Architecture Outside Patronage

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 professional structure is, to a certain extent, mirrored in the pedagogy of design studio at architecture schools. As defined by American Institute of Architect legal contracts, architecture is practiced in a linear progression of design phases and the architect’s role is limited in certain ways, e.g. architects are not involved in the “methods and means” of construction. Project parameters, roles, and responsibilities are assumed to be clear-cut and unchanging, but in reality, can be ambiguous, unstable, and can shift or blur over time. Unlike the presupposed linear sequence, the creative process is often non-linear. These limitations and incongruities of the existing models of professional practice mitigate liability and risk but also intensify the precarity of the architect and any given project, disconnect the architect from construction techniques, and diminish the profession’s ability to serve and engage constituencies and interests outside of existing and rarified centers of power and wealth, i.e. clients who can afford architecture.

This seminar will analyze the history of architectural patronage and locate deviations and instances outside of the normative professional structures and relationships between architects and clients, 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 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. Courses that meet only on Tuesdays will meet for the first time on September 9th. Courses meet regularly otherwise. Please refer to the GSD academic calendar for additional details.