PART TWO—
THE POSTINDUSTRIAL MATRIX OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

Chapter Three—
Architecture in the Political Economy of Cities

The triumph of architectural modernism as a style is synonymous with the reconstruction of the capitalist world economy after World War II. Accepted by American corporate leaders as a symbol of progress, this truly International Style became the architectural expression of modernization in the age of American hegemony.

The postmodern transformation of architecture has coincided chronologically with a different phase of capitalist development. In advanced capitalist countries, and particularly in the United States, the economic crisis of the 1970s accentuated structural trends that had been at work for a long time.

The rough correspondences that one may discern between the forms of architectural postmodernism and the general characteristics of the new phase of international economic restructuring do not tell us much about the process of architectural change.^[1] Architecture, like all other socially constructed activities and beliefs, occurs locally, in specific contexts. These local settings are connected to much broader economic, political, and cultural developments by linkages so complex that they defy summary. On the one hand, we have architects, putting into practice ideas that make up the discourse of the discipline. On the other hand, we have external forces—economic, political, social, and cultural movements—bearing down with more and more specific effects upon the practice of architecture.

In the short run, architecture, like construction, is most directly and potently affected by local conditions and contingent economic factors—interest rates, government policy and expenditures at all levels, tax laws and tax revenues, labor laws, public debt, average per capita income, and other tangible and intangible factors that make up a locality's "business climate." Dealing in detail with these fluctuating variables would far exceed the scope of my study. Moreover, they are not depersonalized forces but the result of political responses by actors who attempt to cope with systemic developments. Among the latter, two are most significant for the cities in which architecture is practiced: spatial restructuring and the growth of a "professional managerial class," the two of which are interrelated by their common dependence upon deindustrialization.

The term deindustrialization suggests the effect of different movements of capital in search of higher profits. It refers to the "runaway shop" phenomenon—the decision by industrial firms to leave the nation's more mature industrial regions for domestic or foreign areas that offer cheaper facilities, cheaper labor, lower unionization rates, and more complacent local governments. But it also refers to investment shifts across economic branches and sectors: First, within the manufacturing sector, capital seeks high-technology industries; second, it moves from the transformative sector as a whole to services. Both intra- and intersectoral shifts favor economic activities that employ higher proportions of technical and professional personnel than the old basic industries like textile, steel, and automobile.^[2]

Deindustrialization implies the hegemonic presence of large "multilocal" firms. No longer tied to any special place by the advantages of regional specialization, these firms are able to shirk the efforts local governments may want to make on behalf of the livelihood and the quality of life of their constituents. Thus, the "multilocality" of big firms pushes the task of regulating them from local and regional governments to the federal level, but the development of exceptionally powerful transnational corporations threatens to exceed even the latter's regulatory capacity. The presence of transnational headquarters in a city ties its fortunes directly to the world economy and ranks it in an urban hierarchy that is not just national but worldwide.^[3]

"Postindustrial" restructuring and the widened scope of business activity affect architecture mainly through changes in the prospects of cities and in the structure of the labor force. On the one hand, population shifts toward newer geographic areas increase the demand for architectural services. Architects design some of the office buildings where the newcomers

work, as well as some of the commercial and institutional (more often than the residential) facilities they and their families need.^[4]

On the other hand, even in older areas (especially in "headquarter" cities), the presence of large-scale employers of "professional, managerial, and technical" workers is correlated to the massive construction of office and institutional buildings that occurred, with some interruptions, from the 1960s through the unprecedented speculative boom of the 1980s. The architects' expertise in design and style serves not only the needs for space and image of corporate employers and local governments but also the distinctive consumption patterns of the "baby boom's" highly educated cohorts.

In the postindustrial city, the presence of professional and managerial groups (in which women play an increasingly important role) tends to blur the classic distinctions between productive and nonproductive investments. The corporate organizations that employ large numbers of urban professionals are normally interested in minimizing turnover among their high-level personnel, partly for reasons of productivity. According to specialized surveys, this was "the largest single reason that owners went into the new building market."^[5] Since productivity is notoriously hard to measure in skilled and often indeterminate services, managers may reasonably consider a well-designed environment, compatible with the consumption patterns of their highly skilled employees, as a necessary "factor of production."

Some of these elite employees engage in urban gentrification, a distinctive (though far from predominant) form of consumption that I shall consider in conclusion. The loss of jobs and the consequent abandonment and decline of traditional working-class neighborhoods link gentrification to deindustrialization and restructuring. However, for many of the affluent "symbolic analysts," the complex of buildings where they work may well be most of what they see in the city.^[6]

Philip Siller is a former New Yorker, a vice president of the Canadian Olympia and York Properties, responsible for New York's Battery Park City and London's Canary Wharf. He describes, unwittingly perhaps, how the built forms of the new economic order drain life out of the city:

People used to define themselves by their home, and they worked wherever they had to work. It didn't matter if it was a nice building or not, a park-like setting or not. . . . But as the dichotomy between their home and their city widens, either because they live further away from it or they skip over the city when they go to work . . . the place where they work becomes an important part of

their self-image. . . . The amenities offered to them at the places where they work have to replace all the organic amenities that neighborhoods automatically provided. You get your dry cleaning done at the American Express Building and you carry it home. You buy your dinner at some gourmet takeout where you work and you carry it home. It used to be that "Pick something up on the way home" meant when you get out of the subway, while you're walking to the house.^[7]

Trends more widespread than those that affect only the local business scene thus have direct and indirect effects on architectural work. General economic conditions and expectations about the economy are directly related to investments in real estate.^[8] The level of personal income (and its concentration in the hands of those who can afford to spend it on design) affect architectural practices geared not only to the work and recreational settings of the upper middle class but also to its mostly suburban residences, its holiday retreats, and even its quality furniture.

Cities and their fortunes are the most important connecting link between vast structural forces and the making of architecture. This is not only because a majority of architects work in cities but also because it is in cities that architecture, in theory, becomes public—a public space, a public good, and publicly visible. At city level, architecture becomes implicated, usually on the side of the powerful, in the class and race conflicts "over the assignment of certain goals to certain spatial forms."^[9]

Politics, indeed, is the fourth component of architecture's structural background. Regardless of international economic trends, the largest part of what people need and buy—housing, health care, education, prepared meals, transportation, and the like—is produced and consumed domestically. The resources devoted to these services and the decision to subsidize them as public goods are clearly not an automatic effect of global economic forces but the results of political choice.^[10] Notably, in the United States, federal investment policies in housing and community facilities and federal tax legislation are crucial intermediaries between needs and their satisfaction.

Tax policy, for instance, subsidizes large mortgages more generously than smaller ones (and therefore, presumably, the minority of architect-designed homes). Tax credits encouraged historic preservation in the 1970s and 1980s. Before being sharply curtailed in 1984 and 1986, the generous depreciation allowances of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act spurred the boom in office construction (as did considerable tax abatements at the local level). Overall, since the 1970s, federal tax concessions have replaced direct grants as the most important form of support for public or public–private urban projects.

Here, the distinction between "social overhead capital," which serves community needs (housing, schools, fire and police stations, libraries, recreational and health facilities), and "economic overhead capital," which supports private sector economic activity (not only roads, bridges, airports, sewers and water systems but also convention centers, stadiums, private–public investments in large retail centers, and the like), is important. It suggests, among other things, different kinds of demands for professional design services.

Many students of the urban scene have argued that local progrowth coalitions, in which business is the best organized actor, have enough power to systematically bend urban renewal efforts toward economic overhead capital and downtown projects. Seeing the city primarily as a "growth machine," private interests overtly oppose capital expenditures that serve poorer neighborhoods and poorer people or best them in the competition for funds. In this view, the urban priorities of the federal government act as either a major constraint or a major encouragement for local progrowth coalitions.

While there can be little doubt about the influence of progrowth forces, other scholars question whether the business community even needs to put direct pressure on city governments. Their argument is that the latter are forced to choose economic over social capital expenditures by the need to compete with other cities in the national urban system. As Carolyn Adams writes, "developmental policies are essential to sustaining a city's market position. That is why city officials so consistently favor them over community programs, especially those in low income communities."^[11]

The subject of real estate investment and urban politics is too complex and vast for me to review in detail. I believe, however, that significant modern architecture is almost inevitably urban, and I am particularly interested in experts' opportunities to play a public role. It is therefore necessary for me to sketch the broad connections (or disconnections) between background forces, mediated by urban policy and politics, and changes in American architecture since the end of World War II.

The Articulation of Urban Liberalism

In the United States, the articulation of liberal urban policies is a signal achievement of the New Deal. But, in contrast with social democratic Germany, the great public works of the New Deal did not establish a particular affinity with avant-garde aesthetics. Let us consider first the dynamic his-

torical context within which the Democratic party created a new urban role for the federal government.

Spatial mobility and decentralization have been constant and primary forces in the shaping of American life. Suburbanization has only been the most striking recent incarnation of this centrifugal tendency. Its early start and enormous scale have made its impact on cities far more devastating than elsewhere in the capitalist world. Spatial segregation and confinement have always served everywhere to classify and separate different groups of people and, pointedly, to contain "the rabble" and insulate the "respectable" citizens. But in America the effects of spatial segregation have been magnified and intensified by racism.

Racial and xenophobic prejudice has often sought the cover of a deeply antiurban ideology, which looks to the small town and later to the suburbs for a socially homogeneous Arcadian myth. Yet, antiurban sentiment has never challenged the "growth machine" ideology, for which urban growth automatically results in collective benefits, despite the disproportionate profits it brings to real estate interests.^[12] Rather, from the Progressive era on, the boosterism of progrowth coalitions has been ideologically reinforced by what Carolyn Adams calls "positive environmentalism." Analyzing the renewal of Philadelphia's Society Hill (the brainchild of Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia's noted director of city planning in the 1950s), Adams observes: "In emphasizing the physical dimensions of renewal, [Bacon and his small group of reformers] believed they were directly addressing the city's social and economic problems. Far from separating the two aspects of development, they, like the earlier Progressives, saw the solution of social and economic problems as dependent upon physical reconstruction."^[13] The conviction that a better physical environment not only directly improves the wretched lives of the poor but also changes their self-concept, their attitudes, and their civic behavior thus establishes a direct line of communication between urban reformism and a cherished belief of architectural modernism. It is important to keep this affinity in mind when we examine later attempts to reverse urban decline.

American capital continued to concentrate rapidly during and after World War I. The big corporations took advantage of truck freight to move their productive plants to the suburbs while clustering their administrative headquarters in a few regional and national centers.^[14] In the years of turmoil before 1914, some industrialists had explicitly expressed the hope that a suburban location would protect their workers from the "infection" of strikes and labor organizing. Many affluent families also sought an early

suburban escape from the consequences of industrial density. The white collar middle class, prompted by streetcars and cheap housing, started early on to follow the elites out of town.^[15] Commercial establishments sprung up around the new markets, while the presence of a labor force and the relative cheapness of automobiles amplified the trend.

Starting with the 1930 census, the population of metropolitan areas was growing faster in the suburbs than at the center. The depression and World War II stymied the migration to the suburbs, but big business took full advantage of wartime federal financing to reindustrialize along the spatial lines prefigured in the 1920s. The influence of corporate leaders in the War Production Board allowed them to opt for a location policy that placed "their new facilities largely beyond the reach of the unions, New Deal-leaning mayors, and the other constituencies which had fueled urban liberalism in the 1930s."^[16] Indeed, the political relationship between cities and the federal government had been transformed by the New Deal.

John Mollenkopf argues in a compelling study that the economic collapse of the 1930s provided national and local political entrepreneurs with a platform on which they were able to formulate progressive programs, pass them against conservative opposition, implement them in part, and use them to create a new constituency for the Democratic party among urban workers of ethnic origin.^[17] The political base of urban liberalism was, in his term, the "iron triangles" that federal programs had forged between state managers, congressional Democrats, and local beneficiaries or ideological supporters of the programs. The Democratic party tried to preserve or to reconstruct this base almost until the 1980s. Mollenkopf observes that "the great physical accomplishments of the New Deal programs pointed the way to future directions in urban land use. The slum clearance projects, the parkways, the new public buildings, and publicly subsidized private housing construction all showed how government could accelerate and direct market forces."^[18]

Many architects and planners participated in the New Deal programs, if for no other reason than that the government had become not only one of the most important but also one of the few employers. In the new technocratic positions that the New Deal was making available, American architects were able to play a role not that different from the public role of their European colleagues, applying, for instance, their long experience with prefabrication to the large-scale projects of the New Deal. The Italian historian Leonardo Benevolo assesses the experience of the 1930s as follows: "A new class of technicians was growing up, aware of the demands of collaboration and used to contact with political and administrative

authorities, while the architect became ever less an independent technician and ever more a coordinator of the works of other technicians."^[19] Benevolo tends to exaggerate (without evidence) the influence of the Modern Movement and, after 1933, the role of the European émigrés. On the whole, the technocratic role that the New Deal offered to American architects was not at all ideologically identified, as it was in parts of Europe for a time, with the new architecture.

Richard Pommer has documented the limited influence of European modernism on American urban housing in the early 1930s. Confronted with the new task of designing large-scale projects (fifty-nine were built or financed by the government from 1932 to 1934), "a few younger architects succeeded in introducing designs from European housing of the Modern Movement. . . . These methods of site planning and ideals of architectural form collided, however, with the vaguer and more timid traditions of American housing design; and the social and political implications of Continental housing became caught in the American shift from private initiatives to bureaucratic control." For Pommer, both architects and critics missed the modernist lesson "of the inseparability of housing, planning and architecture."^[20] In America, aesthetics and social purpose remained divorced. One illustration is the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which introduced the Modern Movement to the cultivated public. It was clearly split between, on the one hand, Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock's formal emphasis on International Style architecture and, on the other hand, housing. The latter part was curated by Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer, with a catalog introduction by Lewis Mumford.^[21]

The reception of the work of Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the United States' most distinguished housing experts of the period, is another illustration of the divorce between aesthetics and social purpose. In the first place, their notable achievements set more a suburban than an urban model of development.^[22] Second, their aesthetics stood in the way of recognition by many architects of the younger generation. Robert Stern has noted that Harvard's central role in introducing the European movement to America was deeply marked by the school's traditional emphasis on aesthetics. Holmes Perkins remembers that Harvard students in the 1930s

thought of [Stein, Mumford, and Henry Wright] as planners. The distinction they were making in their mind was that these men were concerned with program, with social responsibility, with the need for creating a decent environment. . . . The architects, who had always been concerned with aesthetics, were not much inclined to pay attention because, frankly, Stein's architecture was

damn dull! But when you looked at Gropius's architecture or Mies's or Le Corbusier's . . . it was exciting, because it was absolutely different. There was no precedent for it in this country.^[23]

Modernism, therefore, did not give its typical architectural face to the New Deal's progressive urban movement.^[24] A much more conservative progrowth coalition was to sponsor its hegemonic rise in the postwar period.

Suburbs, Freeways, and Urban Renewal

During the extraordinary economic expansion of the war years and the prosperous 1950s, many experts concluded that the central cities had become obsolete.^[25] Despite Truman's narrow victory, conservative opponents of the New Deal had reorganized and regained strength in Congress. Their influence bent the bulk of Truman's housing program to the benefit of the private sector and away from the Democrats' urban strongholds. In the older industrial cities, fate appeared to be sealed, first, by continuing suburbanization and, second, by the movement of business and people to the new cities of the Southwest. The immediacy of urban blight and growing worries about the cities' tax revenues spurred efforts to "save downtown for business," with "positive environmentalism" for ideological justification. Modernist architecture played a very visible part in the undemocratic and unpopular attempts to stem the tide.

Federal policies that favored suburbs, private homeownership, and the automobile subsidized one of the great migrations in American history. Federally insured mortgages enabled a new industry of residential builders to take full advantage of cheap suburban land. After 1956, the Interstate and the Revenue Highway Acts, cheap cars, and cheap gasoline encouraged commuting to the detriment of urban transportation. Returning veterans, workers with wartime savings, and the emergent professional-managerial class left in droves for the lily-white new suburbs to start the baby boom.^[26] By 1950, writes Patrick Ashton, "the population of suburbs was growing ten times as fast as that of central cities; nearly one in four Americans was a suburbanite. . . . By 1970, 76 million Americans lived in suburbs. They represented 57 percent of the total metropolitan population and a plurality (37.6 percent) of the . . . nation as a whole."^[27]

With time, the disparity of incomes and political clout increased the heterogeneity of the suburbs and their inequality of resources.^[28] Yet, for the mostly white middle class and skilled working class, who participated in the exodus, the gains (like the achievements of the housing industry) had been impressive indeed. In 1946, it had been estimated that a mini-

mum of five million units were needed immediately and twelve and a half million over the next decade. After the Housing Act of 1949 was passed, almost a million and a half units were started, most of them by the private sector; from 1950 to 1959, over fifteen million new units of housing were provided. In two decades, "the suburban boom produced about 30 million new housing units . . . increasing homeownership from about 40 percent at the end of the war to over 60 percent by the 1960s."^[29] The look of suburban developments was undoubtedly influenced by the 1930s innovations in planning and by the wartime workers' villages, many of which had been designed by architects, including such noted names as Gropius, Breuer, Neutra, Eero Saarinen, George Howe, William Wurster, and Oscar Stonorov.^[30] The radical separation of housing, work, recreation, and traffic advocated by Le Corbusier and the CIAM in the Athens Charter was unwittingly (or ineluctably) re-created in the suburbs. Similarly, features such as Frank Lloyd Wright's centrally located fireplaces, the small kitchens adjacent to the dining areas, and, above all, the open plan of modernist housing were adapted by the developers' "in house" architects and incorporated into the new prototypes of American homes, to be repeated in both modest and more luxurious versions throughout the land.

