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If the price is right: the hard currency of

architecture
24 SEPTEMBER 2019 BY CLAIRE ZIMMERMAN ESSAYS

Cost is an inextricable determining factor in the difference RELATED STORIES

between architecture and building, with lower outlay
False Economy
generally signalling dearth of quality
23 OCTOBER 2012 BY JESSICA KELLY

Architecture today includes a remarkable plurality of built environments, ‘The shock waves of the new
distributed globally and diachronically. Yet a much narrower usage political economy steering
emerged within the expansionist programme of Western capitalism when housing policies are widespread
the word appeared in 15th-century Europe to distinguish elite practice across the globe’
from mundane building. Buildings that deserved the capital-A appellation 27 APRIL 2016
were expensive demonstrations, executed by elites and presuming a BY NELSON MOTA AND DICK VAN
GAMEREN
comparatively generous budget from the outset. Leon Battista Alberti,
taking up Vitruvius’s triad (in which cost is filtered through use,
Andreas Gursky and an economy
durability and aesthetic address), nonetheless also focused on architecture
of scale
as a tool ‘necessary … to the acquisition and establishment of an Empire’
17 APRIL 2018 BY ELEANOR BEAUMONT
for which the expertise of an architect was essential.

Body unbuilding: on cuts,

‘How would architectural stitching and anarchitecture
history and theory 18 MARCH 2019 BY JACK HALBERSTAM

change, were cost to Identity check: slow architecture

grows on the islands of Ireland
become an analytical
14 JUNE 2019 BY SHANE O’TOOLE
rubric for assessing
change over time?’ On the money: the merits of
degrowth
The profession of, and discourse on, architecture in this context are 30 AUGUST 2019
BY PHINEAS HARPER AND SMITH
intimately tied to a sizeable outlay of money in building projects. Often MORDAK
dedicated to the highest intellectual ideals, such buildings were
nonetheless also intended to realise profit through investment, Enough is enough: Oslo
speculation and conquest (Sven Beckert’s ‘war capitalism’). And yet, Architecture Triennale 2019
theories and histories of architecture have steadfastly treated the 14 OCTOBER 2019
economic underpinnings of building projects as epiphenomenal to their BY ELEANOR BEAUMONT

true We
value. In fact,
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phase that eschewed them. This phase, most local to the 20th century,
emerged with an equally implicit programme of serving mass audiences
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and providing social betterment in the face of 19th-century critiques of
capitalist exploitation. All the stranger, then, that in a period in which
mass democratisation movements took shape, architects and their writers
exercised greater silence on the socioeconomic agency of building than
earlier Western architects who aspired to build villas and palaces.

Images from Francisco Mujica’s 1929 History

of the Skyscraper included the ‘100-Story
City in the “Neo- American Style”’

Part of the difficulty rests in finding effective methods to unlock historical

knowledge of architecture as capitalism, without reinstating notions of an
implacably exploitative or malevolent force over which individual
buildings or people have little agency. Frankfurt School critiques of the
politics of cultural practices are virtually unanswerable for this reason.
Yet architectural history and theory have an untapped resource through
which to connect capitalism to buildings in a way that opens up new
possibilities rather than closing them down. Might the connection
between money, cost and building production transform the built
environment from witless tool of market forces into crafty means of
resistance? In other words, questions of how much things cost, how costs
are balanced, and where the money goes in large and complex building
projects could unlock new ways of understanding architecture in society.
Such connections, operable through time, also might be more consciously
deployed in contemporary building (politics). The great economic
historians of the 20th century (Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Ferdinand
Braudel) sought this kind of knowledge beyond the limits of the built
environment. Their echo in environmental history beckons to us today.

