Institutional Authority and Institutional Critique

In discussing the effects of the events that unfolded during the fateful year of 1968 on architectural education with more than thirty years of hindsight, architect George Baird remarked that “the spectacular reconsideration of the basic premises of architectural education, and the politicization that followed from it, have marked forever all who witnessed the 1968 events.” ¹ George Baird, “1968 and its aftermath: The Loss of Moral Confidence in Architectural Practice and Education,” in Peter G. Rowe, William S. Saunders, Reflections on Architectural Practices in the Nineties. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996): 64-70. Unpacking Baird’s claim about “the 1968 events,” and other architectural histories which have mapped the loss of faith in elite institutions, it is critical to avoid making a direct equation between the politicization of education and the changes and reforms which unfolded in the shadow of 1968 as a cataclysmic event. ² Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect and the Academy,” Daedalus: American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Winter, 1997, Vol. 126, No. 1), 1-38.
Instead, one must look more broadly at the moment of 1968 and its cultural and social histories which have elaborated the conflicting and contradictory ideological registers of the sixties, a moment marked by the influence of a growing youth rebellion, civil rights protests, and an anti-institutional sentiment, as well as the New Left examination of the institutional base of American social problems. The events of this long decade, often labeled under the moniker of “the Sixties,” underscored how the persistent critique of institutional authority, particularly in relationship to societal skepticism and critique of experts, expertise, institutions and their mandate, became a central preoccupation that would greatly affect the future of universities as a site of liberal education. ³ There is a substantial literature on this moment in American cultural history. See, for example: Andrew Jewett, “The Politics of Knowledge in 1960s America,” Social Science History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 2012), 551-581; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. (New York: Twayne), 2006; Carl Davidson, “Toward institutional resistance,” in Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr (eds.) The University Crisis Reader. Vol. 2, Confrontation and Counterattack. (New York: Vintage): 129-38; Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, (New York: Routledge, 1999).

However, before the events of 1968 as a cultural hinge point, a slightly earlier moment in the mid-1960s was significant for the ways in which governmental institutions as well as philanthropic organizations and schools of architecture frantically searched for new ways to define and live up to their social responsibility. ⁴ On changes to academic culture, and the flurry of new and recently-founded institutes at universities and other para-academic organizations, see Susanne Schindler, “The Institutions Must be Designed Before the Buildings,” Perspecta 53 (2020): 110-135. In this moment, American knowledge production and institution-building rapidly evolved, and a significant number of architectural research institutes developed, multiplied, and flourished, at a time when societal institutions, from the armed forces to the government, endured heavy scrutiny and attack. ⁵ This time period is often historicized against the backdrop of a series of ideological shifts from the import of the military-industrial-academic research complex (during the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s) to a critique of humanism and the myths which previously justified scientific research, producing what has been called the “cultural turn” during the Kennedy and Johnson administration in late 1960s and early 70s. Taking a wide view of this period, The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (hereafter identified as IAUS) was one of many such institutes in a moment when the American context was replete with university laboratories, centers, and other such organized research units. ⁶ For example, to mention but a few of these, which indicates the overall trend at this moment: at University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Urban Studies (IUS) and Institute for Architectural Research (IAR), which both were replaced by Institute for Environmental Studies in 1965 (IES); at University of California, Berkeley the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) and Center for Environmental Structure (CES); at Columbia the Center for Environmental Studies; at Princeton the Research Center for Urban and Environmental Planning and Bureau for Urban Research; at Rutgers the Built Environment Group; at MIT the Laboratory for Environmental Studies; at Cornell the Center for Housing and Environmental Studies; MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, and many others of a similar ilk.

