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SUMMARY:Chelsea Spencer (Columbia University) - The Contract Mode of Build
 ing - Neighbors Vol. 7 - THEMA\, TPOD\, HITAM
DTSTART:20260401T123000
DTEND:20260401T143000
DTSTAMP:20260916T104802Z
UID:a972d69a10e43a7e52ce9274c8dcb02ff29a446f188cd97bfce3174f
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Chelsea Spencer \nThe Contract Mode of Building by Chelsea Sp
 encer\n\nThis lecture examines how architectural anxieties about the relat
 ionship between designing and building—a persistent source of disciplina
 ry discomfort—were refracted in the nineteenth-century United States thr
 ough 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 shap
 ed by particular historical circumstances. The lecture takes up two lines 
 of argument.\n\nFirst\, it argues for architecture’s integral role in th
 e reinvention of the contract form itself as the quintessential legal inst
 rument of modernization: an apparatus for securing the fulfillment of arbi
 trary desires and allowing future imaginaries to be cut loose from the ine
 rtia 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 mod
 ern architectural production. \n\nSecond\, the lecture challenges the ten
 dency of architectural history to frame building production as a backdrop 
 to architectural authorship and control. Contractors were neither collabor
 ators seeking recognition as architectural coauthors nor subaltern executo
 rs of architects’ intentions. They were middlemen. What kind of agency i
 s this\, and what are its implications? The lecture asks what it would mea
 n to take seriously the charge lobbed at contractors by journeymen workers
 : in the producerist idiom of the nineteenth century\, contractors were cl
 assic parasites.\n\nA lecture series by invited speakers in the field of H
 istory and Theory of Architecture organised jointly by Sarah Nichols (THEM
 A)\, Pier Vittorio Aureli (TPOD)\, and Alfredo Thiermann (HITAM).\n 
LOCATION:Archizoom https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SG%201212
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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