Introduction

The role of history in theories of practice

2The motivation of (predominantly European) ethnographic inquiry into architecture over the past fifteen years, as indicated by this volume, has been to productively re-think knowledge of the ‘social.’ Drawing on science and technology studies, and, more specifically, the Actor Network Theory (ANT) as foundationally described by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, these important studies describe the processual socio-material networks that practitioners operate in. For architecture, as Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva (2008) have outlined, ANT has offered a re-framing of building design as ‘projects’ ever-changing in their shape, meaning, and value, rather than as static objects. Although the followers of ANT assiduously acknowledge the historicity of the subjects they study, such as Latour’s recognition that some elements of society originate from ‘other’ times and locations that are entwined with the present (Latour, 1999, 2005), or Callon’s acknowledgement that systems such as market economies are historical processes (Callon, 1999, p. 192), they unequivocally distance themselves from historiography and historical objects to afford a more intricate view of emerging local dynamics, leaving the construction of historical knowledge to ‘professional’ historians (Latour, Woolgar, 1986; Latour, 2005). From the vantage point of a historian, this distancing can be understood as a result of history’s disciplinary formation in the early nineteenth century, which became stronger and more defined by disassociating itself with rhetoric and “realism” (White, 2010, p. 14). For architecture, Beatriz Colomina (1999) has similarly argued that as a result of architecture history’s art historical foundations, historians and critics have, at least until the late 1990s, found reassurance and confidence in studies of objects and built form, rather than in the messiness of practice.

3Through an alternative anthropological lens, however, a number of cultural anthropologists in the 1980s specifically turned to history, hoping to resist traditionally static ethnographic frames of timeless, motionless objects, which, at the surface, represented an ambition not unlike that of ANT. However, for them, culture itself was understood to be the object of inquiry, rather than the direct linkages between people and things. When ‘practice theory’ was first developed in the 1970s, with which cultural anthropologists hoped to overcome the functionalist opposition between structure and agency, the role of history was implied at best. The new and important term, ‘practice,’ as founding sociologists Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Anthony Giddens (1979), and anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1981) collectively described, was used to describe practitioners and their actions “on the ground,” as well as the “structures” that both constrained and could be altered by them. Cultural anthropologists began to fold history into their work by grounding actors in broader social, cultural, and political contexts – interpreting practices as either productions or reproductions of history. These studies ranged from Eric Wolf’s political-economic history, Europe and the People without History (1981), to Clifford Geertz’s cultural history Negara (1980), to Bernard Cohn’s colonial history (1980, 1996). As anthropologist Sherry Ortner has argued, these turns to history were important to the formation of practice theory as such, precisely because they:

• 2 In studies of architecture, ethnographic frames are not inherently static, even when substantively (...)

destabilized traditionally static modes of ethnographic inquiry, and substantively, in insisting that the traditional world of anthropological objects – ‘cultures’ – were not timeless and pristine objects, but were themselves products of the restless operation of both internal dynamics (mostly local power relations) and external forces (such as capitalism and colonialism) over time (2006, p. 9).2

4More assertively, in her own study of the founding of Buddhist temples and monasteries among the Sherpas of Nepal, Ortner concluded that “a theory of practice is a theory of history” (1989, p. 199).

5It is into this same theoretical web of 1980s discourse that sociological and anthropological studies of architectural practice were cast, carefully unfolding the actions and beliefs of architects by using histories of the American architectural profession (Blau et al., 1983), academic institutions (Cuff, 1991), or economic markets (Blau, 1984; Gutman, 1988) to both contextualize and make sense of observed everyday actions. To be sure, the goal of such works, much like that of cultural anthropology, was not to overcome the gap between objects and subjects, nor to engage in historiography; rather, it was to study and interpret the culturally constructed sets of beliefs, actions, and procedures ‘on the ground’ to reveal the ways in which architects and their organizations were historically conditioned and stratified. Dana Cuff’s ethnography, Architecture: The Story of Practice (1992), for instance, described how building projects within architecture offices were the centerpieces of complex social negotiations between architects, their clients, and consultants. Cuff understood “practice” to mean “the embodiment, indeed, the expression, of a practitioner’s everyday knowledge” (ivi, p. 4). As accumulations of history, Cuff’s framing of embodied knowledge closely resembled political philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s (1999) concept of a “practical past,” which he described as the form of the past shaping a person’s everyday tasks, actions, and decisions, or what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990) described as a person’s “habitus.” A “-habitus,” according to Bourdieu, was the set of societal forces written into one’s body; a system of acquired dispositions functioning as “categories of perception and assessment,” “classificatory principles,” and the “organizing principles of action” (ivi, p. 13). As deeply internalized habits, know-how, and competencies, embodied knowledge was thought to be a form of drag on the present, through which culture and society could be produced and reproduced through in-situ actions.

