1. See John Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 361-65, and Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 356-71.

2. Military engineering, for instance, became a specialized occupation by the seventeenth century; in eighteenth-century France, civil engineering provided the model of a state-sponsored profession that architects strove to emulate. I have analyzed the importance of this model in "Emblem and Exception: The Historical Definition of the Architect's Professional Role," in Judith R. Blau, Mark E. La Gory, and John S. Pipkin, eds., Professionals and Urban Form (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).

3. Reyner Banham, "A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture," The New Statesman, Oct. 12, 1990, 25.

4. See David Brain, "Discipline and Style: The École des Beaux-Arts and the Social Production of an American Architecture," Theory and Society 18 (1989): 815ff.

5. I adopt Michel Foucault's concept of the discipline as a "system of control in the production of discourse" ("The Discourse on Language," trans. Rupert Swyer, appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge [New York: Pantheon, 1972]). "For a discipline to exist," Foucault writes, "there must be the possibility of formulating--and of doing so ad infinitum--fresh propositions." Disciplines are "defined by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to . . . whoever is able to make use of them, without there being any question of their meaning or their continue

validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them" (222-23). I combine this concept of discipline with my understanding of the social appropriation of discourse. I believe, as does Foucault, that educational systems are "political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and powers it carries with it" (227).

6. In architectural discourse, the term postmodernism tends to be reserved for the return to classicist and vernacular sources of formal inspiration in vocabulary and composition. I shall use the term more broadly, including all the revisions of European canonic modernism--not only the "traditional" return to premodern sources but also the "schismatic" treatment of modernism itself as a formal historical source. The distinction between varieties of "traditional" and "schismatic" post-modernism is elaborated by Robert Stern in "The Doubles of Postmodern," Harvard Architecture Review 1 (1980): 75-87.

7. Architects never attained the liberation from patronage that painters reached with the spread of easel painting and the organization of art markets. While the paintings that Van Gogh or Chaim Soutine had been tragically unable to sell could be "discovered" after their death, there is no such thing as "discovering" an architect who has never built anything, except within the specialized discourse of which only historians, critics, and architects are cognizant. The most notable example is that of Antonio Sant'Elia (1888-1916), the one architect among the Italian futurists. His extraordinarily beautiful visionary drawings with Mario Chiattone (exhibited in 1914 in Milan) are among the "sacred texts" of modern architecture. Sant'Elia's foreword to the catalog, interpreted by Filippo Marinetti, became the group's "Manifesto of Futurist Architecture." See Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970), 34-38.

8. On the emergence of the large architectural firm in the United States, see Diana Balmori, "George B. Post: The Process of Design and the New American Architectural Office (1868-1913)" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 46 (1987): 342-355, and Bernard M. Boyle, "Architectural Practice in America, 1865-1965: Ideal and Reality," in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987). For an excellent overview, see Robert Gutman, Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), especially 23-60.

9. On the interaction between organization and recognition of merit, see the excellent study by Judith Blau, Architects and Firms (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1984), Chap. 5.

10. In American universities, these different orientations can result in affiliation with either technical or fine arts faculties.

11. Niels L. Prak, Architects: The Noted and the Ignored (New York: Wiley, 1984), 1-2, 14-16.

12. In the United States, where architects are legally in charge of producing contract drawings (the detailed and specified drawings that go to contractors for bidding and on which the production of the building is based), professional reputations, official recognition, and informal networks help to forge cooperative ties between "design" and "service-oriented" architects. In some cases, these ties are prompted by speculative clients who want both fancy design and economic efficiency. In others, design architects seek these associations themselves for a variety of reasons, which I discuss in chapter 4. break

13. The mechanisms of licensing, of course, recognize this primacy. In the United States, years of schooling are equivalent to years of practice but not sufficient to be eligible for examination by architectural boards or for professional registration. Two to three years of practice under the supervision of a licensed architect are required for the latter. It is still possible today to take the boards without any formal schooling, but only in a few states.

14. This was a finding of my research in "high volume" architectural offices. See Magali Sarfatti Larson, "Report to the National Science Foundation and the Research Corporation of the American Institute of Architects," Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia (1979).

