Chelsea Spencer (Columbia University) - The Contract Mode of Building - Neighbors Vol. 7 - THEMA, TPOD, HITAM
Event details
| Date | 01.04.2026 |
| Hour | 12:30 › 14:30 |
| Speaker | Chelsea Spencer |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
The Contract Mode of Building by Chelsea Spencer
This lecture examines how architectural anxieties about the relationship between designing and building—a persistent source of disciplinary discomfort—were refracted in the nineteenth-century United States through the ascendant power of contract. What the US case makes clear is that contract was never simply a neutral medium; it was a political idea shaped by particular historical circumstances. The lecture takes up two lines of argument.
First, it argues for architecture’s integral role in the reinvention of the contract form itself as the quintessential legal instrument of modernization: an apparatus for securing the fulfillment of arbitrary desires and allowing future imaginaries to be cut loose from the inertia of the past. This is not the usual story of modernization, however. Rather than rational methods triumphing over inefficient practices, what is revealed instead is the irreducibly irrational core at the heart of modern architectural production.
Second, the lecture challenges the tendency of architectural history to frame building production as a backdrop to architectural authorship and control. Contractors were neither collaborators seeking recognition as architectural coauthors nor subaltern executors of architects’ intentions. They were middlemen. What kind of agency is this, and what are its implications? The lecture asks what it would mean to take seriously the charge lobbed at contractors by journeymen workers: in the producerist idiom of the nineteenth century, contractors were classic parasites.
A lecture series by invited speakers in the field of History and Theory of Architecture organised jointly by Sarah Nichols (THEMA), Pier Vittorio Aureli (TPOD), and Alfredo Thiermann (HITAM).
This lecture examines how architectural anxieties about the relationship between designing and building—a persistent source of disciplinary discomfort—were refracted in the nineteenth-century United States through the ascendant power of contract. What the US case makes clear is that contract was never simply a neutral medium; it was a political idea shaped by particular historical circumstances. The lecture takes up two lines of argument.
First, it argues for architecture’s integral role in the reinvention of the contract form itself as the quintessential legal instrument of modernization: an apparatus for securing the fulfillment of arbitrary desires and allowing future imaginaries to be cut loose from the inertia of the past. This is not the usual story of modernization, however. Rather than rational methods triumphing over inefficient practices, what is revealed instead is the irreducibly irrational core at the heart of modern architectural production.
Second, the lecture challenges the tendency of architectural history to frame building production as a backdrop to architectural authorship and control. Contractors were neither collaborators seeking recognition as architectural coauthors nor subaltern executors of architects’ intentions. They were middlemen. What kind of agency is this, and what are its implications? The lecture asks what it would mean to take seriously the charge lobbed at contractors by journeymen workers: in the producerist idiom of the nineteenth century, contractors were classic parasites.
A lecture series by invited speakers in the field of History and Theory of Architecture organised jointly by Sarah Nichols (THEMA), Pier Vittorio Aureli (TPOD), and Alfredo Thiermann (HITAM).
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- THEMA, TPOD, HITAM