Broadly speaking, IAUS was founded in September of 1967 in order to create an extra-institutional space outside of established architecture schools which could serve three interrelated functions: 1/ “instruction and research facilities of the graduate and postgraduate levels,” 2/ “research and planning activities …,” and 3/ “continuing education to the public through seminars, lectures, publications, and exhibitions.” ⁷ Provisional Charter of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, the University of the State of New York Education Department, issued September 29, 1967. Courtesy of New York State Education Department, Office of the Board of Regents. In its constitution as determined by three modes of work, IAUS entered into and exacerbated an existing ambiguous space that was not exactly coincident with the autonomy of the university as understood in the liberal Enlightenment model nor was it coincident with the commercial realm of architectural practice, as determined by constraints such as budgets, clients, regulations and production costs. This is to say that the model of education was located between two poles which are nominally understood to have defined the postwar period as education transitioned from a modern system of professional training that codified the architect’s responsibility to design and build for the needs of society, to, as Irene Sunwoo has argued “a postmodern system of architectural education that positioned architecture as a critical and intellectual practice that questioned the very limits of the discipline.” ⁸ Irene Sunwoo, “Between The “Well-Laid Table” And The “Marketplace”: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments In Architectural Pedagogy,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2011), iv.

Archival Loss

The IAUS archive at the CCA contains a vast array of documents and paperwork: internal memos, institutional frameworks, policies and procedures, by-laws, meeting minutes, project summaries, research notes, bills, grant solicitations and applications, fundraising letters, as well as bureaucratic and managerial documents such as timetables, salary adjustments, handwritten corrections, and other textual efforts. These documents can be roughly organized into four distinct but interrelated threads— administration, configuration, wordcraft, and funding. In focusing attention on these bureaucratic and often overlooked aspects of its constitution, day-to-day work protocols, material and immaterial production, as well as specific projects that speak to unrealized intentions, failed works, conflicts, and false-starts, a different IAUS emerges. Here I would argue that these documents also can be understood as tacit knowledge of a slightly different order than the kind we associate with design efforts – they manifest an effort to negotiate a wide range of irreconcilable demands around institutional identity, management, and workflows.

According to media scholar Lisa Gitelman, documents can be understood as any object “framed as or entered as evidence … once it is mobilized, it becomes a document, an instance proper to that genre.” ⁹ Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014): 14. Paying attention to documents as a form of tacit knowledge, and the historiography around documents is critical to the process of working from and against the grain of the archive, which allows a number of competing voices and objects to be read as evidentiary, not simply the objects or texts that are thought to nominally play this role, thereby opening the material up to actors and forces who were not necessarily authors. ¹⁰ Eventually, bankruptcy ensued shortly thereafter in 1984, and at the end of its existence, sheriffs came to lock the doors and hold a bankruptcy auction, which led to ten or so filing cabinets lost or destroyed in the process. The exact contents of their file cabinets remain unknown. Author conversation with Silvia Kolbowski, February 13, 2022; and author conversation with Julia Bloomfield, May 22, 2022. My attention to archival construction is key to the empirical use of these documents, and underscores the notion of the archive as a partial collection of miscellaneous materials, much of which focuses on paperwork for projects, publications, and events which are, unsurprisingly, less-carefully documented or entirely absent or missing due to their ephemeral or temporal nature or their purposeful exclusion from the archive. This is to say that the bureaucratic support materials overwhelm the projects and research that they ostensibly support, revealing the centrality that bureaucratic management played in constituting institutionality.

An Armory of ‘Little Tools’

In their book Little Tools of Knowledge, historians Peter Becker and William Clark argued that an examination of seemingly self-evident and mundane epistemic and administrative tools reveals how the modern university’s claim to knowledge “came about with or even through an armory of little tools: catalogs, charts, tables (of paper), reports, questionnaires, dossiers, and so on… Such things comprise the modern, mundane, bureaucratic repertoire of paperwork.” ¹¹ See: Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practice. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 108-132. Looking closely at this ‘armory of little tools’ with a vast empirical basis, an examination of the organizational and administrative documents of IAUS from its founding in 1967 to 1974, when its institutional focus shifted to an emphasis on educational programs and therefore tuition dollars, reveals the specific character of the institute as distinct from and similar to others in the same milieu, and positions it within a larger phenomenon of similar agencies, activities, and groups.