15. Besides its specialized professional journals, architecture, like science, is also explained and presented to the lay public in the general press and the electronic media. Moreover, architectural design is featured by more or less specialized picture magazines such as Architectural Digest or House Beautiful, which have a keen sense of their readers' status aspirations. The dean of American architects, Philip Johnson, with his characteristic candor, calls them "pornography for architects."

16. See Foucault, "Discourse on Language." When I say "discursive field" I follow Foucault's more inclusive definition of discourse, which is close to Thomas Kuhn's composite notion of "paradigm" (though Foucault is obviously much broader in his usage than Kuhn). For Kuhn, a paradigm constructs, first of all, the area of nature or of the social world that scientists take as the object of their research. The paradigm rests on metaphysical assumptions that tacitly determine what kinds of questions it is legitimate to ask. The Kuhnian paradigm is not embodied in texts only--not even primarily in texts, axiomatic postulates, theories, problems, empirical findings, ideas, jargon, and the like--but in exemplars of scientific practice: In replicating practical models of how to do science, apprentices appropriate the paradigm, insuring its hold upon the field and the field's self-reproduction. See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Mary Masterman's incisive discussion, "The Nature of the Paradigm," in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

17. Michael Graves, interview with the author, Dec. 1988.

18. Symbolic capital is, for Pierre Bourdieu, the authority to speak within and for a field, authority that accrues according to criteria determined (and often understood) only by the qualified participants themselves. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Le Champ scientifique," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2-3 (June 1976): 88-104, and "La Production de la croyance: contribution à une économie des biens symboliques," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 13 (Feb. 1977): 3-43.

19. One century later, Michelangelo went on: "A noble house in the city brings considerable honor, being more visible than all one's possessions" (both quotations in Goldthwaite, Renaissance Florence, 83, 89).

20. Goldthwaite, Renaissance Florence, 77-83.

21. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 295.

22. Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 73, 95ff.

23. Langer, Feeling and Form, 97. break

24. I am borrowing from the concept of a "period's eye," developed by Michael Baxandall. See his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 29ff.

25. The concept of "art world" and the complex networks that permit production, circulation, and social appreciation of art works is elaborated by Howard Becker in Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), Chap. 1. On the concept of "field," see Bourdieu, "Le Champ scientifique."

26. Peter Bürger, for instance, sees the hallmark of the "authentic" avant-garde in the Dadaists and the Russian constructivists' efforts to abolish the separate institutional existence of art in bourgeois society. See his Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and the introduction by Jochem Schulte-Sasse.

27. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, develops the architectural metaphor in his 1981 speech in Munich on "Modern and Postmodern Architecture" (reprinted in John Forester, ed., Critical Theory and Public Life [Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1985]). Jean-Francois Lyotard grounds the three constitutive tendencies of postmodernism in architecture's abandonment of the Modern Movement. See his "Defining the Postmodern," in ICA Documents 4: Postmodernism (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986), 6-7. Architecture is important in literary theory, particularly in Fredric Jameson's much-discussed "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92. See also Jameson, "Architecture and the Critique of Ideology," in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Criticism Ideology (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985). Other discussions of architecture include David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 66-98, and Scott Lash, Sociology of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990), 201-36.

28. The design of Brasilia is perhaps the best known of the exceptions. Thanks to James Holston, it certainly is the best studied by a social scientist. See his The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

29. The sample is not statistically representative but formed qualitatively on the advice of experts. I interviewed thirty American architects and one international celebrity whose practice is based in Italy. The American group includes twenty-one of the most noted architects of the recent period and, in two cases, their managing partners (fifteen of them are an elite officially recognized in the international encyclopedia Contemporary Architects, ed. Ann Morgan, 2d ed. (Chicago, St. James' Press, 1987); five of them worked in large "corporate" firms; nine are "rising" (two were once rising) architects identified by the awards and official accolades they have received. I also interviewed the principal of a firm that specializes in doing production drawings for elite designers and consulted with eleven diverse experts in the field of architecture, including the editors of architectural journals, scholars, consultants, the former manager of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and John Zuccotti, the attorney for the Canadian developer Olympia and York. The interviews with four representatives of important developers--including two with senior vice presidents of Olympia and York--are only indicative of what a few of them think of architects. This study is not about clients but about how architects understand them and work with them. break