Yet, in general, independent architects had a very small direct role in building the suburbs.^[31] And while they had nothing but contempt for the builders' aesthetics ("an inebriate lot of criminals," Frank Lloyd Wright called them), developers paid them in kind. New York's David Rose quipped to Martin Mayer, "I would not give a famous architect a dog house to build. . . . When I build a dog house I'm interested in the dog. He is not." As Mayer explains, "the architect's fee is the element of expense that the builder can most easily eliminate, turning instead to floor plans and elevations in books and catalogues."^[32] In the inner cities, architects' intervention was both more difficult to avoid and much more controversial than whatever influence they had in the suburbs.

The population left behind in the old inner cities consisted disproportionately of those barred from suburban homeownership by their income, the inconvertibility of their assets (homes that could not be sold, experience that could not be transferred, low-level skills), and, conspicuously, their race. If the population vacuum of the inner city was filled at all, it was mostly by more poor and more minorities from the South and Latin America (Asia came later, in the 1980s).^[33] Their occupational prospects were bleak and worsening. In the 1960s, the inner cities of the fifteen largest metropolitan areas lost almost one million jobs, while the suburbs gained three million.^[34]

The Republican administrations in the 1950s and 1970s favored the suburbs and the newer metropolitan areas of the South and the West. Moreover, the urban redevelopment programs destined to rescue the older cities were clearly oriented toward slum clearance and the sanitization of downtown.

Eisenhower's Housing Advisory Committee had recommended in 1953 that "overemphasis on housing for reuse should be avoided and the land should be put to industrial, commercial, institutional, public or residential use or any combination thereof."^[35] The Housing Act of 1954 required advisory citizen committees. Predictably, most of their members came from the progrowth associations of downtown businessmen that had been forming since the war in major cities, in coalition with developers, building trade unions, newspaper editors, and urban professionals. Large architectural firms, in particular, had always been part of the urban "growth machines."

On the one hand, city governments were determined to favor in every way the businesses and the middle-class constituencies who had not yet fled the city. On the other hand, urban renewal legislation allowed technocratic planners to circumvent much of the elected local government's supervision. Thus, during the 1950s, assisted only by small civic elites, planners had free rein.

Two observers sympathetic to developers note that neither planners nor businessmen made any "serious attempt to look at the city through the eyes of average people who needed homes, jobs, and recreation. They spoke more as guardians of the cultural values that the cities represented, now threatened by suburban growth." The image of the "obsolete city" convinced them that "in order to save downtown, it was going to be necessary to destroy it."^[36] And destroy they did. Their instruments were the highway and the renewal programs, which provided enormous funds.

Armed with the right of eminent domain and high-handed methods of eviction, urban renewal authorities managed to clear expanses of land so large that they would have been impossible to assemble through normal market operations. But federal legislation excluded developers from taking part in preliminary planning, and many decaying cities found themselves with no takers for their acres and acres of vacant lots:

St. Louis had its "Hiroshima Flats" and St. Paul its "Superhole." Vacant lots littered with junked cars, piles of garbage and rats' nests were the most visible results of thirteen years of work on the ambitious Ellicott project in Buffalo. . . . As late as 1971, more than half the projects begun between 1960 and 1964 still had land unsold and only the very earliest projects—those begun between 1950 and 1959—had completed two-thirds or more of their land sales.^[37]

The vastness of the vacated sites called for large projects, working to the advantage of the large architectural firms capable of handling them. In place of the often spurious "blight" it had cleared, urban renewal too often put upscale apartment buildings, office towers, and institutional complexes like New York's Lincoln Center. The modernist planning and aesthetics the large firms espoused were well suited to the enormity of the sites.

For the historian Vincent Scully, all types of large-scale projects in postwar America followed the principles of Le Corbusier's visionary 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris. Here is how Scully describes the revolutionary impact of this never-realized utopia:

The old streets and blocks of Paris were to be destroyed in favor of towers standing in super-blocks with tremendous throughways flashing between them. . . . By the 1960's, it was the striking visual effect of the ville radieuse , not its social intent, which came to dominate the conceptions of urban redevelopers. It constituted their preconceived formal image, which they discovered could be as appropriate for luxury apartments or for office buildings as for the proletarian army that Le Corbusier had paraded. Despite their protestations of functional objectivity, they tended simply to reproduce it for all functions, except that now the gardens between the towers were normally filled with parked automobiles.^[38]

Typically, urban renewal projects were conceived for a single social function, separated from their surroundings by wide avenues or expressways and made of boxy towers, looming over ubiquitous parking lots and vast barren plazas where no one liked to sit.

In the three decades after the war, headquarter cities (most notably, Chicago and New York) and university towns like Cambridge and New Haven had acquired some modernist buildings of great distinction. But in most cities, urban renewal spread both aggressive urban design and an impoverished version of modernist architecture. For dozens of serious or spurious followers in the 1950s and 1960s, the main source of inspiration was the "laconic splendor" of Mies van der Rohe's steel structures.^[39]

Mies used the steel frame for the first time in 1948–51 in the twin towers on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. The perfection of Mies's modular compositions gave architects a model for the controlled design of large-scale units; the use of steel contributed to the solution of some of the industry's overproduction problems; and his conception of the high rise building proffered great profits to developers. Indeed, as William Jordy emphasizes, the Lake Shore towers had cost from 5 to 10 percent less than comparable apartment buildings: "Inevitably, the purely technological aspect of Mies's work and the profits to be made from it accounted for the tremendous influence of the Miesian example. In most of the offshoots by other archi-

tects and builders, however, neither the 'less' nor the 'more' had much to do with Mies's teaching, except to prove that The Building was as much a prototype as he had intended it to be."^[40] Mies's much-copied steel-and-glass tower became the monumental signature of corporate modernization. Monumentality, however, was less important sociologically than the association of modern architecture with urban renewal and public housing.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, a simplistic and reductionist version of modernism became the expression of urban redevelopment, its frozen looks indelibly tied to the large-scale demolition that had preceded it. For working class and especially minority neighborhoods, urban renewal and freeway construction meant the equivalent of wartime destruction. Expressways divided their neighborhoods and cut them off from the rest of the city; like redevelopment, these expressways displaced with little or no compensation thousands of residents, who were then left on their own to cope with rising rents, substandard housing, and racial discrimination. Thousands of small businesses were evicted and a large proportion condemned to failure. The people displaced were disproportionately nonwhite; if they received priority for relocation in public housing, their presence there helped to discredit the projects and to silently justify their subsequent abandonment by the authorities.^[41]

The revolt against the freeways started in San Francisco in 1959 and spread in the early 1960s to other parts of the country. In New York's Greenwich Village, seasoned middle-class activists (among whom Jane Jacobs played a prominent role) stopped the West Village project and advised the opponents of the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Before meeting its political doom, the demolition phase ushered in among middle-class urban constituencies a strong movement for the preservation of historical landmarks (or just nice old buildings). Even more than the strength of the movement, its ideology of urban permanence, focused on buildings and not on people, had a profound influence on architectural postmodernism.

More tragically and more significantly, highways and urban renewal paved the way in many cities for the black insurrections that started with Watts in 1965. As a first response, the Housing and Urban Development Acts of 1965 and 1968 stopped the worse "Negro removal" aspects of urban redevelopment while still keeping its focus on downtown areas. But Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory went farther: Johnson's War on Poverty attempted to contain urban conflict and reabsorb black mobilization within the folds of a revamped New Deal coalition.

The tragic irony is that urban liberalism, having solved neither the problems of the Democratic party nor those of the cities, accelerated instead

the flight of business toward the safer political areas of the South and the West.^[42] At the national level, the wreck of the Great Society on the shoals of Vietnam and the ghetto revolts opened the long reaction that brought Nixon to power in 1968 and has not been reversed since then, despite the Carter interlude.

At the end of the 1960s, the improvements in highway access and the major increase in office construction allowed the thirty largest metropolitan areas to hold on to a 20 percent share of new office construction, against the strong competition of newer cities and the suburbs.^[43] The results, however, offered nothing to endear the public to technocratic planning or modernist architecture. The latter's triumph in the postwar period could not be separated from what urban renewal had done to the poorest and most powerless inhabitants of the cities. Neither could it be disassociated from the bulldozing of cherished landmarks that so offended the educated public. Finally, the new and growing professional-managerial strata did not even seem to like the glass-box derivations of Miesian exemplars, set in dreary Corbusian plans, where they were supposed to work, live, and entertain themselves.^[44]

Yet, during the years of the Community Action and the Model Cities programs, young designers mobilized by "the Sixties" had been practicing in the neighborhoods an architecture of community centers, district clinics, and modest renovations. Within schools and professional organizations, they battled to have their elders recognize their modest work as architecture and, beyond that, as the counterhegemonic dimension of the architect's mandate. The first phase of architectural postmodernism belonged to them. They opened it self-consciously on a stage strewn with the rubble of the 1950s and 1960s. On this stage, aesthetic critique merged for a moment with social indignation and political strife.

Competition Between the Cities

During the 1970s, the population loss of "snowbelt" cities went beyond simple transfer to the suburbs. After a century of steady growth, the largest metropolitan regions themselves began to contract, as migration of firms and people toward the new cities of the Southwest gathered increasing strength.^[45]

The long recession that started at the end of 1973 (after the steep rise in oil prices) and lasted until 1975 was the worst the United States had experienced since the depression. Architecture, which so closely depends on the volume of construction, seemed particularly threatened. Housing

starts fell from over 2 million per year to 1.34 million in 1974. In January 1973, the Nixon administration suspended all federal subsidies to housing; and while the full impact was not felt until 1976–78, the moratorium stopped $12 billion in appropriated funds from flowing.^[46] The crisis in construction ended toward the end of the decade, thanks to the spectacular recovery of the private sector.

I will review first the politics of urban investment, as the primary context for the public practice of architecture, and then turn to the extraordinary real estate boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Finally, I will sketch some speculative connections between background factors and the reception of architecture, taking gentrification as my empirical stepping stone.

The cities of the Northeast and Midwest bore the brunt of the long recession (as also during the shorter one of 1969–70) in terms of job, population, and income loss. They also paid a heavy price under Nixon's "New Federalism." The federal government's retreat from direct subsidies to the cities did not actually take effect until the late 1970s, but its tendency to withdraw from urban spending was clear in Nixon's reversal of the Great Society programs. Policies like general revenue sharing, new employment and training programs, and the Community Development Block Grants (which replaced the Model Cities program in 1974) engaged the older and largely Democratic cities in keen and uneven competition for federal funds with both Southern and Southwestern cities and smaller towns.^[47]

Experts disagree on the exact contribution of federal policy shifts and urban strife to the economic decline of the older urban areas in the 1970s. But there is little doubt about the fact of decline or the effects of the shift on urban capital programs. In the "stagflation" of the 1970s, major cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia hovered on the edge of bankruptcy. Big city mayors faced growing social expenditures, a heavy burden of tax-supported general obligation debt, and the impossibility of increasing local taxes without provoking more middle-class flight—all this against growing federal indifference to their endemic fiscal crisis. The response of most city governments was "to refocus the city's activities on economic growth rather than on social programs."^[48] It is instructive to consider how they went about it.

For cities strapped by their stagnating or declining tax base, the first priority was to reconstruct it. But city governments have no effective means of reversing regional or national economic trends. Unable for a long time to hold on to industrial jobs, the governments of older cities were compelled to go with the postindustrial shift. The first part of their strategy was to keep and attract businesses and middle-class people downtown. Richard

Hill has described the "corporate center" strategy for Detroit (where it has failed):

Overall investment priorities are to transform this aging industrial city into . . . a financial, administrative and professional services center for auto and related industries; a research and development site for new growth industries . . . [with] an emphasis upon recommercialization rather than reindustrialization; and an orientation toward luxury consumption that is appealing to young corporate managers, educated professionals, convention goers and the tourist trade.^[49]

Cities engaged in this path to recovery with different physical, social, cultural, and economic endowments. Yet, regardless of how these affected the outcome, adopting the same strategy was bound to increase competition among cities at all levels of the hierarchical urban system. And while downtown projects are more visible and therefore more significant for both politicians and architects, their importance should not be exaggerated. The silent second part of the strategy was to continue creating for capital—and also for people—the city-wide infrastructures that they required.^[50]

The fiscal situation forced many cities into another form of competition as well. In the late 1970s, it had become compulsory for most U.S. cities to find sources of financing other than tax appropriations or tax-supported bonds for any project—neighborhood, downtown, or city-wide. The federal government was always the cities' first resort, but, as Washington started to withdraw from direct financing, urban administrations increasingly turned to the capital market for funds. Both Carter and Reagan promoted public–private ventures enthusiastically, offering them financial complements through Urban Development Action Grants. The market's demands for a stable return on investments, combined with the often dismal record of recent urban renewal projects, subjected the new municipal ventures to the imperative of efficiency. To pay for themselves, they would have to be built with minimum delay and managed efficiently. In general, this meant two things: turning over the new undertakings (with tax abatements and cheap credit) to the private sector; and slowly doing away with the concessions to low-income housing (if any had been won), to preserve the new projects for financial and service centers and for an upper middle-class residential clientele.^[51]

In "public" ventures, competition for funds in the capital market pushed the cities to establish special authorities and quasi-public corporations at the same time that city managers increasingly relied on off-budget financial techniques for the public part of the deal. The resulting autonomy from the budgetary authority of elected officials encouraged appointed technocrats or city mayors to act as real entrepreneurs in their dealings with

private developers.^[52] The centralization of decision making in the hands of special-purpose authorities and a financial elite may have improved economic and commercial efficiency, but it also increased the opportunities for corruption and "sweetheart deals" with the private sector. Moreover, as Adams notes in her Philadelphia study, independent special-purpose authorities centralized decision making but fostered fragmentation, making it much harder to devise and coordinate an overall strategy for urban redevelopment.

With this background, the question of direct concern to us is what the private sector and the privatized public agencies wanted to have built. City authorities could not afford a repeat of urban renewal and much less the near insurrection it often had fired. The competition among cities, few of which could pursue much else than the same floundering "postindustrial" strategies, meant that downtown projects would be chosen in largely similar ways. A very sympathetic study of the new forms of urban redevelopment sums up the municipal acquisitions of the 1970s and early 1980s: "By now most cities have the basic equipment to attract development: a new office district, good hotels and restaurants, a shopping mall, a convention center, a historic neighborhood or two . They have projects that keep downtown competitive as a place for business, as well as ornaments that make it enjoyable for the public ."^[53]

It is important to note the mystifying use of the concept "public" next to a list of mostly private facilities. Architectural receipts from public and institutional clients declined substantially in the 1970s, proportionally less, however, than the increase in receipts from commercial work.^[54] The urban projects of this period, primed with public funds and based on public land, accelerated the privatization of public space. To the cheers of city authorities, new forms of hybrid "private public space" appeared in the postindustrial city: "Routinely . . . public areas, paid for with private funds, furnish private redevelopment projects with the amenities necessary to maximize profits. In other cases, city regulations require corporations, in exchange for increased density allowances, to build privately owned atriums or plazas. The resulting locations are designated 'public spaces.'"^[55] Within the new "postindustrial" projects, "the public" ideally consists of those who can pay their way.

The competition among cities to each build its own "architectural spectacle" has had obvious implications for architectural practice. An exhaustive study of downtown shopping malls emphasizes the role of developers with a long record of suburban success, who knew, in other words, what was needed to attract the broad middle-class market. City authorities had their

sights focused on the same target and a say in the design process through their representatives on the negotiating team. Both commercial and city voices—the latter representing its own notions of a middle-class paying or spending public—rejected the barrenness and the single function of urban renewal modernism. Downtown malls sought instead to create mixed uses, variety, spaces packed with activity, and the theatrical excitement needed to compensate for the persistent weakness of retail demand in central cities. Commercial projects served symbolic political functions as well.

David Harvey shows how deliberate was Baltimore's attempt to erase the memory of the riots of 1968 and overcome middle-class fears of downtown with an urban icon. Starting in 1970 with the City Fair, Baltimore had acquired by 1980 an aquarium, a convention center, a marina, hotels, and the incredibly successful Harbor Place—a shopping mall developed by James Rouse, the pioneer of large-scale renovation in a Northeastern city (Boston's Faneuil Hall and Quincy markets, open in 1976). In Harvey's words, "an architecture of spectacle, with its sense of surface glitter and transitory participatory pleasure, of display and ephemerality, of jouissance , became essential to the success of a project of this sort."^[56] Yet, the precondition of downtown middle-class jouissance is the guarantee that crime, poverty, and decay shall be safely banned from the private public spaces where the permanent spectacle goes on. If structures must satisfy the same basic requirements of enclosure and safe access, surface is the only thing that can change. The pressure on cities to carry these projects out and make them work meant that the successes, real or apparent, would be rapidly imitated.

For all the efforts to differentiate the product with novel and exciting inventions, the commercial projects' programs and budgets inevitably tend toward a new conformity that does not always attain James Rouse's "commercialism with artistic flair" nor follow his choice of excellent designers (like Benjamin Thompson in Boston or Frank Gehry in Santa Monica). Architecture engaged in the privatization of public space is most often held to standard structures and, paradoxically, to standard amenities and standard frills as well.

In addition to shopping centers, another typical downtown project was the hotel, for which the architect-developer John Portman set the trend in the 1967 Atlanta Peachtree Center. Its enormous atrium, "free-standing" glass elevators, fountains, cafés, and internal vegetation have earned for Portman's prototype the nickname "Jesus Christ Hotel" (because dazzled first-time visitors gasp "Je-sus Chee-rist!"). It was repeated and imitated by the dozen in the hotel boom of the 1960s and 1970s, notably in Port-

man's own Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles and Renaissance Center in Detroit.^[57]

Just as ambitious architects had learned to work with government in the 1930s and with community activists in the early 1970s, they learned to work with the developers and the "public–private" ventures of the 1970s and 1980s. The effects of this collaboration were superimposed upon the reevaluation of modernism in which the profession had been autonomously engaged since the 1960s. The commercial need for "product differentiation" and the competition among cities to create a sense of their own uniqueness were thus perfectly attuned with the evolution of architectural discourse.

