1. Gerald Hines, quoted by Joseph Giovannini, "The Grand Reach of Corporate Architecture," New York Times, Jan. 20, 1985, sec. 3. Prominent developers like Gerald Hines or Olympia and York also "capitalize on the names of the prestigious corporations that will occupy them . . . giv[ing] the impression that the lead corporations headquartered there own them--as Mr. Hines has done with Pennzoil Place in Houston."

2. "Interview: Gerald Hines and Peter Eisenman," Skyline, Oct. 1982, 18 (emphasis added).

3. See Niels L. Prak, Architects: The Noted and the Ignored (New York: Wiley, 1984), 19-22.

4. See Robert Gutman's excellent discussion in Architectural Practice: A Critical View (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 56-60. Even Burgee Johnson, favorites of Gerald Hines (for whom they have designed fourteen towers), have not been able to buck the trend. Burgee says: "Gerry has always insisted on putting a Houston architect on the job with us. My agreement with Gerry is 'anything you can see, I do the working drawings for.' All the underground and internal stuff, the elevators and things like that that you can't see, they do the working drawings for" (interview with the author).

5. Suzanne Stephens, "SOM at Midlife," Progressive Architecture, May 1981, 138.

6. In 1981, none other than Nathaniel Owings observed: "SOM is taking orders, not creating new ideas. We are putting up office building after office building. Until recently, the firm was praised for its quality. I don't know if we still have that quality" (quoted by Stephens, "SOM," 141). Owings is the retired founder of SOM.

7. Gutman, Architectural Practice, 22. See also Judith Blau, Architects and Firms (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1984).

8. In 1982, architectural firms with over fifty employees represented 1.9 percent of the whole but garnered 29.9 percent of all receipts; firms with twenty to forty- hard

nine employees were 5.1 percent of the whole and earned 19.1 percent of the receipts; firms smaller than nineteen were 93 percent of the total, with 51 percent of the earnings (Gutman, Architectural Practice, Tables 1 and 2, 115-16).

9. Weld Coxe et al., "Charting Your Course," Architectural Technology, May-June 1986, 53.

10. The sample was a stratified snowball, formed by selecting U.S. architects from the encyclopedia Contemporary Architects, 2d ed. (Chicago: St. James Press, 1987), and by consulting experts. I asked the latter which architects they considered either important in the passage from modernism to postmodernism or now "rising." Especially if the architect I had planned to interview was unavailable, I also used published materials. From 1988 to 1990, I conducted extensive (and, in the case of Philip Johnson, repeated) interviews with twenty-nine architects, eight of whom were partners in very large strong-service firms in Chicago and New York. One of them, Richard Roth of Emory Roth and Sons, is principal in a large strong-delivery firm that makes production drawings in association with design architects of the first rank. Five architects have very small firms: Among these, Julie Eizenberg's husband-wife firm, Koenig Eizenberg in Santa Monica, was the only one just beginning, although it had received much attention since getting the First Design Award of Progressive Architecture in 1986. Craig Hodgetts of Hodgetts and Fung in Santa Monica and Stuart Cohen of Chicago had had national reputations but worked only locally, except for their academic commitments. Since I interviewed William Rawn in Boston in 1990, his outstanding work in affordable housing has been receiving national attention from the AIA and from the general press. The other firms range in size from Rob Quigley's (eleven persons) and Morphosis (which goes from thirteen to twenty) to the modal category hovering between sixty and eighty to the very large office of SOM-Chicago. I interviewed Vittorio Gregotti, principal of Gregotti Associates, Milan, at the end of 1990. I was privileged to attend a Research Roundtable organized by the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania, the American Institute of Architects, and the Coxe Group of Philadelphia in April 1989. It was attended by both design and managing partners from firms that have received the AIA national award for design excellence for the firm's body of work as a whole. I shall indicate the source as Roundtable when I quote from my notes of the debates.

Except where the information given to me in interview was confidential, I mention the source. To avoid cumbersome footnotes, in this and the following chapters I do not give any other reference for the interviews I conducted myself.

11. This roster of international architectural celebrities, known outside architecture for their personas as much as for their work, is created by the critics, the media, and the architects themselves, with more than a little push from their clients. The "stars" have devoted their lives to architecture and deserve to be considered elite designers. Yet, in an outgrowth of architecture's charismatic tradition, the consuming need that the publicity apparatus has for image, has grabbed the (not unsuspecting) architects. They seem to bask somewhat uncomfortably in the limelight, believing, or affecting to believe, that it will help publicize not only their own careers but the profession as a whole. Steven M. Aronson has described the star system in amusing vignettes; centering the system on Philip Johnson, he builds his celebrity status up. See Hype! (New York: William Morrow, 1983). See also Denise continue

Scott Brown's feminist account of what it means to be married to an architectural "guru" (one's own work becomes invisible in a star system that has no place for women): "Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture," in Ellen P. Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid, eds., Architecture: A Place for Women (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

12. The most effective makers of design reputations in New York (and celebrities in their own right) are: Philip Johnson, since the early days of his association with the Museum of Modern Art and the International Style. Robert Stern, who, according to Johnson, "is the one who has really followed-or tried to--the model of my career," doubles his reputation as a postmodernist architect with his academic and scholarly reputation, his writings, the exhibitions he has organized, and the popular series on American architecture for public television. Peter Eisenman, as founder and director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Affairs, dispensed avant-garde recognition internationally until the institute's demise in 1978.