Archived documents — including the temporary charter issued by the University of the State of New York Education Department, non-profit tax exemption filings, internal memorandums, trustee reports, by-laws, meeting minutes, project proposals and prospectuses, letters to potential and current donors, project descriptions, director reports, budgetary documents — attest to a self-aware bureaucratic and representational medium in a state of flux as Peter Eisenman as director, the board of trustees, and other associates attempted to shift and accommodate multiple and often conflicting modes of work, funding, and directions in order to stake out a productive territory in a landscape of similar institutes competing for prestige, legitimation, attention, student participants, power, and most of all, dollars. An examination of these documents through multiple parallel trajectories that are not strictly chronological mirrors the manner in which the institute functioned, not as a cohesive entity, but as a contradictory one, as overlapping concerns struggled to find priority during the course of its brief history.

Borders, Between and Within

The archival documents also pose indirect answers to how we might understand what constituted, organizationally and bureaucratically, an “institute” in 1967. And more importantly, the aspirational cultural and intellectual capital of an institute at this time, as distinct from its technocratic and instrumental role as a producer of research, is systematically revealed through an examination of the minutiae of paperwork. Significantly, this bureaucratic medium of documents is legible in two ways. First, as an index of how a fledgling institute defined itself through tacit wordcraft, which I define as a manipulation of the materiality of language through a process of cutting / pasting and rhetorical flexibility to simultaneously pursue clarity andambiguity – a technocratic mimicry of the language, modalities, and formats of documents found in governmental and state apparatuses they aspired to engage such as The Ford Foundation. In this mimicry, there was a mirroring of positivist terminology, vague definitions of then-current trends (many of which were short-lived), and ambitious claims to truth production that were often speculative at best and scientistic at worst. ¹² Sociologist Robert Gutman observed this trend toward bureaucratization in his observations about the trend away from independent proprietorship and toward salaried employment in private firms, which followed “an underlying social process which accompanies the advance of industrialization known as the ‘dequalification of labor.’” Gutman characterized this process as the “tendency of work to be broken down into smaller and more limited tasks requiring less sophisticated training and expertise,” while “at the same time elevating the responsibility of a tiny segment of the professional labor force that has the task of coordinating and managing.” Bureaucratization and more paperwork were one of the most immediate and most obvious outcomes of this dequalification. See: Robert Gutman, Architecture from the Outside in: Selected Essays, ed. Dana Cuff and John Wriedt. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 38. And second, this bureaucratic medium can be analyzed as a means to understand the nature of distributed authorship that was at stake under the rubric of an institute – a designation that was not so clearly defined – and how this grey matter of bureaucratic writing revealed intentions otherwise covered over or left unarticulated. ¹³ Lisa Gitelman, “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf,” chapter 4 in: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014): 111-135. The documentation makes evident the ways in which IAUS ambitiously attempted to work in a managerial mode to carefully curate how it was perceived, represented, branded, and understood by different publics “out there” in New York and beyond. This negotiation would mirror the university’s own entanglements with boundaries both physical and virtual, or what Reinhold Martin has recently identified as the “recurring problem (….) of when, where, and how to draw the line separating inside from outside, a broken, twisted line that puts the university in the world–to some degree by setting it apart.” ¹⁴ Reinhold Martin, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020): 1. For IAUS, this line was consistently shifting and bifurcating according to the vagaries of their efforts to redefine their institutional identity.

Para-Institutionality

Going further, IAUS should be understood as a para-institute, that which can be defined as occupying an in-between or liminal condition, taking up a familiar form but also pushing it beyond definition. This relationship – described by the Greek prefix “para” (παρά) means both beside and beyond – signals a manner in which IAUS straddled positions between an architectural practice, a university, and a non-profit government agency operating in the service of larger political aims or bodies. In this sense, IAUS was defined and self-regulated by this flow of documents in and out of the institute more so than by its definition of the sum of projects, tools, and individuals operating under the direction of these protocols. Connections to MoMA and Cornell University as well as those to public and private agencies “with their capacity for implementing and administering these solutions,” translated to a constellation of social and professional networks that would form the core of activities at IAUS in its early years and also demonstrated a simplistic understanding of the fluidity between these different modes; museum, agency, institute are each seen as points of internodal points between execution, publication, and dissemination. More importantly, the notion of being between but not of or intrinsic to these institutions suggested a sense that the visible connections themselves between institutions, museums, planning agencies, and practicing architects (rather than sustained relationships or active dialogue between these parties) was most vital and optimistically declared before any real ideological or research position had been fleshed out. ¹⁵ Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Center for Architecture, Montréal, “1969 Policies and Procedures.”

