Seeking Other Solidarities

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Notes

Notes

1 It was toward this brand of chauvinism—which they called “misplaced technological zeal”—that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown aimed some of their strongest critiques of late modernism. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 139.

2 This cleavage was heightened by a foundational change in the way architects bid for work and compete with one another, as summarized in Jay Wickersham, “From Disinterested Expert to Marketplace Competitor: How Anti-Monopoly Law Transformed the Ethics and Economics of American Architecture in the 1970s,” Architectural Theory Review 20, no. 2 (2015): 138–58. See also Peggy Deamer, “The Sherman Antitrust Act and the Profession of Architecture,” Avery Review, no. 36, January 30, 2019, http://averyreview.com/issues/36/sherman-antitrust-act.

3 Marginal notes by Laverne Greely on facsimile of Daniel M. Upham, “Federal Reserve a First in Suspension Building,” Minneapolis Star, December 9, 1970, 26B. Box 17, Gunnar Birkerts and Associates records, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

4 The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis construction project involved the use of the computerized Critical Path Method (CPM) for project management, for which Knutson Construction Company operated their own IBM 1440 computer, and for which a separate cost and scheduling consultant, McKee-Berger-Mansueto, also provided CPM analyses.

5 Gunnar Birkerts, “Defining a Design Methodology,” Architectural Record 161, no. 2 (February 1977): 94.

6 D. A. Turin, “Building as a Process [1967],” Building Research & Information 31, no. 2 (2003): 182. See also Paolo Tombesi, “The Carriage in the Needle: Building Design and Flexible Specialization Systems,” Journal of Architectural Education 52, no. 3 (February 1999): 134–42.

7 This is, more or less, still the hoped-for outcome of contemporary approaches, including Integrated Project Delivery and collaborative contract structures. A recent guidebook states, “A collaborative practice is distinguished from that of a typical, multiperson office by the intentional integration of diverse voices and expertise in all stages of the design process.” Erin Carraher, Ryan E. Smith, and Peter DeLisle, Leading Collaborative Architectural Practice (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017), 6.

8 Turin, “Building as a Process,” 180, 186. See also George T. Heery, Time, Cost, and Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975); and Thomas C. Kavanagh, Frank Müller, and James J. O’Brien, Construction Management: A Professional Approach (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).

9 Despite the test fit, expansion and contraction and lateral movement of the catenary arches proved problematic during installation of the office block’s floor beams and curtain wall. It was eventually discovered that the best time to make such connections was in the early morning, after the catenary had cooled and contracted overnight. This delayed the project substantially.

10 Architects’ lack of consideration for these concerns is the subject of the pivotal third chapter titled “One to One: Full Scale Construction Site,” in Pedro Fiori Arantes, The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age, trans. Adriana Kauffmann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 127–200. Arantes was critical of the firewall in the minds of architects between “technical and formal innovations” and those which “reduce hardships or difficulties on the construction site” (178). As Arantes observed, there is also a racial aspect of this design-construction split—many construction laborers worldwide are immigrants or members of minority groups. See also Mhairi McVicar, Precision in Architecture: Certainty, Ambiguity and Deviation (New York: Routledge, 2019).

11 In this area of research, the pathbreaking oral histories of construction work by Christine Wall, Linda Clarke, and others at the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) are particularly notable. See “Centre for the Production of the Built Environment,” University of Westminster, https://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/centre-for-the-study-of-the-production-of-the-built-environment-probe. Accessed January 30, 2020. See also Christine Wall, An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialization in Britain, 1940–1970 (London: Routledge, 2013).

12 The former front has been pushed forward most forcefully and most convincingly by the Architecture Lobby, whose work the author wholeheartedly supports. See “About,” the Architecture Lobby, http://www.architecture-lobby.org/about/. Accessed January 13, 2020.

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Michael Abrahamson

Michael Abrahamson is an architectural historian and critic whose research explores the materiality of buildings and the methods of architectural practice across the twentieth century. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan centered on the important late modernist architectural firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates. In this and other research projects, he explores the systems of creativity, subordination, and legitimation that have enabled the creation of architecture. Michael is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Utah.