Inside the office

CALL FOR PAPERS - International Conference of Construction History (9ICCH)
Deadline for abstracts: June 28, 2026.

When architectural and construction historians inspect the oeuvre of an office involved in building, they often reduce it to the offspring of a single leading architect. However, throughout the 20th century, offices grew increasingly complex and were composed of professionals with diverse profiles and forms of expertise, ranging from design and calculation, to management and administration.

Many external influences invited practitioners to unite forces in one team and to adapt these bonds over time. The rising technical complexity of building challenged the single-authored office and called for a redefinition of roles and profiles. Legislation protecting the architectural profession implicitly reinforced societal regard for design of buildings and structures, relegating ‘other’ administrative or managerial competences to the back office, at times with gendered repercussions. Evolving tools of production affected the size of teams and the distribution of work: the act of drawing (and the required skill to do so) acquired new significance with the evolution of engineering knowledge for instance, but also with the introduction of digital tools. New public requirements, validation and filing tools and computers overall influenced the importance of bureaucratic building labour, which itself was re-defined repeatedly following legal, societal and economical influences. And especially from the 1960s onwards, new economic realities and legal loopholes restructured architectural offices into increasingly hierarchical firms, with name partners, project leaders, and interns employed under often precarious conditions.

 This session invites to disentangle these constellations wrapped under one name, to build a more realist understanding of how work, expertise and credit were distributed inside the office, and to reveal all actors of architecture and construction in the office, including those relegated to the back office. Moreover, it seeks to highlight the alternative sources and methodological perspectives necessary to chart the inside of the architecture or engineering office. It is open to a variety of contributions that deal with the long 20th century[SD1] , take a monographic, sectorial, or international approach, develop both case-based and quantitative narratives, or explore new methodologies to contribute to the historiography of the extended office. We particularly invite studies which tackle questions like:

-        The (collaborative) composition of offices;
-        Articulations of authorship, authority and hierarchy;
-        Tools of production, collaboration, management and communication: generic and specific to competences and profiles;
-        Narratives on gender, foreign and marginal(ized) profiles, visible and invisible work;
-        Offices as a place of training and knowledge transfer or exclusion.