Francisco Mujica’s 1929 History of the

Skyscraper

How would architectural history and theory change, were cost to become
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luxury building costs more than others, yet architectural historians have
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been reticent when it comes to connecting that knowledge to its
Accept context. Looking back to writing that accepted the triad
sociopolitical
(implicitly or explicitly), cost adds an index of analysis against which to
calibrate measures of building use, structural fitness and beauty.
Architects and historians have not limited their purview to these three
for some time, yet, as a datum that immediately introduces a quantitative
idea of value to offset the qualitative concerns of architecture culture,
money cost indexes other aspects of building. Of two buildings with
similar quality X, that of lower cost would immediately rise in value by
offering more quality (of experience, of aesthetic address, of social
engineering, of public good) for less quantity (of currency). This index
describes a fundamental mechanism of capitalism: get more out for less
put in (or, get something for nothing). It is hardly surprising that a desire
to subvert this transactional logic by establishing that value, seemingly
independent of money cost, might coexist with an implicit denial of its
importance in the production of buildings. Rather than deny such logic,
though, historians might find better ways to expose it in the production of
meaningful, even operative, histories.

As a relativising device, cost provides a way to measure other kinds of

value, if only because hard currency regulates how people live. But money
cost also introduces politics into architectural assessment, more or less by
stealth – a politics that emerges with greater drama during times of
crisis, shortage or contraction. en resources are scarce for many, lower
cost matters to those who have less – as well as to those who profess to
represent them. The luxury of ignoring cost, by contrast, is equally
indicative of prosperous socioeconomic status, and thereby acquires its
own political association with elites. Those with abundant resources can
ignore cost if they so choose. Factoring the money cost of building into
architectural discourse thus lays bare the class basis of architecture itself,
cancelling many of its claims for social betterment, or embedding them
deeply in an elitist, paternalistic concept of social engineering. Avant-
garde or progressive credentials do not mask this class basis; they only
make it more apparent by restating its claims in a slightly different
language. The avant-garde is not so much the canary in the coal mine of
capitalism as its mechanical avatar, never to be killed by the noxious
vapours of the host. We have gone beyond the time of the avant-garde;
now, as we contemplate the challenges to architects posed by degrowth,
alternative historical paradigms might include the arrière-garde – better
yet, they include a rejection of art historical models altogether.

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History of the Skyscraper included the the links that Mujica, a Peruvian architect, detected
between US skyscraper setbacks and pre-Columbian pyramids of Central America

Looking for alternative models for history writing, in which cost features
as a base condition of architectural analysis (such as site, materials,
programme, style), the end stages of the Second Industrial Revolution
bring forward one work of theory and one of history. Both refer back,
buffering the violence of their own present – characterised by seemingly
untrammelled consumption and rapid technological change; both writers
focused on building tes that emerged from such change to serve large
occupant populations. Moritz Kahn, trained in the College of Engineering
at the University of Michigan, published an obscure theory of
architecture, The Design and Construction of Industrial Buildings, in
1917, while 12 years later, Francisco Mujica published the remarkable
History of the Skyscraper with his own Paris-based imprint.

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Both books belong to a period of American architectural history (North
and South) that has received insufficient attention, perhaps eclipsed by
the twin juggernauts of world war and the dramatic landing of Modernist
art on these shores. at do these books offer to a consideration of cost
in architectural history? Both reflect architecture deeply embedded in
capitalist systems; both take for granted that market forces define and
constrain what architects do. For Mujica, these constraints guided the
development of a building te generated by land and real-estate
speculation: the high-rise office building. For Kahn, serving a demandingly
profit-conscious clientele, buildings were quite literally production
machines. High-rise buildings generated profit by maximising urban land,
stacking floor upon floor as ‘machines to make the land pay’ in the words
of Cass Gilbert. Factories, by contrast, were profligate of land, spreading
out over acres, making the land pay through saleable output. Both books,
usefully informative about their historical context, also merit re-reading
today. Should one wish to combat ‘capitalist sorcery’, in the words of
Philippe Pignarre and Isabel Stengers, one might first understand its
operations, and seek escape valves before they are cut off. The authors
warn, the ‘sounder of the depths’ of capitalist building activities needs to
keep a sharp eye on the waters ahead.

