"Great Estimations: Craft, Quantification, and General Contracting"

How can the cost of a proposed building be determined in advance, given the inherent unknowability of the future? For early twentieth-century American builders, this was a technical question with moral overtones. As intensifying competition, new building technologies, and changed expectations around precision reorganized building in the late nineteenth century, the untrustworthiness of building-cost estimates threatened the legitimacy of the nascent system of general contracting. Contractors and architects alike complained of discrepancies between bids submitted for the same projects, but particularly of those that grossly underestimated their costs. Not only did such “plungers” mean that competitively tendered contracts were often awarded to the least-competent builders, they also undermined the credibility of contractors as a class of professionals more generally, for lack of agreement over price suggested a lack of competence in matters of business. While some builders called for uniform prices and rules, many insisted that estimating was a matter of expert judgment that had to be learned through careful study and systematic practice, in turn prompting experienced contractors to compile their deep knowledge of the contingencies of the building process, as well as their own stores of quantitative data, into handbooks to aid their neophyte competitors. Surveying early twentieth-century instructional literature on building-cost estimating, this paper analyzes these texts as part of a disciplinary effort to legitimize the role of the general contractor as arbiter of pecuniary value in building. I show how estimating was constructed as a type of managerial expertise that transcended the knowhow of the skilled builder and also served contractors as a strategy to abstract the valuation of craft labor away from local customs and trade rules.