From the mid-1960s on, design theorists had been reducing the radical innovations of modernism to just another voice in what Jameson aptly calls "the imaginary museum of a now global culture." As he says, "the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past," the clever mobilization of nostalgia, the inventiveness of pastiche, and the cinematic techniques of collage and fragmentation (which architects felt increasingly free to use) promoted the role of design in the competitive phase of "postindustrial" urban development.^[58] Together or separately, city governments and developers learned to exploit the old mechanism of architectural competitions to find monumental and "original" designs for projects always touted as unique yet ultimately much alike in their uses and looks after being built.

The point I want to stress is that structural forces converged with the internal evolution of architectural discourse to revaluate the symbolic dimensions of urbanism and architecture. As the manufacturing industries abandoned the cities with the effects that we have seen, hard-pressed city managers, hard-headed businessmen, and architects in retreat from modernism discovered that the production of ever-renewed and ever-diversified images and meanings is a constitutive dimension of postindustrial economic activity. The production of images and meanings is not restricted to the obvious and crucial fields of information, education, advertising, and the media in the postindustrial economy. Commodities (among them buildings), valued more for what they mean in terms of status than for their actual use, are the lifeblood of late capitalist commerce.

As meanings and images themselves became the objects of production, architectural designers found new demand for their work, though often not for the reasons they would have preferred. With the government's welfare functions in retreat and the seedy (or just the poor) downtown quarters erased by redevelopment and gentrification, a population of marginal and evicted citizens has become the generic "homeless," haunting the new

private public spaces as the very present ghost of needs not served. Their daily struggle with private guards and municipal authorities is about the classification and the use of urban spaces: As city after city strives to enforce the rule that stations (or parks, or shopping malls) are not for sleeping, they disclose the real social functions of "public" architecture and tight zoning principles.^[59]

Architecture and the Private Sector in the Age of Laissez-Faire

For all the significance of spectacle in unique downtown projects, the boom in office building of the 1970s and early 1980s was a much more important source of large-scale work. New York's predominance in the office building market began to be challenged in the 1960s, an indication that economic restructuring was extending to the whole country: While the thirty largest metropolitan areas doubled the volume of new office space of the 1950s (and again, in the 1970s, increased the volume of the 1960s by 150 percent), New York's share declined from one-half to one-third of the total. Then, as Frieden and Sagalyn report, "a construction boom without parallel produced more downtown office space from 1980 to 1984 than during the entire decade of the 1970s. From 1960 through 1984, 1,325 office buildings were built or started in the downtowns of the thirty largest urban areas, supplying almost 550 million square feet of floor space—the equivalent of 250 new Empire State Buildings."^[60]

For the noted expert Anthony Downs, what happened in real estate capital markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s amounted to a "revolution." Two interrelated outcomes of this revolution had direct effects on what was built: The first was the retreat from the social priority assigned to financing homeownership since the New Deal; the second was a tendency toward chronic (as against merely cyclical) overbuilding in nonresidential commercial real estate.^[61] The partial deregulation of the thrift industry (which Downs stresses) influenced both outcomes through its effects on capital markets; but the effects of federal tax policy were more direct and at least equal in importance. From 1981 to 1986 in particular, the depreciation allowances of Reagan's Economic Recovery Act helped create the flurry of office construction in the 1980s.^[62] Let us briefly outline Downs's technical argument.

Inflation had made it impossible to continue operating the thrifts on the traditional principle—long-term mortgage loans at fixed rates and short-term borrowing through saving deposits. From 1979 to 1982, successive deregulations allowed the thrifts to compete on the financial markets,

diversify their rates, and enter businesses other than mortgage lending while still enjoying the advantage of federal insurance on deposits. After the savings and loans catastrophe of the late 1980s, it hardly needs repeating that when interest rates rose, many thrifts financed riskier and riskier real estate projects in an attempt to recoup their losses.

On the one hand, deregulation eliminated the sheltered position that housing had enjoyed in the credit markets. On the other hand, it induced competition, which led to higher interest rates and less affordable housing. Another crucial contingency was the combination of large fiscal deficits under President Reagan with the Federal Reserve's anti-inflationary monetary policies. Both nominal and real interest rates reached much higher levels in the 1980s than in any of the three preceding decades. However, as a consequence of capital markets' great uncertainty about inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, and security prices, financial capital still flooded real estate markets in 1983–84.

Downs links the "real estate bias of capital markets" to tax policy and to the socialization of risk offered by federal deposit insurance. To this I must add the extremely generous depreciation and interest-payment deductions allowed by the 1981 tax reform. According to Downs, the favored financial institutions that invest in real estate shift from residential to nonresidential property when they expect inflation: They insist on acquiring equity in the properties they finance, which is something that homeowners normally refuse. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the financial community was looking for protection against inflation and a share of future capital gains. Therefore, thrifts and banks joined the new real estate syndicates in their search for nonresidential property in which to invest. A further enticement in many large cities was the rapid rise in nonresidential rents of the late 1970s, owing both to inflationary construction costs and shortages of space.

After the short recession of 1982, a second boom in nonresidential construction followed that of 1978–81, even though the thirty-one largest metropolitan areas "showed a continuous rise in vacancy rates from under 5.0 percent in early 1981 to 15.3 in early 1985. Downtown office vacancy exceeded 10 percent throughout 1983, the same year in which commercial mortgages (in 1972 dollars) increased by 48 percent more than their highest previous annual gain."^[63] The excess of capital in the real estate markets continued to favor new construction, which allows much higher depreciation rates than the purchase of old buildings.

At the same time, however, the high cost of money directed smaller developers toward the less expensive renovation of older structures. Helped in some cases by tax credits for historic preservation, they attempted to capi-

talize on the increasingly high residential rents of some cities, spurring on the phenomenon of gentrification, to which I will return.

Overbuilding of commercial property and the need to compete for tenants in nonresidential buildings encourage a desire for "product differentiation" that has implications for architecture. While location is still the primary factor in real estate price, good design represents a differential advantage both in leasing and in resale. Indirectly, the trend had been highlighted by the corporations that in the 1970s started adopting new and striking forms or surprising historicist styles for their headquarters. For the corporations, it was a matter of acquiring not only space but a symbolic presence to use as advertisement. One of Equitable Life's vice presidents gives a true "postindustrial" reason for high prestige architectural packaging: "You don't sell financial services the way you sell soda pop. You have to feel this is a sound financial institution. I don't know if a tall, big building is a subtle way to establish the reputation of a financial institution, but you don't do it through billboards."^[64]

Developers were quick to exploit the notion. Gerald Hines, the developer who went from Johnson and Burgee's Pennzoil building in Houston to a nationwide reputation as patron of architectural celebrities, explains:

I discovered that extra quality in buildings would make our product stand out; we found if we had a product that was differentiated, we had a chance of getting a better class of client. . . . The fact that Pennzoil was two buildings didn't scare us. . . . In fact, having the two buildings represented a lower leasing risk: it enabled us to secure a second major tenant, which reduced our exposure—the name of the game in the development business.^[65]

As New York's Citicorp discovered, after keeping about 100,000 square feet for itself in Hugh Stubbins's striking towers, it got premium rents for the rest. The reasons had to do not only with the systematic use of design for product differentiation but with aggressive marketing techniques.^[66] While looks distinguish a building among a plethora of neighboring others, the architect's name and reputation, if appropriately publicized, can become an increasingly important asset. In the marketing of redundant office space, an international reputation becomes one more difference that the public relations department can put to good use. One result is to intensify the "media" element of high-level architectural careers.

Vincent Scully has bitterly observed of the astounding urban boom of the 1980s: "Office buildings are intrinsically less interesting and lively than almost any other kind of building, than houses, farms, or factories, for example, and much less complicated and dense in meaning than temples, or cathedrals or even city halls. . . . Never before in human history have

cities been dominated by forms growing out of a program so fundamentally inane. "^[67] The other side of downtown office building, as Scully crisply notes, is the suburban house.

We have seen that financial deregulation and high interest rates made housing less affordable after 1974, especially in regional markets like California, where speculation had run rampant. The price of housing relative to income became especially onerous for people who bought homes after 1979 and for first-time home buyers. However, it is not inconceivable that the events of the 1970s and early 1980s had a positive effect for the "boutique" practice of residential architecture.

Downs points out that homeowners benefited greatly throughout the 1970s from two things: First, rapid inflation diminished the burden of long-term fixed-rate mortgages on their incomes; second, they made great profits from their equity by selling at much higher prices than they had paid. Millions of households were thus able to make down payments on more expensive homes than those they sold, a favorable factor for architecture's ability to attract potential clientele.^[68] Furthermore, the relative advantages of people who buy or upgrade their homes continued growing during the Reagan years. While the household incomes of American families had become more equal from 1948 to 1969, growing inequality seeped in gradually from 1969 to 1978, accelerated rapidly from there to 1982, and has stabilized since at high levels. This inequality concentrates disposable income in the hands of the rich, who are more likely to spend it on luxuries such as second homes and architects' designs.

The substantial increase in real disposable income per capita under Reagan concealed two main forms of inequality: (1) the growing distance between the higher fifth of the income distribution class and the fifth immediately below and (2) the increasing polarization between the rich and the poor. The richest fifth of households became richer (partly due to Reagan's tax abatements), the middle class shrank, and the poor became poorer while also losing much in terms of social programs. Household income continued to be supported by the massive entry of women into the labor market. Yet, on aggregate, the advantage of dual-income households was offset by the crushing disadvantage of single-female heads of household.^[69]

In some cities (for instance, Montreal), female single parents of modest means have been able to buy homes for the first time in central working-class areas, remaining close to their jobs and to services. This has not been the norm in the United States: Here, central working-class areas are characterized by gentrification, a trend that tends to be linked to the growth of

the urban professional and managerial strata. In the United States, dual-income households have been much better able than female-headed households to take advantage of the "rent gap"—the difference between actual and potential real estate prices that location and amenities produce in some older residential or industrial neighborhoods.^[70]

Gentrification As a New Class Activity

Neither the corporate services that support the large firms nor the "third sector" (made up of government and nonprofit organizations in education, health, social services, and cultural activities) can flee or have fled the cities. Even as the population of older urban areas contracted during the 1960s, service employment expanded.

"Service" denotes a large and heterogeneous sector polarized between the top and bottom tiers of income distribution. "Professional, managerial, technical, and kindred" workers, whose entry into careers and class position depends primarily on higher education credentials, cluster at the top. The bottom tier provides "dead end," low-paying, nonunion jobs to the largely nonwhite, young, female, and often part-time population that pushes the brooms, runs the errands, tends the copying machines, serves the food, and supplies personal services to the upper tier.

The increase of the professional and managerial categories and the related decrease of working-class positions have been continuous in the last decades.^[71] A 1982 study, expecting stagnation in the economy and in state employment, had predicted a slowdown, perhaps a reversal, in the proportional increase of managerial, supervisory, and expert classes. Yet the 1987 follow-up showed the opposite: The growth rate of the managerial class within economic sectors, far from slowing down between 1970 and 1980, had increased from 5.9 percent of the total work force to 11.7 percent; for experts, the rate had gone from 7.8 percent to 9.2 percent; while the class of supervisors was still growing at a steady annual rate of 5 percent. In the census years 1960, 1970, and 1980, the proportion of managers was 14.8, 16.3, and 18.4 percent respectively; that of supervisors, 11.5, 12.4, and 13.2 percent; and that of experts, 5.6, 7.4, and 8.6 percent. "Managerial class positions" had expanded in all sectors except the extractive one. In the 1970s as in the 1960s, professional and state services accounted for most of the expansion in the managerial and expert categories.^[72]

The acceleration in the growth of managerial and professional classes during the 1970s corresponds to the entry of the baby boom generation into the labor force. The number of persons between twenty-five and

thirty-four years of age increased almost by 50 percent in that decade: Twelve million young adults, comparatively better educated and better traveled than ever before in history, presumably took many of the managerial and professional jobs that were opening at a fast rate.^[73] Many of these jobs were in architecture and design. While the proportion of architects in the labor force remains very small, their numbers increased during the 1960–80 period much faster than those of other professional groups. Architecture is a professional producer service, the fastest-growing category among the services.^[74]

The majority of educated and affluent baby boomers still lived in the suburbs. Yet those who chose the city created not only the "yuppie" stereotype but also new patterns of consumption and entertainment that attracted sophisticated suburbanites. In particular, they provided large contingents to the ranks of middle-class "gentrifiers."

Research shows some common characteristics of the latter: They have college degrees, professional, managerial, or technical jobs, and incomes above the city median and especially above that of the neighborhoods into which they move. They concentrate in the age groups between twenty and forty, most are white, their households are small, and they have few if any children; couples can be married or unmarried, heterosexual or, frequently, gay; the majority do not come from the suburbs. They add their hard work—their "sweat equity"—to a relatively modest initial investment, and they expect to be rewarded as real estate appreciates, sometimes very rapidly, in their neighborhoods.

Needless to say, gentrifying neighborhoods invite speculation. But while developers' "revitalization" is associated with wholesale evictions and the direct displacement of the previous residents, gentrification by homeowners proceeds more subtly. As property values rise, the city reassesses them and raises real property taxes, sometimes rapidly and by a large amount. In the word of one researcher, "long-term residents living on low and fixed incomes eventually become asset rich and income poor." Their inability to keep up with rising taxes makes them vulnerable to indirect displacement.^[75]

Economics is not, however, the only important factor: The conflict of "life-styles" in the neighborhood is also significant. As anyone who has seen gentrification can tell, the clash between people who drink beer on their stoops and those who sip white wine in their backyards, between Irish taverns and bars overrun with ferns, between old-time merchants and the newcomers' French cheese, between aluminum siding and restored Victoriana is not a trifling matter but one overloaded with resentment and with indigenous people's justifiable feelings of dispossession.

Indeed, if gentrification was only a matter of rational economic choice, it would have direct but limited relevance for architecture. There is partial evidence that a majority of architects not only live in large cities but prefer to do so. With their urban jobs and limited incomes, with their construction know-how and their design expertise, architects themselves are gentrifiers of choice. Moreover, small practitioners and especially architects who start to work on their own get most of their commissions from referrals—the latter, in particular, from friends, relatives, and a circle of acquaintances. Judith Blau's systematic study of New York City firms established that renovation work had become a primary source of income for many small firms trying to survive the crisis of 1974–79.^[76]

Yet the remodeling of old homes and the transformation of old storefronts into trendy boutiques can hardly constitute an architectural change. They represent, at best, a special niche in the segmented market for architectural services, although one in which architects face the strong competition of builders and small contractors. Gentrification is much more significant as an indicator of the complex shift of perceptions, cognitions, and tastes that constitute the inchoate base of postmodern culture.

For the postmodern sensitivity, history is buried under a thick layer of images and simulacra that mimic an impossible recovery of the past. Synchrony, the simultaneous and ephemeral presence of events in space, eclipses temporality. Or, as David Harvey argues, "fiction, fragmentation, collage and eclecticism, . . . suffused with a sense of ephemerality and chaos" are perhaps the only possible cultural responses to the enormous compression of time and space effected by the global marketplace of objects, images, and ideas.^[77] A multiple self, one that makes itself over with each mask it takes, cannot engender the unitary expressive style that modernism searched for.

We may wonder what this has to do with the carefully repainted facades and restored interiors of gentrified homes, with the countless hours spent exposing brick and sanding beams, with the conversion of industrial loft buildings, occupied until yesterday by small manufacturers, into "archeological finds." Michael Jager has observed that the gentrifiers in a Victorian neighborhood of Melbourne applied the Protestant ethic of hard work to the project of reclaiming nineteenth-century homes and borrowing status from their grandeur. They copied the Victorian middle-class's imitation of the higher bourgeoisie, but not cheaply: Their "sweat equity" gave them moral justification.^[78] Cleanliness and orderliness are close to godliness in the bourgeois gospel: gentrification, returning things to their pristine original form through hard work, embodies all these moral virtues.

The gentrifiers' often exaggerated respect for authenticity is more than

just an attempt to restore the "aura" of the original object. It is also a search, a way of building equity in a past in which much of the "new class" has no roots. Gentrification thus corresponds to a special kind of nostalgia for the past, a moralistic attempt to appropriate it through an active form of consumption. An often compulsive concern with spatial and physical reordering is a morally justifiable form of denying what has happened and what is happening to decayed old neighborhoods. The ideology of positive environmentalism, with which I started this chapter, meets the ideology of art in an ordered environment where disalienated objects (beautiful, creatively preserved or put together) are taken as signs of a conquest over an alienated social life.

The concern with order that finds powerful expression in design may also be seen as an attempt to stave off the postmodern sense of cultural chaos. The insecurity inherent in advancement through hierarchical organizations, the uncertain fit between graduate credentials and the job one is really expected to do, the ephemeral nature of symbol manipulation, the fragility of purely symbolic capital—all these characteristics of the positions of the "new class" should make its members sensitive to cultural disorder. The new class unconsciously absorbs a sense of fragility in the chaotic daily rounds of electronically mediated "postindustrial" work and jarring, disintegrated urban experiences. In the same ways that buildings offer identities to "postindustrial" conglomerates, the past can be a therapeutic illusion for their employees. Both things readily lend themselves to commercial exploitation.

A fine study by Sharon Zukin analyzes both the spontaneous and the manipulated aspects of gentrification.^[79] From the late 1960s on, multiple grass roots initiatives, contingent successes, and conflicts among tenants, landlords, and developers transformed the industrial lofts of lower Manhattan into prized studios and expensive housing. In the process, New York's official center for contemporary art moved from Midtown to SoHo.

Zukin shows that a convergence of structural and cultural forces helped to cause this unexpected development. On the one hand, ongoing disinvestment and restructuring were accelerated by New York's economic and fiscal crisis in 1973–76. The crisis favored promoters of a "postindustrial" strategy in their competition for space with small manufacturers and also increased pressure on the city to find alternative tax bases. On the other hand, the explosive development of the arts and interest in art during the 1960s and 1970s was pivotal. On this convergence, Zukin builds a general hypothesis about the integral role of cultural consumption in the postindustrial mode of capital accumulation.

