Collaboration in historical buildings: self-evident but intangible.

Collaboration has always been a reaction to the complexity of building, answering to the increasing need for innovation and specialization in building. While collaboration in historical buildings is considered self-evident, it is neither well researched, nor fully understood. Authorship of buildings is still often post-factum attributed to a single architect or engineer, cloaking the contributions of other parties. Moreover, historiographical practices tend to separate the profiles of professional builders artificially, ignoring slippages between training and profile or between contractual duties and professional skills.

This session tackled the complex interactions between professional collaborators in the design and construction process of historical buildings. It assembled papers that highlight the complex interplays of knowledge, knowledge exchange, profiles, education and the specific contributions made by professional actors of building in assuming and performing their tasks. The papers critically assessed aspects of collaboration through case studies and together cover a large geographical scope for the period 1900-1970.

The introduction to the session started from five statements on historical collaboration in building and framed collaboration as a process influenced by contextual elements and by specific challenges in each project:

(1) Collaboration in historical building is self-evident but not well understood ;

(2) While essentially project-based as an object of study, collaboration is a lens to understand the impact of broader processes in the building sector, like professionalization ;

(3) The tools of historical collaboration in building are revealing of the knowledge in actors and of the knowledge exchange between them, which takes place in every project ;

(4) A focus on historical collaboration in building can help to better understand the societal entanglement of building ;

(5)   Historical collaboration in building is still an open field of study.

The text positioned professional collaboration in building in a field of tension between the explicit and tacit knowledge of the many actors involved, and the challenges to exchange that knowledge. It demonstrated how research on historical collaboration is entangled with the questioning of actors, professionalization and broader societal issues. In addition, the introduction highlighted how archival traces play a central role in understanding historical processes of collaboration.

Contributors to the session were:

* Silvia Arroyo Duarte (professor at the Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño, Universidad de Panamá), "The National Theater of Panama: a collaborative process"

* Silke Haps (PhD, Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Germany), "Collaboration in building with plastic-coated steel in West Germany in the 1960s: the “Hoesch-bungalow”"

* Simona Talenti (Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Salerno, Italy), “Architects and engineers: design authorship between synergies and disagreements”

* Alexander Curth and Caitlin Mueller (Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) and Mohamed Ismail (Department of Architecture of the University of Virginia, US), “The Concrete Collaborations of Carmen Portinho and Affonso Reidy: Structural innovation in Brazilian Modernism through public service”