13. See Hélène Lipstadt, ed., The Experimental Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988).

14. Roundtable, 1989.

15. For a "how to" book full of insight, see Weld Coxe, Marketing Architectural and Engineering Services, 2d ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982).

16. A common factor--which cannot be taken as representative--is that twenty-four of the twenty-seven elite designers I interviewed have either attended (as undergraduates or graduate students or both) or have taught at elite Eastern schools. Leading in numbers here are Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Yale.

17. This comment is by Warren Cox of Hartman Cox in Washington, D.C., winner of the AIA firm award for excellence in design. Like all the other elite designers present at the AIA Research Roundtable, Cox believes that the ideal is to bill the client "on time card" (time spent set at a fixed percentage or multiple) and to move away from both lump sum fees and fees based on a percentage of construction costs, neither of which pays for the time actually spent in design (Roundtable, 1989).

18. John Hejduk, in Barbaralee Diamonstein, American Architecture Now II, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 129, 133.

19. For evidence about the importance of spouses' incomes for artists, see Donald Eckardt, "Assessing the Avant-Garde: A Sociological Analysis of a Generation of Artists" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1991).

20. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital within a specific field is different from the more diffuse notion of "cultural capital" and most clear with reference to science. See "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason," Social Science Information 14, no. 6 (1975): 19-47. See also the excerpt "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in J. Karabel and A. H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology in Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

21. I am grateful to Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges and Kerstin Sahlins-Andersson for having brought this point to my attention.

22. In the depressed real estate market of the early 1990s, SOM has laid off 200 people in six months in its Chicago and New York offices and lost over $100 continue

million in project volume since 1989. KPF has lost about a dozen large projects, and it laid off 9 percent of its permanent staff at the beginning of 1991 ("Back to the Drawing Board," Newsweek, April 8, 1991, 60).

23. Known as "the Silver Fox" (for his white hair) in the profession, Kohn is a master of the process of selection by interview. Peter Linneman of the Wharton School's Real Estate Institute observes that Kohn knows how to speak to real estate executives "like one of them, and yet with great authority." Some of Kohn's guidelines: "Don't sketch out the design: you could draw the wrong one, and besides, you make the creative process look too casual. But just as important, try to be the last one interviewed and hope the decision is made right away" (quoted by Suzanne Stephens, "The Selling of the Architect, 1988," Avenue, Nov. 1988, 102). After ABC, KPF almost miraculously beat such huge and experienced firms as SOM-Chicago, Philadelphia's Vincent Kling, Helmut Obata Kassabaum of St. Louis, and Caudill Rowlett Scott of Houston for the design of a 437,000 square-foot headquarters building in Kentucky. After that KPF got a job for Motorola through a contact of Kohn's: "Somebody knew of us and recommended that we be interviewed, even though we were new." In three months, a small firm of five people was doing three enormous jobs, which proves they can be done with a small staff!

24. Bunshaft designed the Lever House and the Chase Manhattan buildings in New York, the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale, the airport at Mecca, and many other important buildings. His adverse influence on Robert Venturi's career is common knowledge in the profession: Through his position in the Washington, D.C., Fine Arts Commission, Bunshaft engineered a veto of the project by Venturi and Rauch, which had won the competition for Transportation Square.

25. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 365.

26. These observations are based on the Roundtable discussions, 1989. For a careful analysis of how size and bureaucratic rules balance each other to produce design recognized in professional awards, see Blau, Architects and Firms .

27. Reinforcing Stern's point, the careers of Gropius and Breuer's brilliant students at Harvard in the 1940s (Edward L. Barnes, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, Ioh Ming Pei, Pei's partners Henry Cobb and Araldo Cossutta, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen, Victor Lundy, and Gropius's partners in the Architects Collaborative, John Harkness and Louis McMillen) basically followed the same pattern: Except for Pei, Harkness, and McMillen, "all began their building careers with suburban houses for the Eastern establishment in New England, New York, and Florida. (Pei was hired right out of Harvard by William Zeckendorf, the legendary urban developer and speculator of the fifties and sixties, to work on schemes in Denver and other cities). . . . Their practice progressed . . . from private house clients to institutional clients who then commissioned schools, campus buildings and housing, theaters, and churches. Few examples of office buildings, other commercial structures, or public and speculative housing are to be found among their commissions of the fifties and sixties. Only beginning in the seventies, in the wake of the urban renewal boom . . . has their work become urban in locale and large in scale" (Klaus Herdeg, The Decorated Diagram [Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983], 12).

