Architects of Business and the Labor of Architecture

From factories and warehouses to offices and stores, buildings often figure within business histories as material representations of economic conditions or narrative shorthands for discussions of labor. Less considered within these histories are the labors through which buildings, and thus businesses, are produced and made public. Drawing from pivotal episodes in the history of architecture—from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century—this panel of papers considers the ways in which the work of architects, engineers, contractors, and others shaped and were shaped by economic, political, and technological shifts as they designed professions, businesses, and the conditions of their own and others’ labor. The papers consider how design professionals defined, negotiated, and organized their labor during moments of uncertainty; how office design organized and reproduced the dispositions of those who commissioned, designed, and built them; and how the labor of architecture, in turn, determined the economic, spatial, and environmental possibilities of businesses thereafter. Working across historical moments, this panel also probes historiographical and disciplinary misalignments between disciplinary subfields such as business and architecture history. Architects and architectural archives have long foregrounded visual media, such as drawings and images, discarding seemingly banal documents of business that now pose archival challenges for writing business histories of architecture and architectural histories of business. The papers in this session approach the material conditions of business in a manner that offers potential avenues for expanding both fields’ methodological repertoires and objects of study. Collectively through the case studies they highlight, the papers in this panel argue that, especially when considering issues of labor, neither business histories nor architectural histories can be told without the other.