6More importantly, the influential concept of habitus became one of the few points of agreement between Bourdieu’s theory of practice and that of Latour’s, and it serves as a potential site of common ground between cultural anthropology and science and technology studies and, by extension, between histories and ethnographies of architecture practice. In his own interpretation, Latour described the habitus as “circuitry through which plug-ins lend actors the supplementary tools – the supplementary souls – that are necessary to render a situation interpretable” (2005, p. 209). Following Bourdieu, Latour asks: “Doesn’t reading novels help you know how to love? … Without the avid reading of countless fashion magazines, would you know how to bake a cake?” (ibid.). The sources of contention for Latour, however, are what he refers to as the broader ‘dark’ social forces (structures) not directly connected to the body politic nor easily reducible to a tangible object to study within an ethnographic present:

If you remember that there is nothing beyond and beneath, that there is no near-world of the social, then is it not fair to say that they make up a part of your own cherished intimacy? (ibid.)

Historical ethnography as method

8Historian Hayden White has described the interlacing of history and ethnography as the foundation of a “theatre of ‘practical reason’… in which human agency [is] displayed in the activity of making a world rather than simply inhabiting one” (2010, p. 14). Taken together, “historical ethnography” offers an interdisciplinary method that draws from both history and anthropology to understand the ways in which the past informs the present. Sensitive to the ethnographic imperative of cultural anthropology to connect everyday practices to broader social, economic, and political forces of history, as well as that of science and technology studies to connect humans and material objects, historical ethnography offers architecture a particularly unifying research method. This approach has been theorized most notably by anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1992), and expanded upon by a number of recent scholars (Des Chene, 1997; Stoler, 2002; Hunter, 2013). Citing the historical malleability of ethnography’s disciplinary claims, the Comaroffs suggest that the study of history may indeed rattle the age-old epistemological credo of ethnography that “seeing is believing,” and they offer a reminder that ethnography is:

not a vain attempt at literal translation, in which we take over the mantle of an-other’s being, conceived of as somehow commensurate with our own. It is a historically situated mode of understanding historically situated contexts, each with its own perhaps radically different, kinds of subjects and subjectivities, objects and objectives. (1992, p. 10)

9Following Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) assertion that ethnographers and historians are united in an effort to represent societies other than those in which they live, whether removed in time or in space, the Comaroffs clarify that while ethnography constitutes a specific epistemology, it is also a set of methods for qualitative research capable of extending beyond the immediate site of a practice as it unfolds. They continue:

Ethnography surely extends beyond the range of the empirical eye; its inquisitive spirit calls upon us to ground subjective, culturally configured action in society and history – and vice versa – wherever the task may take us… In this sense, one can ‘do’ ethnography in the archives… one can also ‘do’ the anthropology of national or international forces and formations: of colonialism, evangelism, liberation struggles, social movements, dispersed diasporas, regional development,’ and the like. (1992, p. 11)

10In other words, while the epistemological underpinnings of ethnography as a way of seeing may be limited or in some ways undermined by historical analysis, both ethnography and historiography are methods of research applicable to architectural historians and anthropologists alike.