28. Robert Gutman points out that the Hillier Group of Princeton "ranked twentieth in business volume in the list of architectural giants compiled by Cor- soft

porate Design and Realty for 1986, but not until it appointed [Alan] Chimacoff [as director of design] did it begin to be short-listed in major national design competitions" ( Architectural Practice, 18).

29. Gutman, Architectural Practice, 56.

30. Coxe et al., Marketing, 84.

31. Here, for instance, is a telling account, again by Michael Graves: "I can't take the guilt of somebody [in the office] saying to me, when I leave at one o'clock in the morning, 'Can't you help me with this? Will you be here tomorrow morning?' No. I will be going to Sarah Lawrence to present our project to the faculty. And I'll go again to present it to the students. And . . . they introduced me yesterday saying 'Michael is here for the fifth or sixth time and the only other famous architect we have ever had is Philip Johnson and we don't think he ever came.' But Michael is going, he is showing it to the trustees, he is showing it to the faculty today and he will show it to the students and to the community. . . . If it means a dozen meetings, if it means community work every night . . . just to get some buildings up, I'll do it. And clients know that."

32. The involvement of clients who think of themselves as patrons can be cumbersome and is always time-consuming. Frank Gehry's managing partner David Denton thinks that the real patrons are clients who get a sense of personal fulfillment from participating in the process of design; they provide a small percentage of the firm's economic volume ("Actually, they expect a reduction in fees!"; Roundtable, 1989). Robert Stern echoes this: "Houses are marvelous," he says, "they give you a chance for aesthetic expression. . . . But, on the other hand, house clients are not professionals at being clients. . . . [They] are very demanding, the personal contact is wonderful, but it can also be straining."

33. His firm's solution is to base its survival on major interior projects: "300,000 square feet, at least two a year" (Roundtable, 1989).

34. Roundtable, 1989 (emphasis added).

35. Gutman, Architectural Practice, 88. See tables at 86 and 119.

36. Large train stations, like Union Station in Washington, D.C., or Grand Central in New York are renovated into upscale shopping malls and "privatized" to the detriment of homeless dwellers.

37. Myers was trained at the University of Pennsylvania when Edward Bacon, by whom he was influenced, was director of planning in Philadelphia. He had then a brilliant but also frustrating career in architecture and urban design in Toronto and practices now in Los Angeles.

38. "Interview: Gerald Hines and Peter Eisenman," 20.

39. DPZ's attacks against the suburbs (a temple to the automobile, isolation, sprawling malls, and office parks), long visible in architectural circles, are getting much attention from the general press. Visibility has gained for DPZ some significant public commissions, such as the twenty-year master plan for Trenton, New Jersey. Duany told a graduate seminar at the Harvard School of Design that the effects of his approach to planning are more likely to shape the future than reform the past: "Our revolution is taking over the codes. . . . Most of my time is not spent designing, but writing codes" ( Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 29, 1990, 10A).

40. Thus, Graham Gund, whose firm won the American Institute of Architects' award for excellence in design, laments that the psychological satisfaction he gets continue

from designing a house does not seem worth the time it takes from the firm's point of view: "We have too many $5 million projects; the 40 million one makes more sense" (Roundtable, 1989). In a much smaller firm than SOM, Gund echoes Diane Legge's statement of unresolved tension at the beginning of this section.

41. Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism , rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 280. For an idea of how the mass press presented the skyscrapers of the building boom and their architects, see Newsweek , Nov. 8, 1982, 67-76.

42. Firms that have opted not to work for speculative clients, firms such as Morphosis or, for a time, Friday Architects, accept limitations that are bound to affect their prospects and those of their employees. A potentially significant phenomenon and career alternative is for architects to turn developers. I do not deal with it here, for only two of the architects I interviewed had acted as developers at the beginning of their independent practice, only in California (taking advantage of runaway real estate inflation) and only on a very small scale. The model that is always cited is the spectacular success of John Portman's design-development firm in conjunction with the Hyatt Hotels chain. See John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976).

43. Progressive Architecture , June 1991, 114. See also the remarkable book by the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

44. Stanley Tigerman says: "The reason architecture does so well here is that it is an autistic event: You don't have to talk. . . . There is the Midwestern antagonism to intellectuals, to talking. This place actually builds. It takes some care and joy in actually detailing and making things well."