These documents are evidence of a language game that focused on describing and delimiting an institution as constituted by its self-made protocols, justifications, procedures, and organizational hierarchies. Jean-François Lyotard’s influential book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge significantly outlined these undercurrents from a broader cultural and philosophical perspective, where he argued that knowledge acquisition was no longer about bildung, or the shaping of the mind through selfhood, but instead was increasingly dedicated to a situation in which knowledge was no longer the subject, but in the service of the subject. ¹⁶ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The primary reason for these changes, according to Lyotard’s argument, was that the production of knowledge by the university and its funding by the state no longer were legitimated by a search for truth but instead research was finding its own forms of legitimacy and a shift away from scientific knowledge. In this vein, IAUS was an institutional structure that could produce knowledge without any disciplinary boundaries per se.

Knowledge Paradigms

Thinking further about knowledge paradigms, we turn to historians of American higher education, including Roger Geiger, Stuart Leslie, and Daniel Greenberg, who have each examined the American postwar period in regard to modes of research, the organization and formats of working methods, and varieties of funding sources in order to make crucial distinctions between centers, agencies, think tanks, and institutes. These historians have convincingly analyzed the ways in which the triangulation between funding sources, the autonomy or dependency of knowledge, and changes in the role of research affected the “critical function of mediating between the knowledge demands of society and the knowledge-producing capabilities of university research performers.” ¹⁷ Roger L. Geiger, “Organized Research Units–Their Role in the Development of University Research,” The Journal of Higher Education, (January – February, 1990, Vol. 61, No. 1): 3. In other words, knowledge should be critically understood as a process dictated by inputs and outputs related to its technics and transmission, and less so by the particular demands of an intellectual paradigm or disciplinary schema. Therefore thinking about knowledge production intrinsically must include questions about power as two sides of the same coin; which is to ask “who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided?” ¹⁸ Ibid.

Many of these organizations shared an ambiguity toward nomenclature, which is to say that the naming of organizations signaled a larger effort to shore up expertise in a moment of uncertainty about disciplinary boundaries, or what has been described as an “epistemological and disciplinary crossroad.” ¹⁹ Mary Lou Lobsinger, “Two Cambridges: Models, Methods, Systems, and Expertise” in: Arindam Dutta, editor. A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘techno-social’ Moment. Cambridge, MA: SA+Press, Department of Architecture, MIT, 2013. This diversity in nomenclature can also be read as an index of alternative institutional forms; terms such as “laboratory,” “institute,” “agency,” “group,” and “unit” further suggest a search for other institutional forms beyond those of a traditional architecture firm, office, or an architecture school. ²⁰ See: Giovanni Borasi, editor. The Other Architect: Another Way of Building Architecture. (Germany, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2015). These distinctions were more than simply a question of nomenclature however; they hinted at an effort to reground knowledge in a milieu that has been described as exceedingly elastic and interdisciplinary in the sense that many institutions at this moment were looking for a redefinition of their roles, potentials, and audiences. ²¹ Emilio Ambasz, Sound Recordings of Museum-Related Events, no. 72.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; as quoted in: Felicity Scott, “On the “Counter-Design” of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Symposium at MoMA,” Grey Room (2004) (14): 46–77.

Architecture, Not for Profit

This was all made possible due to public and private funding. What is critical to note is that funding always comes from particular places, organizations and individuals with “distinct ideologies, motivations, ethics, and morals.” ²² Charles Rice & Barbara Penner, “Introduction: the foundations of architectural research,” The Journal of Architecture (2019) 24:7, 887-897. In his examination of the changes in think tanks over the past several decades, Kent Weaver has argued that organizations were in some sense a useful cover for individuals with research projects; he noted that “many of these small organizations would not exist formally at all were it not for the preference of foundations to fund non-profit organizations rather than individual researchers.” ²³ R. Kent Weaver, “The Changing World of Think Tanks,” Political Science and Politics (Sept 1989): 563-578. Weaver defined a think tank by noting that “one recent press report suggested that a think tank might be defined as ‘an arrangement by which millions of dollars are removed from the accounts of willing corporations, the government, and the eccentric wealthy and given to researchers who spend much of their time competing to get their names in print.’” Ibid. It is in this sense too that IAUS should be understood as an umbrella organization for a small cadre of architects, banning together under the rubric of a nonprofit organization in this moment, in effect sublimating their own practices for the benefit of better funding from a wider variety of “particular places, organizations and individuals.”

