Collaboration and Practice

Abstract

The role of collaboration in architecture has become increasingly visible in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis, as long-standing models of work have been revealed to be unsustainable. For their survival, architectural firms consolidated and turned towards collaborations inside and outside the profession. Yet, in Architecture: The Story of Practice, Dana Cuff describes how architects negotiate the contradictory pulls of professional life and their ambivalent relationship to the diverse collaborative forms that characterize the profession: “There is a general belief, evident among artists, architects, critics, and even scholars, that the quality of a work of art decreases in proportion to the number of people involved in its creation,” such that the “small office remains the ideal of architectural practice” (1992, p. 73). This equivocal attitude manifests itself in perspectives toward the nature of practice and the ways in which collaboration is taught in architecture schools. Beyond professional exigencies, the meaning of collaboration in this historical moment—still unwinding the impact of austerity, increasing income inequality, outsourcing, and automation—has taken on an added political resonance.