Artists in search of studio space were, indeed, the first outsiders to enter

a SoHo that had been rapidly losing industrial tenants since the 1950s. In the first phase, city planning authorities accommodated them by rezoning industrial and commercial lofts for artists' use. In succeeding phases, eligibility for loft living was extended from art occupations to those who could give even vague proof of their "commitment to art." As middle-class residents with a taste for the "loft life-style" moved into SoHo, developers were quick to grasp that the presence of artists was an asset for real estate valorization. The unplanned success of SoHo led to deliberate speculative moves into Tribeca and, in the late 1970s and 1980s, to the totally planned construction of Battery Park City.^[80] However, as Zukin ruefully notes, it is inconceivable that "living like an artist" could have appealed to the middle class before World War II.

During the 1960s, the emergence of wider public support for art and historical preservation culminated at state level with the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 and by passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966—each, and especially the latter, backed by a skilled and effective political constituency. Diana Crane reports that "support for the arts by the National Endowment for the Arts . . . increased from $1.8 million in 1966 to $131 million in 1983. Corporate spending increased from $22 million to $436 million. Support by all state governments increased from $2.7 million in 1966 to $25 million in 1983, while foundation support increased from $38 million in 1966 to $349 million in 1982."^[81]

Of the corporate art collections that existed in 1980, 76 percent had been founded in the 1960s and 1970s, as had 67 percent of the New York art galleries studied by Crane. When New York grabbed Paris's position as the world's art capital after the war, it also became a center of the art auction market; contemporary American art began to be auctioned and to gain in price in the 1970s; the number of serious art collectors grew into the thousands. One million people declared their occupation as "artists" in the 1980 census, against 600,000 in 1970.

Interest and participation in the arts had been growing since the end of the war in close relation with the rapid growth of college enrollments. Both undergraduate and graduate arts programs kept pace with the development of higher education, demonstrating that "a career in the arts" was becoming at least conceivable for a vast middle-class public. For the lucky artists, teaching provided an alternative source of support at the same time that a booming art market encouraged artistic careers.

The attention of the mass media and the renewed vitality of local art

centers throughout the United States were further evidence that the traditional "high bourgeois" interest in the arts was becoming much wider. The arts and crafts movement of the 1970s, which appears to have been particularly attractive to middle-class women, extended interest in design (as well as some technical know-how) deep into middle-class life-styles. In sum, the 1960s and 1970s made it both possible and almost necessary to integrate aesthetics into production intended for middle-class consumption. Professional artists and specialists in aesthetics had become an integral part of the new "service class."^[82]

In implicit response to these developments, Susan Sontag observed that a new nonliterary culture was both educating and shaping a new sensibility: "The model arts of our time are actually those with much less content [than literature] and a much cooler mode of moral judgment—like music, films, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts—all of which draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment upon science and technology—are the locus of the new sensibility." Closer on the one hand to the style of science, modern art was on the other hand erasing the barrier between "high" and "low" culture. Indeed, the new attitude toward pleasure in art no longer associated it with edification; it would henceforth be possible to enjoy popular art forms without either moralism or condescension.^[83]

If, in Weimar Germany, architects compelled by the political climate had symbolically joined the politicized art avant-gardes, the opposite was happening in the 1960s in America: Professional artists were joining architects in the ranks of a much widened professional-managerial class. Their positions as specialists in aesthetics were sustained by the democratization of interest in the arts and possibly helped by the apolitical, less elitist, and less didactic sensibility detected by Sontag. As more cities turned to the arts for help in their postindustrial conversion, a 1984 study found that the cities with the highest proportion of working artists were also those with the highest rates of downtown gentrification and condominium conversion.^[84]

Gentrification provides an appropriate close for this analysis of the postindustrial matrix of architecture. As a symbol of spatial and physical reordering, gentrification expresses the ambiguities of the professional and managerial class to which architects belong. Disinvestment and restructuring made gentrification possible; the displacement of indigenous residents makes it a cause of social disorder. In the cities of late capitalism, private reordering cannot be disassociated from the dispossession and disruption caused in "other people's" lives. The causal link between gentrification and

homelessness is not as direct and certainly not as massive in its effects as large-scale urban renewal and redevelopment. But at least rhetorically, homelessness appears as the dark side of all forms of urban revitalization.^[85]

It would be a mistake to reduce gentrification, or, for that matter, "commitment to art" and aesthetics, to economic self-interest or to a preoccupation with social distinction. Of course, much of both propels the new sensibility forward. But the postindustrial passage also contains the latent possibility of transcending the narrow utilitarianism, the overriding concern with production, even the blindness to injustice and alienation that characterize industrial capitalism.^[86]

Not much of the positive potential seems close to becoming reality. From the standpoint of the 1990s, there appears to be less political will and fewer known political ways for the actualization of dimly envisioned possibilities. Yet, in the same way that architects do not claim to be artists only to exploit an available opportunity, the taste for ordered and pleasurable urban environments and the appreciation for beautiful objects and good food are not necessarily callous attitudes of conspicuous consumption. Aesthetics and entertainment are basic human needs that deny the subjection of everything to the hegemony of economic logic. Capitalist businessmen understand this well, or else they would not systematically try to make these needs amenable to profit. Neither beauty nor pleasure nor fun are morally objectionable, as the reproving tone of leftist critics often implies; it is the social context in which these needs are affirmed that makes them so difficult to disentangle from other morally obscene effects.

This survey has recorded the appearance of different roles, at different historical moments, in the repertory of the architectural profession in America: service professional, businessman, technocrat, corporate servant, social activist, subaltern consultant to developers, and artist. In the moment of postmodernism, the artistic role was ascendant in at least one important revisionist sector of architectural discourse.

Other sectors of the profession were less theoretically than practically inclined, yet they still took "art" (not efficiency or technology) as predominant legitimation. Postmodern eclectics, indeed, sought to abandon the adversarial aesthetics of modernism extolled by Lionel Trilling for either an aesthetics of everyday life or one of pleasure and entertainment, which could be adapted and revised for commercial use.^[87]

By the 1970s and 1980s, the pitfalls of earlier periods had discredited the technocratic alternative, while the government's retreat from housing helped to further disassemble a public role that has never received much

sustained support in the United States. Still, we shall see that the memory of those alternatives persists in the lore of the profession.

I turn now to the elite architects who played a part in changing the profession's discourse. In the next chapter, the protagonists will guide us, from their local and particular viewpoints, through the ways in which structural change has impinged on the making of architecture.

Chapter Four—
The Perception of Structure:
Firms, Clients, and Career Settings in the Design Elite

Rob Quigley, a much-awarded San Diego architect, remembers that one of his developer clients kept telling him: "Rob, this is not going to win an architectural award, is it? Each time a building of mine got an award, I lost money!" Most clients, indeed, do not seek architectural services for aesthetic reasons. The usual corporate and commercial client seems to think that the artistic part of architecture is dangerous for the control of construction and maintenance costs. As a producer service, architecture is expected to contain costs by rationalizing construction. Much of this service is provided by firms experienced in proven, routine solutions or "in house" by architects who work within large engineering or construction firms or for the largest residential developers. That is not where new ideas come from, however.

In the saturated field of real estate investment, the new patterns of upper middle-class consumption have made commercial clients aware of the potential of architecture for differentiating and marketing their product. The developer Gerald Hines states it candidly: "The basic intention is to establish an identity for the building which is individualistic, that makes the tenants say, 'that's my building, and I'm proud of it.' After all, our buildings are products that have to compete with other products."^[1] The strategic search for "quality," "distinction," and "identity," known to major corporations since before World War II, is relatively new for commercial developers. It directs them to outside architects whose names are recognized (or, more rarely, to rising younger ones), the client's emphasis on

uniqueness matching and encouraging the profession's own postmodern eclecticism.

In an interview with Hines, Peter Eisenman asked how postmodernism's nostalgia for the past fir with the self-image of corporate America; the answer delineates where the choice between style and cutting costs ultimately lies:

The new architecture fits into the mold that corporate America imagines for itself. I think the style is very strong. For example, the Republic Bank Center project for Houston by Johnson/Burgee is a very strong statement. At first we were a little concerned, but it has received an excellent reception from clients. . . . The clients' acceptance of a particular system really leads the trend. If your clients are buying post-modern buildings, your builders are going to build post-modern buildings. But if your customers can buy modernist curtain wall systems at prices lower than post-modern stone buildings, then we are going to see a move back in that direction.^[2]

George Kassabaum, of the very large St. Louis firm Helmut Obata Kassabaum, used to say that there are "clients who want it good" and "clients who want it Wednesday." Consumption patterns and architectural eclecticism seem to have inaugurated a new relationship between large commercial clients and smaller firms with a reputation for innovation, but the new type of client seems to want it all: fancy new ideas, reasonable price, on-time completion, and efficient delivery. The money lenders reinforce the normal tendency of corporate clients toward conservatism, and they also often encourage cost savings at the expense of quality.^[3] If clients do not find it all in one architectural firm, they increasingly tend to split commissions between design architects and production architects (who sometimes work in the client's own architectural department).

Large and knowledgeable clients have fostered specialization and fragmentation in the architectural profession.^[4] "Signature architects" and "idea firms" may be allowed qualified movement, for publicity's sake, across the boundaries of market niches, but this cannot reverse the profession's increasing bifurcation between "a small number of large corporate offices who are assuming control over the largest percentage of architecturally designed work, and the large number of firms small in size, doing small-scale buildings and a proportionately smaller percentage of architecturally designed projects."^[5]

After the demise of modernism, the elite of designers who make architectural discourse is likely to be found in the latter group. Since the mid-1970s, the prize put on novelty has allowed a few talented designers in

middle-sized or even small new firms to take large-scale work from large firms and to outshine those large firms identified with modernism.^[6] This should not be surprising. As Robert Gutman observes, "the small office includes more architects and other technical personnel than it used to. . . . [It is] a bigger small office than it was in the recent past."^[7] But large comprehensive offices cannot be discounted. Whether or not they hire innovative designers, they can satisfy clients, achieve recognition at the official levels of the profession, and, last but not least, obtain conspicuous billings, and they can do these things more easily than small firms can.^[8]

Drawing from experience and extensive research, Weld Coxe's noted group of management consultants proposes three ideal-types of architectural firms:

Strong-idea firms , which are organized to deliver singular expertise or innovation on unique projects. The[ir] project technology . . . flexibly accommodates the nature of any assignment, and often depends on one or a few outstanding experts or "stars" to provide the last word.

Strong-service firms , which are organized to deliver experience and reliability, especially on complex assignments. Their project technology is frequently designed to provide comprehensive services to clients who want to be closely involved in the process.

Strong-delivery firms , which are organized to provide highly efficient service on similar or more routine assignments, often to clients who seek more of a product than a service. The[ir] project technology . . . is designed to repeat previous solutions over and over again with highly reliable technical, cost and schedule compliance.^[9]

Strong-idea firms associate more and more frequently—often on client demand—with firms of the second or the third group. In fact, association is obligatory for highly specialized projects, such as hospitals or laboratories, and for projects out of the designer's own state or abroad. We can safely assume, however, that elite designers will not be found in the third category.

Predictably, the large majority of the architects I interviewed over the period 1988–90 are principals or partners in strong-idea firms of variable size. However, I also interviewed architects known for their design talent and ideas in large strong-service firms.^[10] While Coxe's ideal-types make sense, for the purposes of this analysis they must be complemented by the firms' (and their principals') positions on a different aspect that I call the discursive dimension of architectural practice. Ultimately, it is the recognition granted within the autonomous discourse of the profession that gives architects elite status and lifts them above the level of a small or purely local practice.

Nowadays, an architect's professional recognition is contaminated by the designer's "media celebrity," but its chief expression is still the standing it confers in the circles that follow the profession's discourse. Standing may be local, national, or international; it includes a good measure of client satisfaction, especially for strong-service firms; yet it depends primarily on publications, awards, professional societies, rankings in important design competitions, lectures, nominations to juries in awards programs or elite schools, faculty appointment in a renowned school—in sum, the marks of recognition bestowed by esteemed fellow architects, educators, and architectural critics.

The design elite to which I am referring is therefore not the same as the notorious architectural "star system," although it includes many "stars."^[11] All the architects I interviewed know about the others' work, talk about one another (frequently with malice), and often know each other very well, even if they are located in different areas. Yet, despite these real or invisible networks, we cannot speak of one design elite, for it has many layers and many centers.

Undoubtedly, New York architects and influentials believe that New York is the capital of American architecture as it is that of American art.^[12] With its schools, museums, exhibitions, lectures, critics, foreign visitors, and debates, New York's architectural scene is more "discursively active" than that of any other city in American and perhaps the world. But it would be much too simple to assume that New York's cosmopolitan and intellectual elite co-opts and anoints the architects of regional or local repute.

In terms of what architects build, Chicago and Los Angeles are strong and independent centers in their own right. In San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, San Diego, Santa Fe, Miami, and smaller cities as well, elite designers receive national awards, win national competitions, and build across the nation and abroad. The saying attributed to Antoine Predock of New Mexico—"A regional architect is one who only builds in his own state"—rings true, but it must be corrected by two observations.

First of all, elite reputations are made by and within the medium of architectural discourse. New York influentials have direct access to New York and probably to European critics as well, but in order for these critics to exercise their influence, they need new names to make. The architectural critics of the New York Times , because they need interesting stories, must scout for new talent and interesting work, as also do architectural museums outside New York (such as the reputed Walker Art Center in Minneapolis or the new Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal) and museums and galleries of contemporary art all over the United States.

Vittorio Gregotti, the renowned Italian architect, long associated with CIAM and with the journal Casabella , observes:

The star system is no longer tied to a group, as in the time of CIAM. There no longer is ideological solidarity as there was then. The stars all know and compete with one another. In America, the construction of charismatic personalities gives a much greater authority to the architect, but also a shorter life. What is this life? Finally, it is only the life of the schools. The schools perform the "cooling" operation, transforming the ideas into style and minding the changes of fashion.

Particularly in the United States, the nationwide system of universities with reputed graduate schools of architecture is directly connected to the making of architectural discourse. Through publications, lectures, and teaching in what graduate students in the best schools simply call "the circuit," architects in peripheral locations gain direct access to the discursive field of architecture.

Finally, competitions (especially the international ones) provide another important point of entry to a widely broadcast discourse, for the winners as well as the most noted finalists.^[13] The case of Robert Venturi, for instance, seems more extreme than it is unique. He became world famous after publishing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966 without a single major building to his credit, although he did include several competition entries among the examples of his work. Nowadays, even local architects, helped by their reputations and by direct contacts with clients who operate internationally, not only enter architectural discourse but also achieve international commissions.

The second important observation is that architecture is primarily a local activity. In the United States, the state and local chapters of the American Institute of Architects make sure that national design awards are geographically representative. Thus, publications, exhibitions, and visiting lectures rapidly bring local and regional reputations to the attention of the profession at large. Moreover, except when times are really bad, established design elites may not care too much about work beyond their area. Some of the architects I interviewed have as much work as they need in their state or do not need much because they have chosen to practice a local, craft-oriented kind of architecture. I will explain in conclusion how the discourse of the profession "amplifies" their achievements.

In architecture, as in other fields, the distinction between "locals" and "cosmopolitans" is more a matter of frame of reference than of geography. At present, there are several ways of finding clients, practicing architecture, and becoming part of a design elite because there are many different points of entry into architectural discourse. More important than locale is the

interaction between the clients and the firm, which jointly determine what and where architects build. And professional discourse, almost by definition, transcends locale.

In this chapter, I let the designers describe the settings in which their careers unfold and the changes they deem important in their practice. I start by considering what these men and women have in common: namely, their relationship to the enterprise of building in a firm that is also their means of livelihood. Their different types of careers involve different strategic choices at the outset or at the classic "turning point." Among elite designers, the latter means either starting one's own practice or joining the firm that will allow one's career to develop. In the second section, I examine the beginnings of architectural careers and some of the indigenous concepts by which architects describe both their careers and the lives of their firms.

In this segmented market, certain types of firms tend in principle to go with certain types of clients, but the principle may be transcended by the designer's talent, the firm's reputation, or the client's will. In the third section, the architects discuss some of the factors on which they depend for negotiating and realizing (that is, building) design work: different types of clients, repetitive and unique commissions, the vanishing public client, the skyscraper as a building type. Architects' relations with developers are treated as examples of a special case in the fourth section.

My account of how careers are organized in firms, how the firms find clients, and how architects see clients and commissions centers on the tensions architects perceive and express, often in their own voices. I deal with the clients' side only occasionally. In the last section, I organize these findings into types of design careers, including alternatives to the traditional patterns of the architectural elite.

What Do Elite Architects Have in Common?

All elite designers, like all independent practitioners, are in business , either as small entrepreneurs or as partners in a large firm. Such is the aleatory nature of real estate financing that, even in elite practices, a good client and a good commission are, first and above all, a commission that gets built and a client with the power and the money to build it. "Getting work in" is the lifeblood of the firm. Fred Clarke, Cesar Pelli's managing partner, considers the office, which allows the firm to obtain work, "the space shuttle that gets you to the moon," organized as a buffer that absorbs pressures and liabilities.^[14]

In many elite firms, the division between design and managing partners is meant to insulate the former from the tasks of running the firm and finding clients. Other partnerships are more egalitarian in the distribution of business chores. In any case, the division of tasks cannot be a division of interests: The brilliant design partner can be allowed to forget the business part of the practice but never to ignore it. In the smaller firms, unless they find a way to rationalize management, "running the business" risks becoming a devouring and therefore, at the same time, always sloughed-off part of the designers' work. Architects in precarious practices obviously worry about the effects of this on their careers and on their selves more than architects in established firms; yet, once the office exists, supporting it becomes an important concern and a potential burden for all architects.^[15]

Architecture's dependence on clients whose decisions reflect the larger socioeconomic situation is the major element of contingency in architectural practice. The initial recognition of "real" architectural talent, as opposed to theoretical or symbolic recognition of "paper architecture," depends on clients and on the nature of the commission. Despite the autonomy claimed by its "geniuses," architecture is a structurally heteronomous profession. The client's choice of architects, the visibility of the commission, the project's realization by the construction industry, all involve an element of luck. John Burgee, for example, tells an interesting story about how Philip Johnson and he topped the list for the famous AT&T headquarters building:

They sent out a fairly big questionnaire, asking a lot of very specific questions. I had been talking to a friend of mine at AT&T about the possibilities of someday working with him, and I thought this was just a form that he sent, the kind that you fill out when you've got time. . . . So about two weeks later I got a call from my friend at AT&T and he says: "We had no response." And I said: "Oh, did you want that back in a hurry? I thought it was just for your file." He said "No, it's for our headquarters building. We sent out fifteen or sixteen, whatever they were, we got all fourteen back within three days except yours. . . . Are you going to submit it or not?" So I said "Oh, my God, I'll get down there tomorrow." Not responding to their request . . . that did surprise them, got their attention, somehow.