45. In many other countries, the architect is not responsible for the working drawings: In Japan, the contractor has full responsibility; it is usual for the architect to have a small field office on the works to follow the execution of the project. In Italy, as in France, the separation between architect and contractor is mediated by a third party, the construction manager, who insures the coherence between the project and its realization. The maturity of segments of the building industry in the United States has made it possible to go directly from the architect's working drawings to execution. Except in the United Kingdom, it is also unusual for architects to choose contractors or engineering and other consultants. (I am grateful to Vittorio Gregotti for these details.)

46. Giovannini, "Grand Reach," 27.

47. See Alan Colquhoun's introduction to Essays in Architectural Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1985).

48. I borrow from the typology in Coxe et al., "Charting Your Course."

49. Cesar Pelli, who went from Eero Saarinen's "elite" office to head the small design department of a large architectural engineering firm (Daniel Mann Johnson Mendehall in Los Angeles) and from there to Gruen Associates, seems to have been one of the few exceptions. In fact, the awards Pelli won while at DMJM were not sufficient to bring "architectural" commissions to a firm that had no reputation for design. Working within Gruen's large commercial practice offered Pelli (though not Frank Gehry, who for years waited in vain at Gruen's to be promoted to associate) the opportunity to make a name for himself through such buildings as the 1973 Commons and Courthouse Center in Columbus, Indiana, and the Pacific Design continue

Center in Los Angeles. In 1977, Pelli's reputation gained him the prestigious deanship at Yale's School of Architecture. It is not indifferent that Pelli had maintained through teaching and visits the relationship with Yale that he first formed as project captain for Eero Saarinen's Yale buildings. The small practice Pelli started "on the side" with his wife, Diana Balmori, and Fred Clarke of Gruen's had mushroomed into an office of over 100 people by 1989.

50. Architects converted into media stars can be used to sell any product, like Michael Graves praising Dexter Shoes in a much-quoted New York Times 1987 ad, or the much-less-known but handsome couple of Todd Williams and Billie Tsien in The Gap's shirt ads.

51. No one knows the problem of succession better than John Burgee. In 1968, he and Philip Johnson started a practice that soon specialized in large-scale work for speculative clients, something to which Johnson (though not Burgee) was entirely new. The partnership has become "John Burgee, Architects," a firm for which the eighty-four-year-old Johnson is design consultant, and Burgee has another partner, whose name is not yet publicized. Burgee says "My name is not known as Philip's, even though it has been on the firm for twenty years." His strategy is essentially to "focus more on the firm--that is, a group of individuals, not a single person--and to stress more and more the quality that this group of experienced individuals can bring."

For this reason, Burgee wants to keep the office around sixty people, "the size where I am personally involved in each project and [yet] we can do the very big ones." To surmount the problem of succession, Burgee is working to develop another "hybrid," a medium-sized commercial practice of international scope that operates as an all-around service firm. The main difference with the "two-lives hybrid" is Burgee's (not always successful) struggle to keep the working drawings in house. It is possible that Burgee's practice will increasingly resemble the more traditional type of elite architectural firm, once the very high profile due to Philip Johnson's name and to the patronage of Hines Interests dissipates. (The extremely damaging outcome of a 1991 suit by a former partner has forced Burgee to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and may well have finished the firm.)

52. Some of the examples I feel bound to name belong to architects already included in the encyclopedia Contemporary Architects: the Cannery and Monterey's Aquarium by Esherick Homsey Dodge Davis; Tent City and the Transportation Building by Goody and Clancy of Boston; the Loyola Law School or the Hollywood Library by Frank Gehry (before the Pritzker Prize and his international fame); the Anti-Cruelty Society building and the Library for the Blind by Stanley Tigerman in Chicago; Franklin Court by Venturi and Rauch in Philadelphia; Gerald Horn's addition to Northwestern University's Law School for Holabird and Root. Some others belong to architects who are younger and should some day deserve to be included: the Lombard Street Community Center by Friday Architects in Philadelphia; Rob Quigley's Public Library and the Baltic Inn for the homeless in San Diego; Morphosis's Outpatient Cancer Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles; Koning and Eizenberg's affordable housing in Santa Monica; William Rawn's two housing projects for the Bricklayers Union in Boston.

53. Even Bruce Graham, who did not need a career alternative and who complains bitterly about the state of architectural education, serves on the board of the continue

University of Pennsylvania's School of Fine Arts and is the moving force behind SOM's Foundation for Architecture.

54. The Baltic Inn has assuaged the neighborhood's fears so well that Quigley is now designing an upscale SRO for the "higher end of the low-rent market" and several others throughout the city. In Los Angeles, Koning and Eizenberg are designing "the first new SRO hotel in three decades" for a nonprofit developer. See Progressive Architecture, June 1991, 104-5.