Papers presented by Chelsea Spencer since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

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

Abstract:

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.

2022 Mexico City

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

Abstract:

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.

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