Many of the architects I interviewed seem more willing to accept the role of luck than that of sponsorship, recommendations, and awards. This may be a way of justifying the irrationality of success in a heteronomous profession, but "luck" also recalls another logic—the charismatic logic of genius—amidst all the rational steps taken to market the firm and insure its success. Here I examine elements of occupational identity that are held

in common by these elite designers, some of which will inevitably reappear in the next chapter, when they explain their visions of architecture and approaches to design.^[16]

It bears repeating that these men and women are all in business, no matter how self-consciously elitist and restricted their practices. Some of them can afford to lose money, but not for too long. Architects lose money, we could say, by extracting their own unpaid labor time: They spend time on work that the client will not pay for while overhead costs keep running. As one elite architect puts it, "the negotiation of the fee is the single most important thing: it gives you the leeway to spend the time. "^[17]

A sole proprietor like Rob Quigley of San Diego can decide to lose money on projects he cares for; large successful firms like Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York lose money in competitions, for which architects never get enough compensation, by diverting paid staff from paying projects; smaller prestigious firms keep going by paying their designers with proximity to the "masters" and interesting work rather than good wages; and most architects engaged in prestigious work need supplementary sources of income, often from academic work.

Elite architects are not exempt from clients' abuse. Gene Kohn, the founder and managing partner of Kohn Pedersen Fox, summed up the essence of "developer stories," which occurred repeatedly in my interviews. In the early stages, Kohn said, developers do not have the financing to build large projects and refuse to pay out of their own pockets; they expect architects to subsidize them with free work. Many, if not most, of the less secure firms accept this demand in hopes of getting the job and seeing the project built.

For practically all these designers, being an architect means first and foremost building, for obvious economic reasons and for equally important ones of self-realization. Few would be bold enough to speak like John Hejduk, a member of the "New York Five" and a very influential architect through his ideas and his role as the dean of the Cooper Union in New York: "I'm in my mid-fifties now and I feel I am just ready to build. . . . What I don't agree with is the emphasis on building rather than architecture . The very thing an architect can do is to affect your psyche and spirit—that's his job. It's simply not enough for him to answer only to the physical. Unfortunately, that's what's been done today. We have builders, not architects."^[18] Talented designers seldom take their talent, or their ambition, lightly. Peter Eisenman, for instance, explains that he left his "power position" as director of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Affairs in New York because he was bored with his fifteen years as an intellectual impre-

sario. Twice he connected the turn to practice with the personal transformation of psychoanalysis and divorce. And Charles Gwathmey, like many students who passed through Yale's graduate program when Paul Rudolph was there, sees his mentor as almost determining his personal choice. "Rudolph was like a sort of principal in an office full of talented people, himself a strong, a major architectural force who was aggressively building buildings. . . . I never could work for anybody. I always had the idea I would have to work by myself, and I was a victim of Rudolph's 'you-got-to-build-immediately' ethic."

If building is importantly connected to the architect's self, not building or building trifling things can be costly. Denise Scott Brown is eloquent about what this meant for Robert Venturi in the 1970s, when their firm seemed to be a permanent "runner up" in all the important projects it attempted to get: "I always said, why would we just do little houses when we have the talent to do more? . . . In Milton's sonnet on his blindness there is a phrase that fits Bob perfectly: 'that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless. . . .' Bob had an ability that he could not use because he didn't have the opportunity."

The respect, even the reverence, with which these designers speak of building and buildings is obviously consonant with a lifetime commitment. Building is the distinct occupational interest that architects pursue, defend, and invoke to justify their choices and assuage their doubts. In order to place building more exactly within the professional ideology, we need to compare the psychological costs of not building important things with the other side of the coin.

Craig Hodgetts, winner of several major awards in the 1970s, once seemed headed for a successful career. He is now by choice on the outskirts of architecture, teaching and doing sundry projects with his architect wife in his eight-person firm. His account of how he started doubting architecture is instructive. Back in 1980, at the first Venice Biennale with an architecture section, Craig was struck by the bitterness of "all his heroes, the most wonderful architects and luminaries." He explains that their cynicism and inner despair result from being involved in the building process:

Here's the client, there's a contractor, there's the legal system, there's the consciousness of the urban situation, and so forth, and the only continuity between all of those is the architect. . . . Everybody is terrified. The risks are enormous. The architect assumes the mantle of all those anxieties and sacrifices whatever his own emotional needs may be in order to husband these projects through. . . . The project's lifespan is five, ten years, something like that. It has no immediacy, it is this strange phenomenon of living in a projected future which is somewhere

else. By the time it is built and open you [as the architect] are . . . numb, kind of past life, and you look at it and think "Gee, I wonder why I did that."

Furthermore, for this reluctant and reflective architect, architecture as it has been defined since the Renaissance is not and was probably never worth it. It only seems so important because it is so expensive: "Why should it matter what it looks? Just because it cost x million dollars? . . . There is a kind of merchandising alliance right now because the architect is called upon to magnify the importance of his client, and that of course is not a reasonable role in society today; it is not a healthy role."

Designing buildings is the livelihood of all architects. After a design is done, a long and difficult process results in a finished building that represents the culmination of the architects' work. But the building can also symbolize the frustration of the architects' intentions. Artist-architects tend to see building as something more. Thom Mayne, for one, talks about it in a clearly romantic key, as the objectification of a search. Its aim is "producing places that are appropriate for our time. And I am not interested in defining those. My explanation is in the work, and . . . I have said it all when the work is done. There's really nothing left for me to say except this is a bedroom and this is a living room—stuff I am not even interested in."

Building, then, is the central self-expressive activity; it is what distinguishes "real" architects from "paper" architects; it is where architecture can show itself to be an art. And yet, of course, building is service, the embodiment of architects' dependence on clients and their programs. The contradiction should no longer surprise: In this occupation, building is the specific and preeminent interest created in its members, but it also is the mystified mainstay of its ideology.

In reality, architects do not build anything; at best, they supervise those who do. Historically, the art of design is founded on the separation of conception from construction and on the architect's appropriation of the former. In conceiving a design that is to be built, the architect must confront (and if possible surmount) the basic heteronomy of design work. "Building," as the sign of the true architect and the foremost expression of creative autonomy, is a mystification. It is meant to hide that which it inherently represents: the architect's dependence on both the patron and the real executants.

I turn now to the different ways in which architects transact the difficulties of finding "buildings to build." I begin with basic differences among firms, for the firm is both the organization that supports (or hinders) an architect's career and the first materialization of his or her ambition.

Getting Started and Going on

For elite designers, as for other architects, a decisive choice is whether to seek employment in an already existing office and stay there or to strike out on their own (and, if so, when and with whom, since only six of the twenty-nine designers I interviewed were sole principals). From this point of view, the most basic distinction among firms is whether, having been founded by the principal or by partners, they represent entrepreneurial ventures or not. If the firm was founded by its present principals, the career of the elite designer is parallel to that of the firm and synonymous with getting it started, going, and well known. In a firm that the elite designer joins as a hired employee (no matter at what level), the identification of career and firm is in principle not as close.

Unless entry is at the partner level, the designer's career in an extant architectural firm revolves around classic organizational questions—openings "at the top," the time it takes to get to them, and the compatibility of one's professional goals with those of the firm. There are, of course, contingencies; being a talented woman when the firm needs to show openness may be one. Because of their size and security, large firms can offer better and stabler employment as well as longer career lines. Gene Kohn emphasizes, as do other large-firm principals, the policy of giving every carefully screened employee the opportunity to work in all areas, "from feasibility to design to detailing to production to supervision," but here too luck plays a part: "Some . . . happen to be in the right project at the right time; it goes ahead and they get to stay with it. Or we are very very busy and, suddenly, something comes in and one of the young people who is asked to study it does a great job and gets discovered."

At SOM-Chicago, young designers come up through the ranks as project managers and heads of studios (a concept started by Bruce Graham in 1972, the studio is a team that stays together and executes several projects, almost like a small office). What count here are the usual career assets in organizations—showing leadership, getting along, and being placed on the fast track by a senior executive. But bringing in clients of one's own (because of an impressive reputation, through well-cultivated contacts in the community, or, rarely, because of previous professional contacts) is quoted repeatedly as an obvious and almost determinant factor. In large firms that are interested in creating a reputation for design, the awards and the professional standing of talented designers can help their advancement to partnership.

Practically all architects must serve an apprenticeship in someone else's office before registration. None of the elite designers admitted to stealing

clients from their apprenticeship firms (the pattern so feared by law firms); in fact, most reported more precarious beginnings. However, they frequently found their partners in their former employers' firms. Besides acquiring experience of different levels and scope in their previous work-places, they also formed networks of acquaintances and reservoirs of good will, which turned out to be helpful in getting recommended to clients. In fact, the medium-sized entrepreneurial firms of the design elite often seem honor-bound to mentor the former professional employees who get started on their own. Indeed, turnover is expected in firms where there is little room at the top and where the charismatic designers leave few design opportunities to their associates. Yet Michael Graves points to a common experience of beginning architects when he observes that the referrals they get from their former employers, who are their seniors in the profession, tend to be for "work that is not wanted by somebody else, because the job is either insufficient in size or in some way shaky and uncertain."

Entrepreneurial beginnings are modest. Some elite designers started out "drawing in my kitchen," "in a warehouse that belonged to my partner's parents," "in a garage," or "in my apartment"; or, like Graves, they sacrificed a good part of their academic salary to rent an office while waiting for clients. It is usual for architects to moonlight while in the employ of others and not unusual to act as a small developer.

After returning from two years with the Peace Corps in Chile, Rob Quigley's seven months with a very fine San Diego firm gave him an understanding of architectural practice that hardened his resolve to go out on his own:

The kind of attitude in the drafting room was, I think, typical of most offices in the country. "Boy, you know, we could do great work in this firm if we had a great client," or . . . "if it weren't for all those building codes," or . . . "if we just had the budget to do it." Hearing this, day in and day out, I began to believe that you could not do good work unless you had a "patron of the arts" client, and once you start believing that, you are dead . And I escaped, and luckily I got a commission to do a small house, got a commission to do another small house, . . . then I put together a small investment group to do a four-unit, three-story apartment building. I acted as a general contractor because I wanted to learn from the tradesmen. That gave me enough work to go out on my own.

For employed architects, moonlighting includes not only projects too small to support an independent practice but also unpaid work, especially submissions to competitions and award programs. If nothing else, this effort keeps one alive and active in the discursive field of architecture. Placing as a finalist in a significant competition or receiving an important

award (for small-scale work or projects) may act as a trigger for the decision to start an independent practice, provided there is a supplementary source of income. Philip Johnson quips that architects either have to be born wealthy or marry into wealth and then apologizes for this "rich boy's statement"; the fact is that a spouse's income can help entrepreneurial ventures in architecture as in other businesses.^[19]

Three concepts recur in the architects' accounts of their careers: breakthrough, track record, and range. I analyze them in turn, but, first, I briefly describe their interrelations.

Architectural breakthrough refers to a phenomenon that includes the accumulation of symbolic capital—Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the legitimate authority to speak in and for the specific field where one's achievements count—although it cannot quite be measured in the same terms.^[20] Because of this profession's fundamental heteronomy, a breakthrough must necessarily confer authority on the architect in the eyes of the potential clients. After the breakthrough, an architect should ideally go from project to project, accumulating a track record (an ensemble of realized work) without suffering major interruptions. Breakthrough and track record are the fundamental building blocks of orderly careers. Range, however, is different: It refers to architects' efforts to shape their careers with relative autonomy from the market and to escape their specialized niches. By striving for range, architects implicitly resist client pressure to confine them to a limited track record.

As I hinted above, peer recognition provides confirmation of individual or collective ability, but it is seldom enough to bring the breakthrough of which designers speak. Breakthrough is a complex notion. First of all, it is highly retrospective, constructed by looking back from the vantage point of a developed career. In a sense, only an established architect can say "that was my breakthrough," as if that building had created the career that followed.^[21] It is next to impossible to know whether architects recognize breakthroughs when they happen; younger architects assess their achievements cautiously, for reversals of fortune are common and can happen quite easily.

For instance, Julie Eizenberg and her husband, Hank Koning, got a First Design Award from Progressive Architecture in 1987 for two complexes of affordable apartments built in Santa Monica. Their work was reviewed by Paul Goldberger in the New York Times, and the award helped Julie get a teaching job at the University of California, Los Angeles. On the other hand, the Santa Monica Community Corporation, Eizenberg and Koning's client, thinks they have hired them too often and would "like to spread

their work around"; Eizenberg and Koning's next project, a community services center, while big enough to put them "in another league of work," was still only "a hole in the ground" in 1989 and not yet part of their track record. Julie refused to see these considerable achievements as a "real" breakthrough.

Second, the breakthrough is tied to symbolic capital in the field. It is work that brings attention and standing in architecture: It gives the designer "presence," the status of a potential or emergent member in the eyes of the profession's elite. Presence allows strategizing behaviors and political moves in the profession's discursive field. Thus, a man as strategically placed as Michael Graves considers the remarkable project with which he won the competition for the unbuilt Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center in 1977 as a breakthrough because it led directly to the Portland Municipal Services Building, his first major realization. His account of what happened after winning in Fargo-Moorhead with enormous expenditure of time, energy, and money, tells of the anxiousness attending architectural work:

I worked so hard to get the commission, got it, but never built a building. Now, those drawings were published everywhere. They were imaginative. It was really the first postmodern things that were published a lot . . . covers, and so on. That's not what I wanted; I wanted a building! But, from that, I was invited to give a lecture in Portland, so the net continues. . . . The AIA invited me, and Ed Wundram [the Portland competition organizer] sat next to me at dinner after the lecture, and he said: "We've got a competition going out here. . . . What do we have to do to encourage somebody like you to enter?" I said: "Ask!" I mean, "somebody like you!" He thought I was too grand, but, here again, he thought that Fargo would be built. I did too at the time. Even when it looked as though it was very shaky, you continue to think and to say to people "There's every hope that it will be built," though things are not going well, or they didn't raise the money, or they didn't pass the bond issue, or whatever it was, which is all true. Golf courses got 51 percent [of the vote] and the cultural center 40 percent. Then it was dead, but by that time we had Portland.

Professional standing and the attention of sound clients must go together in elite careers. Standing, however, is not the same as position in the field. Having attended an elite school, having met the right people, and having an effective "old boy network" can substitute for the traditional family ties of the "gentleman architect," but with two conditions. First, an architect's mentors in the field must have positions of influence and be willing to use them; second, the protégé's work cannot threaten the mentors' own professional standing. The beginner's work should bring credit to the mentors and reinforce their influence, but it should not take clients from them,

unless they have plenty to spare. Mentoring is self-reproducing: In a competitive and male profession, it tends to exclude women and other outsiders. It also tends to work against dissent, or at least against architectural challenges that cannot be contained within a market niche other than the mentor's own.

The third and most important characteristic of "real" breakthroughs is that they should insure a relatively continuous flow of work. Because clients are the crucial factor in this, breakthroughs must be important enough to elicit not only the attention but also the trust of clients. It is ultimately by the grace of clients' choices that architects constitute their track record, the compendium of experience and recognition that is the prerequisite of important architectural work.

The trajectory of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates illustrates the discrepancy that may arise between a breakthrough in the discursive field of architecture and the track record, which is the first thing a client wants to see. Fame gave a prestigious standing in the field to the Venturi Rauch Scott Brown partnership, nourishing their high expectations. But precisely because their reputation was controversial, they needed to accumulate a substantial track record to neutralize the effects of fame. Therefore, their "real" breakthrough (Wu Hall at Princeton University) took from 1964 to 1978 to come. Denise Scott Brown gives a vivid account of the tyranny of the track record:

They don't trust new young firms, that's the first thing. They don't trust firms who are not well connected in the society, which we weren't. They don't trust firms who . . . can't show buildings, and then they don't trust firms whose work they don't like the looks of. But if everyone else is saying they are marvelous and they have a whole lot of other commissions and they have a strong track record, then you feel reassured about the fact that you think it ugly. . . . Hiring us was a risk. Princeton was the seal of approval that removed the risk element for many clients. Obviously, we still don't get whole categories of clients who are not interested enough. But now we get enough who are .

Real breakthroughs and impressive track records can never eliminate the element of uncertainty from the lives of even the best entrepreneurial design firms. Their principals vividly and repeatedly refer to this uncertainty as the "roller coaster" of architectural practice. In hard times, it does not spare the large corporate firms either.^[22]

Large strong-service firms must be started too, and the time at which they do so is significant. The small partnership of Skidmore Owings Merrill was founded in the late 1930s, when there was practically no architectural work. According to the late Gordon Bunshaft, SOM's success after the war

was facilitated by the disappearance of many rivals (firms identified with the Beaux-Arts approach) in the depression. The building boom and the change in clients' taste completed a constellation of factors favorable to modernism:

We never had to sell modern. They just accepted it. . . . At one meeting we presented partial models for the exterior of Chase [the Chase Manhattan building in New York]. We had made samples of stainless steel and glass and one in aluminum; Owings thought he had to do one in granite. . . . The key man on this board was about ninety. . . . He came into the meeting before anybody, he walked up to me and he said: "What's this?" I said: "That's a granite thing." He said: "Hell, we don't want any granite today, we want a modern building!"

