"Bargains, Boilerplate, and the Making of the US Building Industry"

This paper weaves together two histories of contract bargaining—between architects and building contractors, on the one hand, and of contractors and trade unions, on the other—that arose simultaneously in the United States during the late nineteenth century, the so-called age of contract. The standard-form building contracts and collective-bargaining agreements that resulted from these negotiations codified the social and economic relations that define the modern construction industry, including the role of the general contractor as a despised but indispensable mediator of the relationship between architectural expression and building labor. The paper traces the early history of the suite of standardized contract documents produced and licensed by the American Institute of Architects (arguably its most effectual sphere of activity today), beginning in 1888 with the first Uniform Contract, a product of tenuous cooperation with the short-lived National Association of Builders. Through close reading and contextualization of these documents, I show how these copyrighted boilerplate forms were used to thread the political economy of contract through America’s disparate “building interests,” binding them together as a nationwide industry. In codifying their mutual contractual obligations, I argue, architects and contractors also codified themselves—not as individual collaborators but as fungible legal abstractions in a market society. I compare these negotiations between architects and contractors to those that were beginning to unfold at the same time between building employers’ associations and trade unions, well documented in labor archives, in order to reveal the tensions of contract that underlie the vexed relationship between architecture, capital, and labor in the modern world.