action. While such linguistic fluidity may be seenpositively as enabling new temporally and culturally-relevant interpretations, the resultingsemantic confusion serves to inhibit rather than enhance consensus of meaning, ostensibly aprerequisite for collective action. Architects and scholars of the profession alike unwittinglyperpetuate this semantic confusion by indiscriminately employing these terms synonymously,10Karsten Harries, “The Dream of the Complete Building,” Perspecta, vol. 17 (1980), 40.11Mark Wigley, “Whatever Happened to Total Design?” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 5 (Summer 1998), re-print2001, 1.12Harvey employs the metaphorical framework of utopia in his discussion of architectural production, as itsinternalized contradiction etymologically rooted in ‘no-place’ and ‘ideal place’ succinctly depicts the dichotomybetween the idealization and realization of transformative programs. While architectural representation of utopia -in contrast with the “ideal society” originating with Thomas More prevalent in the literary arts or the Baconiantechnological iteration in the sciences -- tends toward the imposition of order over chaos through the manipulation ofform and material, the problematization of utopia, he points out, need not be restricted to spatio-physical terms.Rather, as Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach suggest in their inquiry into the dynamics ofindividual body and built environment, utopianism may be viewed as both “social activity and thoughtprocess” (Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, Embodied Utopias (New York and London:Routledge, 2002), 1) In the same vein, Harvey suggests that the “failure of realized utopias of spatial form can justas reasonably be attributed to the processes mobilized to materialize them as to failures of spatial form per se.” Thisleads Harvey to argue for a spatio-temporal approach to utopia, in which the materiality of place and the socialprocesses of its realization come under equal scrutiny and in dialectical relationship (Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 173).For further comparative discussion of utopia as depicted in the literary arts, sciences, and architecture, see WilliamAlexander McClung, “Dialectics of Literary Cities,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 41, no. 3 (Spring1988), 33-37.13For Dana Cuff, the first of several “dualities” in architectural practice is that of the individual/collective, “tappinginto the contrast between architecture’s fundamental respect for the autonomous artist and its use of teams ofprofessionals to do the actual work for any project” (Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice, Cambridge,MA and London: The MIT Press, 1992, 11).3

inequitably, or without specificity of meaning. The Swiss historian Siegfried Giedion, forinstance, in his introduction to Jose Luis Sert’s 1942 text on the Functionalist City, depictsCIAM’s first gathering after the 1928 La Sarraz Declaration as “a congress based oncollaboration, not a congress in which everyone merely contributes circumscribed knowledgefrom his own special field, as in the nineteenth century.” 14 Giedion calls attention here to adistinction between two collective action terms -- collaboration and contribution -- and betweena twentieth-century iteration of collaboration and that of a prior century. An absence of clearmeaning, however, makes it difficult to enter into the specificity of that moment to comprehendthese distinctions and the consequences for architectural practice. Similarly, Gropius, long heldby scholars as a leading proponent of collective action, professed that “the art of building iscontingent upon the coordinated teamwork of a band of collaborators whose orchestralcooperation symbolizes the cooperative organism of what we call society.” 15 Here, Gropiusstruggles with the inadequacy of not just one but four signifiers of collective action -coordination, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation -- in a seemingly redundant effort toarticulate a vision of architectural practice.While this semantic confusion may hinder consensus on collective action, the existenceof multiple signifiers and meanings is not the principal issue here. As Adrian Forty observes,words enter the architectural lexicon only to be transformed over time in variable contexts oftheory and practice. He speaks of a “phenomenon” of language characterized by “the constantflux between words and meanings, of meanings’ pursuit of words, and words’ escape frommeanings.” 16 ‘Function,’ for instance, crossed as a metaphor from mathematics and biology intoarchitectural usage in a strictly tectonic sense through the end of the nineteenth century, afterwhich it bore a more polemical inference involving the human/building interface.17 ‘Structure’referred to the “internal organization” of the body before its adoption as an architectural term inreference almost exclusively to the entire building. It was not until the latter half of thenineteenth century that its meaning narrowed to the supporting framework of a building, andlater, more abstractly, to the organizing framework of a plan of action on most any scale.18Articulation of the ProblemRather, the central problem prompting this study is that architects continue unabated inthe twenty-first century to assign transformative aspirations to collaboration withoutinterrogating its significance to the architectural profession past or present. The problem -- andthe relevance of this study -- may be distilled to two principal components. First, in thecontemporary discourse, architects idealize collaboration as superior to other modes of collectiveaction and as a means to enable participation in a free-flowing model of information and14José Luis Sert, Can our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions: Based on theProposals Formulated by the CIAM, International Congresses for Modern Architecture, Congrès Internationald'Architecture Moderne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), ix.15Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1935), 57.16 AdrianForty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson,2000), 14.17Ibid., 174-195.18Ibid., 276-285; and Antoine Picon, “Architecture, Science, Technology, and the Virtual Realm,” in Antoine Piconand Alessandra Ponte, eds., Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 2003), 294.4

knowledge production facilitated by advanced technologies and global communication networks.Following Coyne, romanticized digital narratives aggravate this idealization with presumptionsof horizontal decision-making across temporal, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries. Thisimagery, however, contrasts sharply with the hierarchical, methodological, legal, and regulatoryrealities of a profession still vested in an older model of practice, one that ostensibly sustains theidentity of individual architects and grants them authority and authorship of both the process andoutcome of architectural production. It ignores, moreover, indications that technologicaladvancement may not correlate to an equitable distribution of knowledge or to enhancedperformance and outcome, despite the substantial investment of human and financial resourcesinto robust technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) intended to nurture thesevery attributes in a global marketplace.19Coupled with this idealization of collaboration in the contemporary discourse is a secondcritical component of the problem prompting this study. As I shall demonstrate, despite theubiquitous appearance of the word ‘collaboration’ in scholarship and journal articles on theprofession, the discipline of architecture lags in scrutinizing its historical relationship withcollaboration, a sentiment echoed by Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, professor of design and editorof Visible Language, in observing that “collaboration has an interesting, if largely unwritten,history in design.” 20 This is remarkable given the immense transition in practice from theVitruvian generalist to the twenty-first century specialist, and corresponding changes in therelationships between architects and others engaged in the design and construction process. Theearliest medieval architect-designers, for instance, distinguished themselves by their design skillsfrom the anonymous ranks of craftsmen and guild members, but the dearth of detailed drawingsand a reliance on large-scale models necessitated the architect-designer’s almost continuouspresence on the construction canteen to issue clarifications and instructions.21 By the fourteenthcentury, the architect-designer’s elevated socio-economic status coupled with the rise oforthogonal drawings as a communication tool re-defined rules of engagement with the craftsman.This granted the architect-designer a degree of freedom to pursue simultaneous andgeographically-dispersed projects, although, as historian Howard Burns shows, there was rarely19For an extended discussion of this topic, see Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, andthe Romance of the Real (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press 1999).20Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, “Practicing Collaboration in Design,” Visible Language, vol. 38, no. 2 (2004), 140.21Leopold D. Ettlinger, “The Emergence of the Italian Architect during the Fifteenth Century,” in Spiro Kostof, ed.,T

Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University (Avery Library) Bancroft Library Archives at the University of California - Berkeley (Bancroft Archives) La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/City University of New York (NYCHA Collection) Rare and Manuscript Collections, C