Kohn Pedersen Fox, one of the most visible firms of the 1980s, is a likely challenger to SOM's position as corporate design leader. Its beginnings involve a strategically planned anticipation of clients' desires. The firm started in 1976, in the middle of the recession. Gene Kohn met his partners while all three worked (Kohn as vice president) in John Warnecke's office, a large firm that was rapidly declining because Warnecke wanted neither to share power nor prepare his own succession. Kohn explored the field with the marketing and managerial acumen for which he is famous. He got the ideas of "six or seven key people about what a good firm should provide in terms of service, talent, energy." One of his contacts got him an open line of credit with Chemical Bank, which was exceptional for a new office in 1976; but there was no work to be had, "none, zero."

From July to September 1976, KPF made a breakthrough so remarkable that the bank credit was never used. Crucial to it were the extended contacts created at Warnecke's and a first commission with ABC, the media network, where Kohn and Fox knew two "key vice presidents" and to whom they offered their services for the planned renovation of an old armory. "A good interview and no competition, basically," led over fifteen years to twelve buildings, master plans, and interiors.^[23]

What mattered most to their first clients, according to Kohn, was getting three senior architects present at all the meetings and involved in all the phases of the project. After three years and a dozen buildings (three for ABC), KPF had itself become a marketing tool: A Chicago developer tried to lure ABC to a relatively risky real estate area by retaining its favorite architects. Ultimately, Pedersen produced for the developer, not for ABC, one of his most publicized designs at 333 Wacker Drive: a dark green blade of glass that curves softly along the river front with razor-sharp lines and clean massing. KPF was the first outside firm to penetrate Chicago's jealously guarded architectural preserve in the postwar period.

In sum, KPF owes its meteoric ascent during inauspicious times to Kohn's aggressive and effective marketing of an experienced architectural team distinguished by William Pedersen's brilliant design talent. Kohn says: "People have to like you, and they have to respect your talent; some other third party has to say something nice about you, and, finally, the press has to give its blessing. When those come together, they form a pyramid that points the job." But the editor of Progressive Architecture gives them more credit than that: KPF supports the now customary "contextual" approach to the urban environment by a carefully prepared architectural, social, and economic history of the place. According to John Dixon, this approach is "tremendously persuasive" for a client.

KPF is a large-scale practice with eight partners, two hundred employees, and a hundred more in Conway Associates, its separate interiors branch; at any time in the 1980s, it was working on thirty to forty projects in different stages of development; it has many "repeat" clients; it has projects overseas; it participates at a loss in competitions for different building types. But it has not yet had the breakthrough it so desires in prestigious institutional building. All the public relations, all the talent, all the care in detailing and construction, and all the concern with mobility within the firm seem insufficient to release KPF from the constraints of success within one major building type.

Strong-service firms, therefore, need their breakthroughs as much as the entrepreneurial strong-idea firms. However, there seems to be a sort of trade-off between security and variety in the constitution of the track record: Repeat clients risk locking the firm into a relatively narrow (though immensely profitable) market niche. For the corporate and the entrepreneurial firms, growth has different implications.

Since its take-off at the end of World War II, SOM has built a worldwide reputation of technical competence and excellence in the design of very large buildings for business, government, and large institutions. In the 1980s, it has tried to diversify an approach too closely identified with the modernism of the 1960s, enraging its retired partner Gordon Bunshaft, a fierce gatekeeper of modernism against the postmodern challenge.^[24] Bruce Graham, the powerful senior partner at SOM-Chicago, has recently started to collaborate with elite designers such as Charles Moore, Frank Gehry, Venturi Rauch Scott Brown, and Stanley Tigerman. These designers see this as a welcome attempt by SOM to spruce up its design reputation, an action that might spread large-scale work around. Graham implicitly contrasts the entrepreneurs' "roller coaster" with the stability due to his own firm's size and internal organization, which he sees as requirements for

securing work: "It's harder for them. Frank [Gehry] does not like to have more than twenty-four people, so he can't keep a backlog of things. He can't move those people into the next phase while he gets involved into the next phase. If he had three studios, he would be able to do that better." Gehry might respond with what he told me: "Thirty people is the absolute limit here. We won't hire the thirty-first, so that means we have to choose the jobs, and it is hard." Yet his complaint that corporate clients who are courting him want him "to be SOM" lends indirect support to Graham's diagnosis:

If they come in with a senior vice president in charge of real estate and . . . a junior real estate division manager, they would like the office to have their kind of parts, so that one can meet with that one. . . . It's almost like putting a key in a lock! When they come here, they don't know how they're going to fit. I think the president, the boss, usually can relate to me if I just spend time with them, but the lower levels have trouble with this. . . . They want that fit!

Although size is a sign of success and organizational health, it appears to be a recurrent concern in the growing entrepreneurial elite firm. A corporate architect like Graham implicitly takes size as the counterpart of good organization, but entrepreneurial design principals mention size almost apologetically. They are well aware of the old architecture school notion that one architect cannot supervise more than five others. Their prominence in the field matches in many cases the studio set-up of their offices, run by the master as an old-fashioned atelier. Obviously, the larger the size, the more difficult it is to preserve this atmosphere.

Most strong-idea firms cultivate an informal appearance: renovated lofts; art books and models lying around; the occasional piece of very fine art or the master's own creations (in Gehry's office, his fish-shaped lamp and paper furniture); open drafting rooms never too far from the principal's office. As an example of this last item, Robert Stern's office is one of elegant simplicity carved out of the huge drafting rooms (an oval room with no doors, separated by large arches from a corridor with the loft's glass wall on one side and the entrance hall on the other). The atelier atmosphere, reminiscent of art schools, is one of the nonmaterial rewards for always underpaid professional workers.

Elite entrepreneurial architects often engage in the ideological masking typical of the sellers of symbolic goods. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, "the vendor deceives the customer only insofar as he deceives himself and is sincerely sold on the value of what he sells."^[25] These architects see in large size both a cause and a symptom of the transformation of architecture from "a way of life" into "a means of livelihood." Yet, when the "roller coaster"

is down, it is clear what comes first: Employees are reluctantly but no less relentlessly let go.

Some elite firms admit to having a stable core of partners (not all of whom design), experienced project captains, and technical people, around which revolves a larger professional staff expected to move on after a few years—the justification being that the best people have the ambition to leave in order "to do their own architecture." Yet managing partners of entrepreneurial design firms recognize that they do not provide good technical training to their professional employees. Instead, they depend on preexisting technical competence, acquired by their staff in "firms that do not get published" or in those that do. SOM, in particular, has the reputation of a graduate school in practical construction skills.^[26]

Robert Stern Associates, with one hundred people in its employ, has acceded to the status of large firm, although the looks of Stern's office reveal a reluctance to identify with a straight "corporate" practice. Stern says he is the first to be surprised, since he thought for so long that his teacher Paul Rudolph's "ideal office size"—twenty people—was a lot. He justifies the course he has taken by invoking a modified but "natural" model of career development:

I imagined I would have the kind of career that Rudolph before me had had . . . if you use Rudolph as a model, small houses in Sarasota, and then he got Leslie College and suddenly New Haven parking garages and architecture buildings and then big office complexes for IBM. . . . But setting up practice in 1969 with all hell breaking loose and then a declining economy! . . . When you have a five-hundred-men office and it gets cut back to two hundred, it's one thing, but when you have a three-men office and it gets cut back, it's pretty terrible. . . . I suppose I am getting the kinds of projects I imagined I would have had fifteen years ago, but also large projects for developers. Let's face it, being trained in my generation at a place like Yale, developers were not even imagined as possible clients for a good architect.^[27]

Stanley Tigerman, Stern's friend and former classmate at Yale, has a thirty-person firm in partnership with Margaret McCurry, his wife. Tigerman is convinced that supporting a larger firm than that is "like feeding a big animal": You need to get more and more work to "feed it and feed it and then, what's next? You!"

In sum, size is determined by the uncertainty of architectural practice, and it becomes an important element in the designer's ideology. Tigerman, like Gehry and many architects of the entrepreneurial elite, believes that big firms change the nature of architecture from a profession that believes in good craftmanship and the free play of fantasy into something that is "like going to work for IBM. IBM, SOM, it's the same."

Bruce Graham would dispute that his firm is "like IBM." It has much less regimentation than the New York office had under Gordon Bunshaft, Graham says. His own goal in organizing SOM-Chicago "was to design firms that could build cities [emphasis added], and big pyramidal organizations won't be able to do that because the heirs become assistants and they soon die, the firm dies. . . . You don't build cities in your lifetime, you build them in milleniums." "Building cities" (standing for large-scale planning and even infrastructural design) is, in fact, a practical part of SOM's diversification strategy. But it is also an ideological notion by which Graham implicitly counters the new superiority of the smaller strong-idea firms in designing "beautiful buildings." Other designers of corporate towers mention large-scale architecture as if it were the same as urban design, as if the sheer amount of urban land and sky their buildings cover produced "cities" by accretion. Graham, however, is clear about what he means. He chairs the Chicago Central Area Committee, "the most powerful business group," a position he owes to being both an important executive and an architect. Yet he only mentions the latter, contrasting the real power of Chicago architects with New Yorkers' mere influence. For him, "building cities" is a function of power.

SOM is the very model of a firm closely integrated with the capitalist firms it serves. Its clients, its projects, and its practice are definitely more secure than those of most entrepreneurial architects. It has offices in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, and London. It is a large partnership with internal career lines and a definite policy of not hiring partners from outside. Senior partners can deal as equals with their powerful clients, for the partners are backed by organizations and influence comparable to those of their clients. The organization's internal labor pool takes care of succession, and the continuity of the firm is not a problem; competitiveness is, however. This involves being concerned with "new blood," or new design ideas.^[28]

The next chapter will show that design work at the partner level is not essentially different from that in smaller firms, only better supported by organization and technology. Yet design reputation in large comprehensive firms is a collective attribute. As Gerald Horn of Holabird and Root notes, "in a large firm, it's really the firm that they are hiring; only occasionally they'll name a person."

In architecture, as in the law, sophisticated corporate clients tend to push the firms that provide them with professional services toward the organizational form that they, as clients, find most reliable. The market of services thus comes to consist of distinct niches. Robert Gutman observes:

Each niche or segment is made up of clients with particular needs and architectural offices that attempt to serve these needs. . . . Fragmentation within the profession is a condition that clients help to generate and are probably interested in preserving. Architectural firms also find it to their advantage to preserve the pattern, at least once they have succeeded in understanding it and mastering its implications.^[29]

Yet, as we have seen, architects with design ambitions emphasize peer recognition, breakthrough, and track record, regardless of the type of firm in which they work. Therefore, the organizational distinction between entrepreneurial ventures and large corporate firms (like the overlapping division between strong-idea and strong-service firms) must be corrected. In terms of design, the kind of symbolic capital that each type of firm (and each firm) accumulates makes a difference.

The examples of SOM and KPF suggest that a firm's age connects its symbolic capital to the evolution of architectural design. A firm like SOM is old enough to have built a diversified track record at a time when the relative uniformity of the modernist language helped both the firm and its individual designers pass from one building type to another. After all, museums, libraries, Air Force academies, and office buildings did not have to look all that different. Today, SOM looks to renew itself by opening its design gradient to new, albeit not too audacious, experiments.

The pluralism of styles of the postmodern period seems to tie new service firms with design ambitions more tightly to their track record (namely, the large commercial projects to which every large firm must give primacy for economic reasons). Savvy clients in search of product differentiation "demonstrate time and time again a high degree of openness to new approaches and new faces," as the repeated use of competitions demonstrates.^[30] Regardless of the size or the nature of the project, such clients can push design architects (or strong-idea firms) to work in association with strong-delivery firms, turning for novel ideas to entrepreneurial designers, whose names rest on uniqueness, variety, and innovation.

The Negotiation of Design

Clients are crucial for the economic survival of architectural firms. Furthermore, clients are the ones who ultimately choose architects and architectural styles. Changes in the nature of major architectural clients appear to have coincided with the eclecticism of the postmodern period and reinforced it. Experienced observers such as Weld Coxe and Robert Gutman insist on clients' resourcefulness and on their power to dictate what services

each kind of architect shall be allowed to provide. Yet, as Craig Hodgetts noted earlier in this chapter, the risks of such an expensive enterprise are immense. Organizational clients try to minimize risks by seeking different architectural services in different kinds of market niches. However indirectly, this demonstrates the clients' uncertainty in a period of stylistic disunity and escalating construction costs.

Turning to the elite designers, I let them explain, first, the basic distinction between clients who are able to act as one and clients who act collectively. Second, I examine how the designers see the related, but not equivalent, distinction between "one-of-a-kind" and repeated commissions. Third, their account of the decline in public commissions forms the backdrop for their ambivalent relationship with developers, which I examine last.

Institutional versus Individual Clients

Thinking aloud about "a marketing argument for KPF," Gene Kohn latches onto the logical inconsistencies of market niches: Architects known for their museums must have done one for the first time, and it must have been good, or it would not have led to the second and the third, so why can't he find clients willing to believe that KPF could bring "a fresher approach" to the museum than firms that have done many? Part of the answer lies in the way institutional clients are constituted.

Like other patrons of large-scale architecture, institutional clients tend to be represented by committee, which often projects the organization's own internal conflicts upon its hired experts. Universities, for instance, put together committees of administrators and hierarchically determined "representatives of the users" (professors may be included, and sometimes students, but seldom, if ever, support personnel).

Joan Goody relates how university administrations, particularly the physical plant divisions, tend to "assume [that] the academics don't know anything and [that] they are already fighting with each other." Infighting and the presence of "in house" professional advisers in large organizations produce, as she says, contracts that are "a sort of compendium of all the problems they ever had with every architect they have ever had."

Even in the best of cases, the architect must spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings and presentations to accommodate all the different "heads" of the corporate client.^[31] To smooth the conflicts over, she must be lucky. Joan Goody ruefully suggests that, regardless of her track record, she would do better being a man:

The Frank Lloyd Wrights in their capes and broad-rimmed hats . . . came across as being the Magus. And these strong men (and the clients were men) would allow themselves to be beguiled by men, although this was somehow a female role which represented the artistic "other world." . . . When I come to the 10 percent leap of faith and I say "Trust me, this is the way it will look better, I have done many buildings of this size" . . . they can't quite do it.

Male or female, architects who face committees often cannot tell who is really in charge. Their traditional function of "arbiter of taste" for the ruling class becomes difficult, if not impossible, to perform. This may well prompt the men to rely on charismatic male bonding, as some of them report. Yet the dominant trend points in another direction: Large corporate clients (like universities, businesses, or government) do not deal with their hired architects directly, especially if construction looms large among their activities. The norm is for an expert in architecture and construction (the corporation's own architect or architectural department or a "third party" architectural consultant) to mediate between the client and the designers, much in the way that internal legal departments intercede between corporations and outside law firms. Several elite designers report difficulties in relating to a sometimes timid, sometimes arrogant intermediary who must be treated as an expert but cannot be treated as a colleague.

To many innovative architects, this type of institutional client seems to be structurally averse to risk. Yet it appears that the profession's own post-modern diversity compounds the insecurity and the irreducible variety of the corporate client's taste. Uncertainty, playing upon the costs and the permanence of building, pushes the collective client toward safety or compromise, which means conformity with styles that already exist. But if what is desired is a new image, minimizing risk compels the client to "style" the building superficially—the massing, the facade, the lobbies, the skin—while keeping the invisible routine and the costs down.

The designers I interviewed have too much savvy to believe in a harmonious conception of the "patron."^[32] Yet the niche structure of the market objectively takes the place of an older ideological notion that I call "the match made in heaven." Thus, a sense of preestablished cultural harmony between architects and those who choose them ("They know what we do; they would not come to us otherwise") can still slip unawares into architects' talk. Whatever the scale at which architects work, they have good practical reasons for preferring clients with enough power to make a decision that "sticks." Among the desirable characteristics of the client, taste and artistic discernment thus seem secondary to a ready capacity for decision making, which is more often lodged in individuals than in groups.

Gordon Bunshaft of SOM-New York links the "golden era of American architecture" (the 1950s and 1960s) with the fact that he "never dealt with anybody but the boss of the company." The architect enjoyed an authority parallel to that of the CEO. Bunshaft's nostalgia shows in his account of how SOM dealt with clients in the past (the change of tense from past to present is significant here):

We never show them a design of a building; we show them plans . And perhaps it took us a year to get the plans accepted and all worked out. . . . And when we are all done, we have been studying the outside and the masses, but we never showed it to them. . . . They knew the plan and the building was just the natural outcome of the plan [note the axiom of the Beaux-Arts and the modernist approach that the plan comes first and generates the building]. This is how architecture is done.

Peter Eisenman would probably agree about little with Bunshaft, but he too sees a direct link between the internal stratification of the multiheaded client and the historicist brand of postmodernism, which he, like Bunshaft, detests:

CEOs are the ones who are excited about what I have to say. Middle managers are entirely threatened, because their job is to get things done on time, for cost. They don't give a shit for aesthetics or any ideology. Postmodernism has been really useful for middle management because they don't have to think about anything. They get a comfortable, nonthreatening . . . nonideological, perfect commercial architecture.

Philip Johnson says about the pediment-coiffed AT&T landmark in New York that John deButts, AT&T's chairman, wanted a building to supersede Mies van der Rohe's Seagram:

With the Seagram, Sam Bronfman got too many kudos for doing that different building; deButts wanted to be on the act for his generation. . . . Some people on the board disliked it just on concept, but deButts said "That's not a glass building. I like it." Then so many people hated the top that he got worried and we did lots of other tops. Then he said "I like this top. Any questions?" In other words, it was not a committee decision.

