Historically, architecture has been initiated by the church and state, businesses and corporations, developers, and affluent institutions and individuals with the capital and resources necessary to commission architects. The realization of any project is dependent on the architect’s ability to establish and negotiate a relationship with a client or patron. In the performance of their services, the architect often assumes a passive role responding to a set of received parameters, which include a given site, budget, and functional or other quantitative or qualitative needs of the client.

This seminar will analyze the history of architectural patronage and locate instances outside of the normative professional structures and relationships between architects, clients, and builders, both past and present. In considering an expanded role, the seminar will examine the capacity of the architectural profession to initiate the project, to define the client, to bypass the client or patron altogether, to exercise greater control of the terms of design and construction, and/or to assume the roles, responsibilities, and risk of the developer and/or builder. The seminar will question and critique the normative professional processes and the client or patron as a necessary precondition and starting point for architecture. The seminar will attempt to distill and establish a framework for different alternative modes for practice that enable greater architectural “agency,” simply defined as the architect’s power and ability to achieve their goals. This research and speculation on non-normative practice also has the potential to refocus the profession away from the interests of those clients directly commissioning work and their capital, and towards values and interests marginalized by and excluded from typical and existing professional practice structures, which may include users (separate and distinct from clients), a broader public, under-represented stakeholders and constituencies, and the environment.

The seminar presupposes the practice of architecture is a territory and potential site of creativity and invention. Inherent in the seminar is the assumption that a new generation of architects will develop necessary and novel structures and processes and relations between actors, capital, land, and architecture
 

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 9th.