11In order to make sense of the complex systems and widening array of sites ripe for ethnographic analysis, anthropologist George Marcus (1986, 1995) has argued that ethnographers should develop a “view of a system,” prior to providing an ethnographic account of it, “showing the forms of local life that the system encompasses, and then leading to novel or revised views of the nature of the system itself, translating its abstract qualities into more fully human terms” (1986, p. 171). While Marcus was not concerned with history as such, recent ethnographers have suggested that, among the sites anthropologists now visit when they go to “the field” is the archive – the very site where Foucault (1972) suggested “rules of practice” were established – to reveal the multiple entanglements of people and structures of power, such as those with states and institutions (Des Chene, 1997; Stoler, 2002). Bracing against skepticism from both historians and other anthropologists, who argue that archives are, at best, supplements to sites of ethnographic observation, anthropologists including Mary Des Chene and Ann Laura Stoler demonstrate how archival work can itself be understood as a wholly ethnographic endeavor in their studies of colonialism – using arrival objects to determine structural principles of organization, explain why certain practices came to be, and how certain conditions determined who and how one could speak or act. Finally, if, as Lévi-Strauss asserted, historians and ethnographers are similarly committed to representing societies other than those in which they live, then the work of a historian and ethnographer might be viewed in parallel: the task of writing notes about archival objects or documents is an interpretive task not unlike that of writing ethnographic field notes. As Des Chene concludes, when notes of either sort are expanded into prose, then the work of studying the past and the present is much the same (1997, p. 77).

Historical ethnography of architecture firms

12If one of the central benefits of bridging between historical and ethnographic accounts of practices within cultural anthropology in the 1980s was to reveal the ways in which actors produced or reproduced history, then historical ethnography in architecture might be especially useful to help explain how and why certain structures of distinction, power, or exclusion were historically configured, but also if and how they continue to play out in the present. Returning to the opening observations made at Gensler, the corporate architecture firm is one possible site, among others, upon which to base a historical ethnography, but it offers insight into the often-overlooked dynamics of economic power, hegemony, and globalization. While the complexity of large-scale work was reflected in sociological studies of architecture during the 1980s (Blau, 1984; Gutman, 1988; Cuff, 1992), they compared architecture firms based on macro conditions of scale and relative complexity, developing organizational characteristics that stratified them in various ways. “Large” architecture firms, for instance, were characterized as those employing more than fifty people; as best suited for large-scale projects; as having complex clients such as corporations and government organizations; as providing a wide array of services with sophisticated management; and by prioritizing service and entrepreneurialism over “design” (Cuff, 1992, p. 46).

14Perhaps as evidence to Manfredo Tafuri’s claim that architectural historians are necessarily fueled by continual promptings from practice, architectural historians in the US over the past two decades have specifically turned to large-scale architectural firms and corporate formations to determine why and how such conditions emerged. Two examples are Reinhold Martin’s Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (2005), which examines the totalizing power of corporate ideologies during the 1960s, and John Harwood’s The Interface (2011), which explores the impacts of computation systems on corporate architecture between the mid-1940s and 1970s. Moreover, doctoral programs of architecture in the United States, the majority of which are pedagogically devoted to the study of history, reveal a similar attention to large-scale organizations of economic power, as evidenced by a series of recent and forthcoming dissertations, including Avigail Sachs’s Environmental Design and the Expansion of Architectural Practice, 1937-1973 (UC Berkeley, 2009); Alexandra Lange’s Tower Typewriter and Trademark: Architects, Designers and the Corporate Utopia, 1956-1964 (NYU, 2005); Hyun-Tae Jung’s Organization and Abstraction: The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill from 1936 to 1956 (Columbia University, 2011); Michael Kubo’s Architecture Incorporated: Authorship, Anonymity, and Collaboration in Postwar Modernism (MIT, 2017); as well as my own, Design and Profit: Architectural Practice in the Age of Accumulation (UCLA, forthcoming), which makes an explicit effort to bridge between ethnography and history by using Los Angeles-based architecture and engineering firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall (DMJM; now AECOM) as a case study.