In sum, it is always easier to sell to one person, especially one who has the power to decide. Denise Scott Brown thinks her firm clinched the commission of Wu Hall at Princeton by showing beautiful beach houses, after showing all the campus buildings in their track record. It is a strategy of corporate jet salespeople, she says, to "sell" middle management on efficiency and the president on "raw beauty."

The profession's eclecticism, however, has lodged beauty more than ever in the eye of the beholder. Today, the residual ideology of "the match

made in heaven" is a feeble echo of Gordon Bunshaft's account of a past in which architects, together with the brilliant and powerful men "who became personal friends . . . established the character of a building."

Thus, while a first set of difficulties in getting commissions big or significant enough to be public comes from the corporate constitution of the client, a second set seems to lie in the profession's eclecticism. For elite designers, the competitiveness inherent in the increase in the number of firms has been compounded by the pluralism of taste that the profession itself has promoted. The lists of candidates in closed or invited architectural competitions illustrate this situation.

Competitions are used with increasing frequency to adjudicate important commissions, reflecting in part the client's uncertainty about what to choose. Despite their complaints about uncompensated costs, architects dearly aspire to being included, and even more so in the lists of potential architects kept by major corporations. The reigning diversity leads many expert advisers to think it their duty to present clients with "one of each kind." As a result an architect may be invited on the basis of personal style then candidly be told that he lost "because of aesthetics." Since the aesthetics were well known beforehand, all that is conveyed is an offensive neglect of the architect's scheme and its adequacy for the program and the site. Postmodern eclecticism, in sum, has complicated the task of a design profession that has never quite left the age of patronage but must work without Maecenas.

Repeated versus One-of-a-Kind Commissions

Given the difficulties and costs involved in finding clients, the most rational policies for an architectural firm should be to concentrate on clients who continue to bring in work and to specialize in commissions that represent a repeated building type. This is what strong-delivery firms strive for, but it is equally important in the success of a new corporate firm such as KPF. Michael Graves explains:

If Kohn Pedersen Fox is doing, say, a dozen towers . . . they're doing many and they are big buildings with decent budgets. We have some too, and now I know the economics of that, and if you are doing many at the same time they are repetitive buildings. You are paid by the budget and the size of the building; and if floor twenty-three is like floor thirty-three, it is not so hard to punch it out on the computer. Yes, you must compose it originally, and, yes, you must spend more time to get the materials in the hands of the contractor, etc., to get it built. All that is true, and it takes longer than let's say my little building in San

Juan Capistrano, but the financial rewards are much, much, much greater, and so that is what makes profit for an architect, that kind of practice.

There is a tension, however, between economics and architectural ambition, which wants relief from routine work. Diane Legge, who in 1988 was a young partner at SOM-Chicago, phrases it clearly:

Hopefully, you build up a clientele who keeps coming back to you. Hopefully, you work on projects that have brothers and sisters after that . . . [Musingly] Many of the projects I work on are one of a kind. . . . The client I work with will probably never do another race track; and the Boston Globe is probably never going to do another printing plant, because these buildings will last for fifty years. . . . They'll go beyond me.

The concept of "range" (the array of different types and sizes of projects) expresses the conflict between architectural ambition and economic rationality. It is a concept repeatedly invoked by elite designers, who see range as an insurance against the routinization of talent. They unanimously believe that architects mature, refine, and renew their abilities by careful consideration of new and diverse problems. As Graves and Legge suggest, the economics of the firm are the first major obstacle in achieving range. The second obstacle, of course, is the tyranny of the track record.

Charles Gwathmey also emphasizes "the tension between the business of architecture and the need to face new discoveries."^[33] He describes his first speculative high rise proudly, yet he doubts that it will be enough to open up a new niche for Gwathmey Siegel:

Listen, it took us twenty years of practice to have someone trust us enough to let us do a building we had never done before. . . . The real estate people evaluate it as having the best floor plan of the buildings available in New York . . . [but] no one else has come knocking at our door. We are perceived as difficult, committed, expensive. . . . We are no more expensive than other well-known architects in this town. We don't take more time.

In a fundamentally heteronomous profession, the high value placed on range indicates something more than the expert's desire to create new knowledge in the confrontation with new problems. Striving for range is an ideological strategy by which architects assert and pursue autonomy. Range defies the market's compulsion to force architects to specialize. It is not a coincidence that architects invoke it to justify getting involved in a process as economically irrational as the competition: They argue that competitions are strategic because of the odd chance of extending their range with otherwise "inaccessible" types of buildings.

Second, striving for range is a way to say "I can do it." It places one's confidence in one's own firm and one's own talent above the judgment of clients who do not know or care enough about architecture. Finally, range embodies a subtler rationality than that of sheer specialization: In fields that produce symbolic goods, the symbolic capital attached to the name of an architect or a firm increases when it is transferred from project to project. Metaphorically speaking, such moveable assets can go in search of the best returns, insuring continued and expanded accumulation to the owner. David Denton, Frank Gehry's managing partner, puts it succinctly: "There has been a big shift from the large firms of the modernist phase who did all the work. . . . But to establish yourself as a name designer, you have to do a lot of types, and that costs a lot. "^[34]

The Waning of the Public Client

Government is by definition a multiheaded and bureaucratic client. Despite all the problems involved in working for the government, it still is the institutional client of choice. The federal government's share of the total budget for new construction went from 22 percent in 1981 to 15 percent in 1984, while the percentage of total receipts that architectural firms drew for public and institutional facilities went from 36 percent in 1972 to 26.6 percent in 1982. Yet the federal government is still the largest single client for new and renovated buildings of all kinds in the United States. Since the passage of the Architect-Engineer Selection Act in 1972, the General Services Administration's selection process has become open to "hundreds of firms that once thought they would never have a chance to design a major government building."^[35]

Yet the elite designers whom I interviewed perceive a rapid retreat of the public, and especially the federal, client: some because they focus for political and ideological reasons on subsidized housing, which was drastically reduced under President Reagan; others, perhaps, because of the increase in competition for fewer commissions. Thus, depending on the architect's orientation, the contrast with France's "royal" program of public monuments under Mitterrand or with the commitment of northern European social democracies to affordable housing and environmental planning seems painful to consider. In my interviews with architects, the government often figures merely as the source of regulations and reviews that slow down the approval process and diminish the architects' autonomy in many projects.

The drastic curtailment of the federal government's social role under Republican administrations has directly and indirectly brought to an end the involvement, characteristic of the 1970s, of a postmodern generation in community projects and public housing. Don Matzkin of Friday Architects is clear about what this meant for him and his partners, who were known before even being published for their community design work in Philadelphia. In 1972, their breakthrough had been their fifth community center, funded by Model Cities, which led to eight more community and religious projects. Don says he would not mind designing community centers all his life, but, "with Nixon and Reagan, community money dried out and we had to figure out what was marketable of that experience. . . . Reagan forced us to work for the private sector!"

Postmodernism thus seems to have coincided with a greater emphasis on private commissions. Besides the shrinking of federally subsidized housing and community funds, some building types—like the small train station, for instance—have practically disappeared from the public landscape of the United States.^[36] Others, like the post office, regional prototypes of which used to be commissioned from outside architects, are now modified or produced by government design offices to cut costs. All civic monuments are adversely affected by the chronic fiscal crisis of local governments.

Architects denounce the shrinking of the public client at the level of single buildings. This is not because there is no will to build city halls, public libraries, post offices, public schools, or even fire stations as civic monuments (as some architects seem to believe) but because funds for renovation or new buildings are scarce. Often, elite designers win competitions for projects which there are no funds to build (Michael Graves with the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center, for instance, or Barton Myers with the Phoenix Civic Center). Others must accept commissions from municipal governments who desire for their buildings the extravagant interior spaces made fashionable by hotels and shopping malls, but these lavish interiors consume the budget to the detriment of detailing and materials.

The retreat of government is also felt at the level of environmental planning. Barton Myers, a noted architect and urban planner,^[37] emphasizes three factors in U.S. architects' retreat from physical planning: the devastating heritage of modernist planning, the fiscal and political incapacity of cities, and the fact that postmodernism arrived when architects in the public sector were already struggling with "burn-out." He says:

Those architects who were interested in working in cities or being involved with reform in the early 1970s all left [he mentions Richard Weinstein, Jacquelin Robertson, and Robert Stern in Mayor John Lindsay's Urban Design Group in

New York]. They have all gone to the development industry. At the same time . . . postmodernism was attacking what had been built. . . . Most architects said: "Well, all this concern with social issues in America is not getting us anywhere. Let's go back to being better architects." So they went back to being architects who basically focus on making objects.

Myers's insistence that "postmodernism has almost no instinct for planning" on the one hand exaggerates the effectiveness of architects (or, for that matter, planners) in the physical solution of urban problems. On the other hand, it seems to slight postmodernism's sensitivity to context and its preoccupation with usable public spaces. Yet Myers's criticism captures the retreat of designers toward concern with the single building while also suggesting that contextualism, symbolism, and preservation do not make a match for the total urban vision of modernism. From a European perspective, Vittorio Gregotti concurs: "In the 1950s, architecture had an inferiority complex with regard to urban design. In the 1980s, it was reversed; it became then opposition to planning in general. That is when postmodernism became antimodern. "

Recognizing circulation as the lifeblood of the modern city, modernist planning delivered it to the automobile. But the physical problems created by the automobile require regional solutions, in which public-transportation policy has a decisive part to play. For the developer Gerald Hines, "If there is tax increment financing the development patterns will change, but you have to bring in the transit system first. . . . Only when cities start to strangle, like Houston, do people really start to study mass transit; only when people need seventy lanes to get downtown does mass transit become the only alternative."^[38] The response to modernist planning, therefore, not only exceeds the competence of architects and urban designers but also seems far beyond the reach of the political capacity that can be presently mobilized in the United States. It is indicative that the most widely praised achievement of "postmodern" American planning—Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's (or DPZ) 1983 plan for the new resort of Seaside in Florida—is, first, based on the exclusion of the automobile; second, is a small private project for the upper middle class; and, third, is a frankly nostalgic mixture of American small town and English village that has nothing to say to the large cities. The success of Seaside has led DPZ to perfect its "neotraditional" approach to small-scale urbanism in over thirty planning projects, the bulk of which predictably consists of private suburban plans. Duany's campaign against the typical American suburb is still waiting for the broad public policy that could take it beyond merely local developments.^[39]

In sum, architects design mostly single objects. They tend to find their range in unique commissions, for these demand more creativity than repeated types. While the bulk of one-of-a-kind commissions comes from residential clients, residential work can only support independent practices that remain deliberately small and have a renewable pool of rich clients from which to draw.^[40] Therefore, institutional clients are the most likely to provide work at a scale large enough to be profitable, interesting, and prestigious; there are, however, relatively few of such clients, and their financial stringencies often relegate architectural considerations to the background. A very small elite of no more than two dozen architects can aspire to be considered for prestigious international commissions. If we add to this the perceived retreat of the governmental client, elite designers seem to be left with business corporations and developers for major sponsors.

Today, the most visible (and yet the most repetitive) commission that developers entrust to elite designers is the schematic design of skyscrapers. Both to close this section and to introduce the relationship of architects with speculative clients, let us hear what some eminent designers say about the most conspicuous of modern building types.

Designing the Skyscraper

The "tall office building" has been called a stunning architectural phenomenon, and its urban impact and cost certainly are stunning. Its designers admit that the skyscraper is mostly a massive sculptural form or, as Vincent Scully says, "an architectural one-liner, intended to knock our eyes out for a fleeting instant as we glimpse it from behind the wheel."^[41] Yet they also talk about the discipline and responsibility its design entails. Here is Frank Gehry, a relative newcomer to this building type:

The problems are incredibly more complicated and yet simpler. Complicated to solve architecturally because the repetitive nature of windows . . . is pervasive. You can't escape it; it's like peg-board; you have to hand it over to the rental program. . . . The freedom of the smaller buildings is you don't have to put those goddamn windows every five feet. You can move them around, so you have opportunities to make different forms. [emphasis added]

Philip Johnson declares that the problem of form in gigantic size is intractable, yet he accepts this risk as an almost inescapable consequence of the type:

The problem is the middle. . . . It isn't hard to [design] an interesting bottom. You can't go wrong with a big enough pier, and you can't go wrong with an amusing top of whatever flamboyance you want, but the rest of it! It is a piece

of dullness that is just unbelievable! . . . You have the problem of the taper, of the top, the middle, and the bottom as always, but the form, the outline is the basic thing that you are always faced with. . . . Gae Aulenti [the Italian woman architect of international renown] says "the skyscraper is not the subject of architectural thought." . . . Wait until she does one!

A ferocious rejoinder in the name of service comes from the late Gordon Bunshaft, who did design many skyscrapers: "Architecture is the simple thing of enclosing space for various human functions. I don't hear anybody talk about whether the building works , whether the client or the employees are happy. . . . Mr. Goldberger [the New York Times critic] thinks all those buildings are built for silhouette from a distance, so they all put pyramids on the top or little domes or crap." Finally, Joseph Esherick, the West Coast architect who won the AIA Gold Medal in 1989, speaks of skyscrapers almost as an immorality of design:

The skyscrapers and a lot of these buildings are just basically big teapots or big pieces of jewelry. There is nothing easy about designing a good teapot: It shouldn't leak, you should be able to pour out of it, it shouldn't burn your hands, and it is something you focus on. There are technical sides to it, but the materialistic demand is that the thing be focused on [in the sense of attracting attention]. It's very hard, I think, to do something like that and give it any kind of spiritual quality.

Architects and Developers

How elite architects see speculative clients depends, first of all, on whether they work for them or not. Practically all the large firms do.^[42] Yet elite designers are somewhat ambivalent in talking about their relationships with developers. For the layperson confronted with the results of the 1970s and 1980s building boom, the most obvious reasons for ambivalence are expressed in questions that few architects can afford to ask: Is still another speculative office building necessary? What is the impact of another tower on a dense urban environment and an overloaded infrastructure? What people and what social needs does it displace? Architects are no worse in this than other hired experts: They leave ultimate "value judgments" to the political sphere.

Most of the elite architects I interviewed are liberals who were in their thirties during "the sixties." So in principle they welcome, as does Robert Stern, the emergence of "an informed, articulate, and armed public, who must be included in the process in a way that was not imagined before the mid-sixties." But our society's fragmented spheres of action appear to justify forgetting one's own active citizenship in the performance of a spe-

cialized technical function. There are, after all, special arenas for "the armed public" to represent itself and special agencies set up to represent the public interest (even though elite architects are often quick to denounce their "invasions" into the design process).

Contemporary architects in the United States cannot be held directly responsible for their own disengagement from social architecture. Depending on the kind of business they run, the crux of architects' relationships with speculative builders is not a lack of social responsibility but a lack of alternatives. Bruce Graham implies that architects, if they were to accept responsibility for what is not built, would let the real decision makers off the hook: "The problem of housing is not an architectural problem. It is simply a financial and political responsibility. If the society decides to build [housing], then the architects can do it, but making it cheap is not the answer."

Graham is wrong; building cheap often is the answer. It certainly was in Europe and in the United States in the 1930s. It certainly is an important answer in the Third World today. And finding new design solutions for unimagined levels of poverty taxes the architect's skill far more than a skyscraper (an architect working for Habitat for Humanity mentions Indian reservations, where families have an income of $250 a month, and Mississippi—in both places Habitat must build for $10 a square foot).^[43] If, however, architects cannot be held responsible for wrong social priorities, they should be held responsible for taking the notion of architecture-as-art as a special ideological shelter.

In our century the educated bourgeois has learned to suspend moral and political judgment in front of works of art, making it convenient to leave hard questions aside. In practice, aesthetics ("guaranteed" by the famous architect's name) are traded off by developers to review boards for a few more stories or an infraction of density regulations. In ideology, heated debates on the aesthetics of a building hide questions about priority and consequences from view. Aesthetic talk further mystifies the architectural object, making it a thing that has value only in discourse. Too often, elite designers speak as if the most important issue about a building was whether it is beautifully and sensitively designed or not. This might be taken as just another example of the congenital moral idiocy of experts were it not that the lingering ideological notion of an art avant-garde still associates art with progress and with a critical "antibourgeois" position.

The postmodern erosion of barriers between "high" and "mass" culture has allowed architects to present purely commercial buildings as potential works of art. Yesterday's "gentlemen architects," steeped in tight distinc-

tions between "culture" and "commerce," would neither have argued nor conceded the point. As Philip Johnson puts it, "When I was a kid, developers were called speculators and they were all evil and that was that. . . . You don't do work with people in the alleys!" The ideology of art gives a further twist to experts' generic abdication of individual responsibility. Architects (like other experts) seem to argue tacitly that one individual cannot go against the whole structure of the division of labor—therefore, one individual's moral choices cannot count all that much. Yet artists' faith in their own genius requires them to believe that it would, indeed, make a difference if someone less talented was hired in their place. The two contradictory positions can be held together, except that the latter ("it would be worse without me") demands a minimal preservation of one's personal integrity as a designer. The working relationship with developers seems problematic even for the consciously limited responsibility of the expert in aesthetics.

The first distinction elite architects tend to make is that between mere speculators and a "better kind" of developer. Frank Gehry's is by far the most colorful: "The very basic essence of the developers is to make money. That's obvious. Then, if they are responsible developers, their second priority is to make some kind of good building, whatever that is, in the end. They don't want to take the world. They don't want at the end of the project to have people say 'Oh, you bastards, you created this thing!'" But the other developers, especially around Los Angeles:

They are led by their greed and street smarts. Their lives are spent in the jungle. . . . If they were sure that [good design] was going to make them money, they would use it! There is no clear evidence of it, because they can build a junky apartment house quicker. I would take twice as long. Julie Eizenberg would work to make something better. And we have to charge more! I can get an architect to do a building for a third of what I do, and they do it faster . . . and it builds cheaper. The technicians (it's an overstatement to call them craftsmen) can slam bam, wham bam, thanks Sam, get it up, finished! It's sloppy bullshit but the users don't make any judgment on that. . . . They buy their fancy chairs and their glitzy fixtures and for very little money they create a look they feel comfortable with.