The Design and Construction of Industrial

Buildings outlined the concrete-framed
‘Daylight’ factory system espoused by his
brother Albert

Kahn’s treatise came out of the phenomenal demands that factory

construction exercised on Detroit architects and builders in the first 15
years of the new century, when his brother Albert was active. As Moritz
noted in Design and Construction, design exercises a critical influence
over all stages of production; the architect’s responsibility is intimately
tied to a detailed understanding of how buildings work over time, not
merely at their moment of inception. Rather than the plan, Kahn
describes the importance of the ‘routine diagram’ that spatialises
production processes, moving methodically through stages of
architectural production from start to finish, with two exceptions: a
chapter on worker welfare preceded by another on architectural
treatment. Throughout, the architect is conceived not only as an agent of
the client, but also as the representative of those who will occupy the
plant over time, whether people or machines.

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The mechanised approach to architectural design that Design and
Construction lays out embeds creativity in a sequence of administrative
and organisational procedures strictly controlled by money cost. Kahn
indicates the range of skills an architect must master. Not merely laying
out a building on a site, the architect of early concrete-frame buildings
had to accommodate a complex and variable production sequence in a
regular structural system of reinforced-concrete bays. As regular as they
are, such buildings have a multi-scalar dimension as well. Machine
operations were calculated by square feet of space that they and their
human operators required; metal fixtures for maximal flexibility
embedded in concrete beams and columns made it possible to
accommodate both, and to change the line when production demanded.
The site plan, by contrast, connects to regional or national infrastructure
in the form of truck, train and boat lines. The architect became, in this
scenario, the inventor and constructor of multi-scalar systems rather than
buildings.

Source: COURTESY OF ALBERT KAHN

ASSOCIATES
Albert Kahn (lef ) signing contract with Saul
G Bron (right), President of Amtorg, Detroit, 9
January 1930. Standing centre behind them is
Moritz Kahn

Attention to Mujica’s History of the Skyscraper of 1929 has focused on the

book’s advocacy for Pan American skyscraper styling as an apt style for a
building te invented in North America, based on antecedents from
ancient Mesoamerica. The book appears to have had limited influence
when it appeared, in part because of its small print run (a circulation of
only 150 copies prior to a 1977 Da Capo facsimile). Reluctance to embrace
a nativist history of architecture as the 1930s and ’40s wore on and the
toxic nativism of fascist regimes worldwide became more apparent, also
may have played a role. Regardless, the interest of the book today lies
less in its theories of stylistic expression than in its exploration of a
building te
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these are
buildings that house many occupants and whose importance resides, not
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in form, but in a host of other architectural characteristics. Mujica’s book
includes a catalogue of high-rise buildings organised chronologically, from
the Home Insurance Building of 1884 to One Wall Street, still under
construction as the book went to press in 1929. In it, the author
quantifies buildings quite literally – how many tons of steel, how much
concrete, how many yards of marble, how many acres of rentable floor
space. John Sloan’s foreword sums up the project nicely: ‘The younger
school of American artists is now conscious, whether as a result of the
war or because of the country’s gradual economic growth, or both, of the
fact that an American art must perforce express those phases of
American life that have been expressed more fluently through economic
processes’. Mujica sought an American idiom; it was, at base, an economic
one.

Albert Kahn’s personal cost ledger spanning the years 1907 to 1919. It details a cost analysis of
the Lima Locomotive Works in Ohio. He spatialised cost by calculating it by the cubic foot, as
opposed to the square foot

All of this leaves aside trickier questions that emerge when money cost
becomes part of architectural historical analysis. The difficulty of
computing currency fluctuation and changing exchange rates over time
has been eliminated by digital tools. Yet the intricacies of cost accounting
make it easy to come up with variable numbers for building cost. As it
becomes part of architectural historical analysis, common metrics will be
needed. More importantly, cost provides a lever to open the black box of
architectural authority, to subject it to critique that requires articulate
defence. This does not mean cost becomes determinative of building
value; rather, the lever opens a portal connecting Sloan and Alberti –
architecture, imperial economic force, take note of class and deliver on
your promise.

This piece is featured in the AR September issue on money –

click here to purchase your copy today

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