15Yet examining an architectural firm using the methods of historical ethnography first requires a reimagining of the possible sites and subjects of investigation. A historical ethnography, the Comaroffs argue, “must begin by constructing its own archive. It cannot content itself with established canons of documentary evidence, because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism – as much the subject as the means of inquiry” (1992, p. 34). Drawing from my research, the assembling of an archive for the corporate firm DMJM and its umbrella successor, AECOM, for example, immediately reveals a broader definition of architectural work. Formed as a turbulent, profit-sapping partnership in California in 1946, the three founding architects (DMJ) were entrenched not only in the production of drawings and models, but, in an effort to brace against the volatility of a speculative urban economy, they also designed a corporate ladder, wrote business procedures, office standards, and growth plans that shaped and made possible the forms of conglomeration that have since come to characterize AECOM. Moving from archive to office, the study of DMJM leads one first to the doorstep of the archives of the University of Southern California, where the founding architects were educated alongside noted Hollywood Art Directors during the tail end of the Great Depression, to the classified archives of the US Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to uncover government alliances, contracts, letters, and project documents related to Cold War national defense, to the US Security Exchange Commission where legal corporate documents were filed, to trade journals of business and management where organizational plans were published, to private residences of retired architects and business leaders to gather oral histories, and finally to the present office to conduct open-ended interviews and to observe. As its own collection, the documents, drawings, objects, and stories begin to explain how such a firm emerged, growing slowly between the 1950s and the 1990s by acquiring firms and their attendant embodied histories – a practice of resilience that was directly informed by Cold War military strategies predicated on deterring potential aggressors. While for DMJM, accumulating embodied history implied acquiring individuals and firms with proven experience and diverse expertise, accumulating embodied history for the military implied acquiring tried, tested, and indestructible materials and weapons, such as ballistic missiles and their impenetrable concrete bases – layers of brute force that were designed by the same architects that designed DMJM. Therefore, a historical ethnography of DMJM reveals that architecture practice might not only be understood as a social negotiation between architects, their collaborators, and clients (Cuff, 1992), nor a socio-material negotiation between the various actors and material objects (Yaneva, 2009a, 2009b), but rather a negotiation between actors, objects, and – importantly – their embodied histories.

Conclusion

16A renewed interest in architecture practice over the last two decades indicates an important shift in attention away from architects as individuals and buildings as objects, to broader and more complex views of architecture as an entanglement of actors, materials, and historical forces. With it, this shift has also ushered in new theories and methods for research that reveal an emerging divide in analytic approach – between ethnographies of the present and histories of the past. While this schism reflects epistemological and disciplinary allegiances of scholars, there are productive methodological intersections between them. By turning to the formation of practice theory as it developed within cultural anthropology in the late 1970s and 1980s, when a similar debate between ethnography and history surfaced, the role of history and historical objects can be understood as a means by which to reconcile the formations of the past with the exigencies of the present. For practice theory, the turns to history in the 1980s helped to explain whether or not contemporary practices constituted reproductions of history, carrying with them deeply rooted structures of power, ideologies, or institutionalized inequalities that might otherwise be indiscernible in observations of the present, or if they indeed represented a form of historical transformation. While anthropologists informed by science and technology studies have braced against engagements with history to afford more detailed views into the dynamics of the present, historical ethnography sensitively unites the concerns of ethnography and historiography in such a way that guards against tendencies to detach architects and architectural workers from the political, economic, and material realities in which they are inextricably embedded.

17In 1995, Robert Gutman argued that the field of architecture was comprised of two seemingly disjointed discourses: one centered on the history and theory of architecture and was based in the academy, while another centered on practice and was based in the architecture office. The strength of architecture as both a discipline and profession, he suggested, was predicated on productive bridges between the two discourses. Similarly, Dana Cuff argued that the forward momentum of architecture was founded on a dynamic feedback between historically constructed “beliefs” of architects and the “circumstances found in everyday architectural practice” (1992, p. 56). Therefore, uniting the terms of history and ethnography as a method for studying architectural practice offers an important unifying effect for revisionist thinking: for both, the engagement with history guards against the potential timelessness of practices by defining architects as consequential contributors to a world perpetually in-the-making, rather than merely inhabitants of one.