Perceptions are obviously shaped by particular experiences, but the distinction between the category as a whole and the exceptional developer (the architect's own) is recurrent in this rhetoric of implicit self-justification.

In Chicago, distinction and rhetoric take a regional turn. Gerald Horn contends that even Chicago bankers have a different, Midwestern, attitude

toward building: "Just to last one winter in the Chicago climate means it's going to last twenty or fifty or a hundred years in California. . . . The bankers in the Midwest . . . want things that will stay there for all the winters. They say 'I don't want this glitzy thing on it that looks good and makes it fashionable.'"^[44] Other Chicago architects agree that their city is different, but they also believe that the same kind of "slap-dash" developers who have built Chicago's suburbs may be taking over downtown building. Bruce Graham thinks it makes a difference that banks and insurance companies were involved directly in Chicago's urban development, but what matters most is that architects have deliberately sought to collaborate with developers: "Our office in New York built the monuments . . . but the developers were building the city. We deliberately went out to do work with developers so that . . . bad architects wouldn't take over Chicago. And it wasn't just us! Harry Weese did the same thing, and Holabird and Root and [Bertrand] Goldberg."

The prevalence of the large firm in Chicago tends to support Graham's argument in several ways. Large architectural firms have power, and they also need large-scale work to support themselves. Chicago being poorer in corporation headquarters than New York, it stands to reason that government work (for which connections with city government count a lot) and speculative projects were the main alternatives. The large firms could never have afforded to behave like "gentlemen architects" for reasons that have nothing to do with their principals' upbringing.

Firms such as SOM bring to the client the organizational and technical insurance that things will be done on time and on budget. Therefore, they are not likely to work in association (and much less likely to accept association) with strong-delivery firms, a working arrangement that developers often demand of the smaller elite firms. Association is said to spread the work, to raise the construction firms' standards of professionalism, to be the only way of working nationwide and internationally, and, above all, to limit growth and overhead expenditures for the principal firm. But the problem of how much and whether one can trust the associate firm looms large. David Denton points out, for instance, that "if a project comes in above budget, construction architects tend to go back to the [materials] specifications and simply change the quality without changing the design." The best solution seems to be the costly one of delegating full-time a highly trusted and technically competent employee to "linking" with (in fact, supervising) the associate firm.

Most of the elite architects I interviewed, even if they go into lengthy justifications of these "forced marriages," end up admitting that the abdi-

cation of control over the working drawings is a risky contingency of doing developer's work.^[45] In fact, the trend toward association seems to represent for American architects a potential loss of occupational power and control. Logically, for those who are in favor of it, association presages not a loss but a transformation.

While the working drawings for a large project can keep a good-sized firm busy for three to four years at a time, "design only" lasts about six months. Therefore, firms such as Robert Stern's and Cesar Pelli's, which work in association for all large-scale projects, must compensate for the loss of construction work by keeping a lot of work coming in. The track record, however, can belong to the construction firm instead of the design architects, who are thereby free to transfer their signatures and charismatic personas from project to project. Association, indeed, allows elite designers to expand their range beyond what is possible in "all-around" work. Elite architects who work for big developers insist that their clients have become better educated and more socially ambitious. (Charles Gwathmey, who does not work for the big ones, says their motives are "ego and money: They like driving around and saying 'that's my building; Philip Johnson built it for me; he is my architect.'") Robert Stern admits that developers' first objective is always profit but thinks that "good" developers have their own reputations to maintain. Above all, many architects want to believe that developers have discovered the economic value of their work: It helps with zoning boards to have a famous signature, and good design helps the approval, the rental, and the resale of buildings.

John Zuccotti, who represents major developers in New York, partially confirms their hopes: "Good design solutions helped me, as the attorney for the client, in securing the decision. Good architecture helps in a political sense . . . and it also helps in the basic truth that good design does solve problems that arise in the approval process." Ron Siskolne, vice president for planning and development of Olympia and York, Zuccotti's most important client, sees architecture simply in terms of marketing:

We are building a product, like laundry detergent. We need to know what kind of design is going to appeal to the consumers, who have become much more design-conscious, across the board. Design is a secondary, added feature, but it is gaining more importance. . . . We try and include [in invited competitions] some less-experienced architects that we think might stretch to work in a new scale, if the marketing objective is that we don't want buildings to be all that similar. We are not dealing with the public at large: The media generate the interest in the designs that we develop.

There is nothing radically new in using architecture as sign. Mansart's Versailles was meant as a sign of Louis XIV's power. Yet, there is a semiotic

difference between a building erected in an unbuilt place and a building conspicuously inserted in the dense fabric of a city to create an urban event. The former kind—like Versailles itself, or Frank Lloyd Wright's 1936 masterpiece Johnson Wax Administration building in Racine, Wisconsin, or, today, Frank Gehry's Design Museum for the Vitra chair company in the small German town of Weil-am-Rhein—makes a place; the latter kind creates a new "sign system" around itself, and that is its semiotic significance. Gordon Bunshaft was proud to point out that design was already worth a lot in free publicity in 1952, when he designed Lever House for a soap company; two years later, Mies van der Rohe's building for the Seagram Corporation introduced the name of a liquor manufacturer (a twentieth-century Medici) into the annals of "high art." Unsurprisingly, after the demise of the "glass box" in the mid-1970s, American corporations have rivaled each other in putting up towers aptly defined as "giant architectural logos."^[46]

Robert Venturi's postmodern manifesto of 1966 emphasized the communicative power of architectural ornament. In once again freeing appearance from structure, Venturi unwittingly prodded architects to the deliberate production of architectural images. The postmodern theory of architecture thus foreshadowed its own absorption not in industrial production, as modernism had done, but in the prolific production of signs of the postindustrial age.^[47]

Ideal-Types and Alternative Career Settings

We have viewed elite careers in connection with the firm, the organizational support by means of which and in which they evolve. From this point of view, there are two ideal-types of elite career settings in the profession of architecture in the United States.

One ideal-type of elite career depends on the reputation of a large firm for service and design excellence. Individual architects contribute to this reputation, though not in the visible and original manner that ideology associates with artistic talent. The other is the individualistic type, associated with the entrepreneurial firm. The table on page 134 summarizes some basic features of these two ideal types.^[48]

Both types of firms can promote their protagonists to high levels of national and international visibility. Reputation includes them in both ideal and real rosters of architectural talent, considered by critics and potential clients for important commissions, invited competitions, international exhi-

bitions, and juries—the events that go into the making of "architectural history."

A large organization and a corporate practice are almost prerequisites of longevity among American architectural firms. In the first ideal-type, architects come up through the ranks of a preexisting firm that values design talent. The loosening of the modernist canon and clients' desires for product differentiation have facilitated competition. This appears to have spurred elite strong-service firms to diversify their approach to design. Speculative clients may take an active part in this process by "arranging marriages" (in Ron Siskolne's words) between the more established firms and "genius designers."

The operation of the large firm has an essential element of impersonality. The late Gordon Bunshaft scoffingly suggested that SOM had been prompted to single out individuals (something not done in his time) by the press's compulsive search for "charismatic designers." Corporate firms with a design reputation may build up some partners' names, but it is extremely rare for an elite design career to emerge within ordinary service firms.^[49]

The second ideal-type, based on an entrepreneurial practice, is built around the personal talent and reputation of one designer (or no more than a few), known for innovative design and sought out by clients for prestigious or unique commissions. The life cycle of the firm tends to coincide with the architectural career of the design principal. Breakthroughs come between one's late thirties and mid-forties, and track records that spell success are seldom accumulated before one's late fifties. But even the longest and most productive careers come to an end, and firms too closely identified with individuals find it difficult to survive their succession.

In the falsely democratic atmosphere of firms that employ between fifteen and ninety professional employees, there is not much room at the top to prepare seriously for succession. Nor are there many opportunities for creative and conceptual talent to emerge when a charismatic (and egotistic) leader must put his mark on every project. The "star system," to the extent

that it touches an architect's career, further aggravates the problem of firm survival.

Today's star system functions symbiotically: The general press (helped by architectural journals) creates "design leaders" and feeds their names to potential new clients after it has been fed the names of new "stars" by savvy marketeers.^[50] The genius architects of our century (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto) did not have successors; but today's stars (unless they have extraordinary personas, like Philip Johnson) must go on succeeding themselves within a system that creates fashions without much architectural reason and consumes them in increasingly rapid cycles.

In the United States, the charismatic star system appears to complement the separation of design from production. Together, these two trends may support a hybrid empirical type of elite firm, which uses the "guru's" symbolic capital in its attempt to live two lives: One is the traditional life of the all-around (strong-idea and strong-service) firm, for smaller and more prestigious projects; the other life, for large and repetitive projects, tends to be that of a consultantship in silhouette building, siting, and embellishments, as opposed to the constructional role of structural, mechanical, and air-conditioning engineers. The service part of the practice may weather the crisis of succession but lose the international visibility "owned" by the charismatic designer.^[51]

Below this level we find "architects' architects" and more traditional elite careers. At this second level, elite careers tend to coincide empirically with local firms and regional reputations, although it is neither the firm's size nor the geographical or stylistic range of its work that matters. In the United States, "traditional" architects are those that make a committment to following a project carefully and therefore to being directly engaged in construction ; it is obviously easier to carry this out when one is not working many airplane hours away from home.

The traditional firm's partners are rooted in a region that they know very well, in which their work is highly respected, and in whose schools they often teach. Their rootedness may count against them when it comes to being included in much-publicized local competitions that hunger for "name architects." Yet these are firms whose public projects tend to be loved by users and worthy of high respect in the profession's discourse.^[52]

Architectural discourse therefore complicates the simple typology of elite careers based on firms. The bulk of architectural services, however technically competent and useful, does not even enter a discursive field that privileges aesthetics. All architectural elites exist by and within the

profession's autonomous discourse. In addition, the level of highest visibility is a media event , architectural discourse seized upon and amplified by the general press.

Architectural aesthetics are the subject of much abstract theorizing, but the canon of architecture, which consists essentially of built exemplars, matters more. Symbolic challenges are waged against the canon to determine what exemplars will be counted as "Architecture." Thus, disputes that may seem purely ideological can rearrange positions and redistribute "cultural power" in the delimited architectural field. In according different relative weights of form, meaning, technique, and social function to architectural products, these challenges redefine not only the product but also the ideal image of the architect's role.

Publication, awards, exhibitions, and competitions are still the major mechanisms through which the profession selects work, built or unbuilt, for peer recognition. Already in the 1930s, as all the older architects report, the library was the place where one discovered Le Corbusier and the Modern Movement. But the expansion of architecture's academic base has amplified recognition beyond anything imaginable in the prewar period. The broad audiences created by schools support alternative teaching settings (like Peter Eisenman's Institute of Architecture and Urban Affairs) and make teaching essential for academic elite careers. These begin in relative autonomy from clients and unfold in large part or even purely through discourse.

Whatever elite designers may claim, not one of them is indifferent to peer recognition or, more broadly, to the profession's discourse.^[53] Practically all recent American architects included in the encyclopedia Contemporary Architects have participated in teaching as visitors, critics, and jurors. Most of them teach or have taught regularly; many have occupied positions of great responsibility as deans of architecture schools or vie to obtain them. Influential designers who build very little, like New York's John Hejduk or Raymond Abraham, are primarily theoreticians who teach. Teaching, then, provides a basic alternative that goes beyond merely economic support.

In 1975, when Cal Poly's Ray Kappe founded the Southern California School of Architecture, Thom Mayne was among the first teachers. He and his partner, Mike Rotondi, the school's first graduate, teach and participate in its direction. The school was for a long time their primary involvement and, as Thom says, it allowed Morphosis, their firm, to "select work that would continue our own explorations, our own investigations, without the burden of actually running a business."

Peter Eisenman, once the tireless and most ambitious intellectual impresario of architecture in the United States, started the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment in 1964 and in 1969 the Institute of Architecture and Urban Affairs—a unique center of research, instruction, debate, and publication (publishing not only the ambitious theoretical journal Oppositions but the lively magazine Skyline and a series of significant monographs). In my interview with him he described his student days at Cornell, his stint with the army in Korea, and his work for other architects. Then, a failed commission for his old fraternity house and time spent studying for a Ph.D. in England seemed to put him on another course: "There was nothing else I could do. . . . And then I became very ideological; I was no longer fit for the real world. And [while teaching at Princeton] I began to do this set of didactic houses. I was no longer going to have an ordinary practice. And then I started the Institute and it was not clear to me that I would ever go into real practice." In giving a wider resonance to "paper architecture" and to very small projects, schools, especially elite schools, provide a platform from which it is actually easier to launch oneself toward a real (that is practical) career in architecture. In the case of Cesar Pelli, an elite academic position has helped to move his career from one type to another: From a position in a strong-service/strong-delivery firm, he has moved to an extremely successful, large-scale strong-idea entrepreneurial practice.

Academic positions are in themselves direct channels into the discursive field: They can amplify the significance of small-scale experiments and transform an artisanal practice into an alternative to the established types of elite careers. Stuart Cohen, who teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago, on the one hand describes work "done for practically no money," small projects that are "complicated and spatially rich and getting more and more bold." On the other hand, he takes care to mention that he owes to his writing a personal reputation larger than that derived from his projects.

The discursive challenges of the early postmodern period have been waged in the arenas of teaching, writing, and debating. In Chicago, setting up alternative arenas or taking over the existing ones was the preliminary phase in the attack against the dominance of the large firms and the "descendance of Mies." Cohen describes a movement that started when Tigerman, Tom Beeby, and himself organized the "Chicago Seven" exhibit in 1976:

After our show we formed the Chicago Architectural Club in 1981. I would say literally in that period, because of the visibility that we created collectively for

ourselves and for other small firms doing high quality work, that became an option. We were educating a clientele. . . . We were creating a market for the work we were doing and convincing people that they could make a go at it rather than having to sit at SOM and draft all day long. And the number of little firms has grown astronomically! . . . We were all conspirators in a sense. I was teaching at Illinois. Tom Beeby at IIT [the Illinois Institute of Technology]. We used to talk about how dismal both schools were, and Tom and I and Stanley said "What are the possibilities of making a first-rate school of architecture?" It was like our agenda for the city of Chicago. . . . Our dean resigned, and I nominated Tom. Then Stanley came and the year after Tom Beeby came, and it was like hitting a critical mass there in terms of change.

The amplification and the alternatives provided by symbolic challenges are significant. Their objective, as we have seen, is to renegotiate and redefine the architect's place within the delimited field. And yet, beyond it, as Rob Quigley says, architectural elites "are mute; the laypeople couldn't care less what architects think."

Quigley belongs to a genus of architects who attempt to redefine the architect's role in broader social terms. They struggle with what little remains of the weakest architectural option in the contemporary United States: designing decent housing for people of modest means and dignified buildings for community life. Architects hope that the revision of the modern precludes a repetition of the urban renewal disasters of the 1950s and 1960s. But there is no broad government sponsorship for the programs of jobs and housing that could bring a new life and a new domestic architecture to the urban ghettoes (or the poor rural areas) of the United States; there are mostly local efforts. The Massachussetts Housing Finance Agency has subsidized Boston's Tent City, on the site of the 1968 squatting protest by displaced residents, and Goody Clancy has designed on the site a remarkable "mixed incomes" complex. Also in Boston, the Bricklayers and Laborers Union has acted as developer for William Rawn's simple but eloquent housing projects. In San Diego, Rob Quigley has paired with an adventurous developer whose beginning "niche" in the jungle of southern California real estate was profitable SROs (single room occupancy hotels):

He was smart enough to see that there is no place for people to go when the redevelopment agency clears an area. He realized that if he created a flop house or a slum or something undesirable, that was not in his best interest. So he thought of going to a visible architect who in San Diego at least is considered the avant-garde. He didn't think I would be interested and he was only willing to pay what he would pay a draftsman. . . . It covered about half our cost. When he proposed it, I was just overwhelmed . This is where whatever our talents are should be focused. And so we agreed to do it, and there were no models . It hadn't been done in seventy years.^[54]

In Quigley's political analysis, "there are no bad developers. . . . Their values mirror our society's values." He is aware that a compromised role is the normal fate of experts striving to do the best they can with their work.

In large firms, in entrepreneurial ventures, in hybrid types, in traditional local practices, through discourse and in building, all the architects on whose accounts I have drawn attempt to reconcile the business of architecture with their own conceptions of art and service. Peers, or clients, or both concede that these men and women have more than ordinary talent. The architects too believe themselves capable of doing work that is worth more than just its material significance. We should read their mystifications of architecture (building, art, building cities, crusade) as different signs of an ideological struggle to affirm the value of their work.

The social conditions in which architects practice have changed. The analysis based on their perceptions does not contradict the general argument outlined in chapter 3: The demise of modernism has increased the fame that some architects can expect to gain through their work. The clients—corporations, developers, even city governments—try to use for profit, publicity, or both the designer's name in symbiosis with their designs. Yet, while there seems to be more appreciation for architects' ability to conjure up images , both their control of the process of building and their centrality in it have diminished. In particular, the architects committed to a socially responsible architecture find it more difficult to pass from paper projects to building. Taking refuge in the pure aesthetics of architecture appears as a consoling and ever-ready temptation.

Looking at practice through practitioners' eyes, aesthetics and the profession's discourse are obviously important, so important, in fact, that architectural elites in the United States may constitute themselves exclusively within discourse. Discursive battles are therefore always endowed with practical significance. In the next section, I consider the main discursive battle of the period 1966–85—the revision of the modernist canon—from two angles: I examine in chapter 5 how elite designers view the creative substance of their work and, in chapter 6, how postmodern revisionism has shaped their views. This in-depth analysis establishes the ideological and personal parameters of architectural discourse. In chapters 7 and 8, I take a larger sample of the profession's elites: the juries who assigned design awards for the journal Progressive Architecture during the period 1966–85. I use their debates to reconstruct the recent transformation of the discourse and the canon of architecture.