An examination of the sources of funding and fundraising efforts at IAUS tellingly describes how the economic model for a nonprofit educational institute radically shifted multiple times during the fifteen year time period, in large part as a reflection of the larger economic neoliberal trends that affected architectural production in a moment marked by dwindling of funds in the straitened American economy of the 1970s. In his essay “From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation,” historian Jonathan Levy argued that nonprofits’ pecuniary revenues, from such donations or from financial investments on their endowments, were not taxed because they carried out “public “purposes,” codified in Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954.” ²⁴ Jonathan Levy, “From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through: Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation” in: Corporations and American Democracy. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, William J. Novak, editors. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017), 213-244. His essay traces how the definitions around state incorporation laws from the nineteenth century forward are ambiguous, allowing for a degree of contestations with regard to what counted as acting for and in the name of the public. ²⁵ William J. Novak, “The Public Utility Idea and the Origins of Modern Business Regulation,” in: Corporations and American Democracy. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, William J. Novak, editors. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017), 139-176. Arguably this ambiguity was a key facet of the IAUS mission statement and funding model, which must be understood in direct contrast to the nature of architecture as a commercial practice, or a for-profit enterprise. How exactly they acted for and in the name of the public was ultimately less than clear however. While their charter claimed that IAUS would “provide continuing education to the public” the question of who constitutes the public remained rather open-ended. For example, the early projects at IAUS also privileged an interest in urban form and architectural form, lending credence to the notion that the work was not commercially specific to a site, but was instead “abstract” and therefore aimed at the larger public, as opposed to a specific private client.

“Breathtaking Escapes,” Enterprise, and Institutionalization

Writing after the doors had officially shut in 1984, Michael Sorkin noted that Eisenman had kept the IAUS going through a “series of breathtaking escapes from financial disaster, purchased with withheld salaries, last minute grantsmanship, and other feats of financial legerdemain.” ²⁶ Michael Sorkin, Exquisite corpse: Writing on Buildings. (United Kingdom: Verso, 1991), 110-113. This in itself is not surprising as a facet of their existence, tethered to the whims and vagaries of funding, funders, and foundations; however this is also not to contradict the entrepreneurialism of the endeavor. Furthermore, we often reserve a reading of technocratic documents such as spreadsheets as being ideologically neutral, but in fact their ideological function is to neutralize the difference between things, under the guise not of the aesthetics of the museum, but of the evenness of data information architectures. What the documents studied above make clear is how much of their time was spent on these matters. What is more surprising is the fact that this was structural to being a non-profit that was situated neither as a practice or as a school. Looking at how the notion of para-institutionality shifted over the course of its lifetime, as well as understanding the extent to which an institute was defined less so by activities and types of work and much more so by its development of its sense of “self,” modes of self-preservation and articulation of an institutional identity through formats like letterhead and graphics, wordcraft, and other strategies of legitimation which attempted to simulate the operational and bureaucratic paradigm, which was then was mirrored back to them through their own efforts.

1. George Baird, “1968 and its aftermath: The Loss of Moral Confidence in Architectural Practice and Education,” in Peter G. Rowe, William S. Saunders, Reflections on Architectural Practices in the Nineties. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996): 64-70.
2. Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect and the Academy,” Daedalus: American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Winter, 1997, Vol. 126, No. 1), 1-38.
3. There is a substantial literature on this moment in American cultural history. See, for example: Andrew Jewett, “The Politics of Knowledge in 1960s America,” Social Science History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 2012), 551-581; Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. (New York: Twayne), 2006; Carl Davidson, “Toward institutional resistance,” in Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr (eds.) The University Crisis Reader. Vol. 2, Confrontation and Counterattack. (New York: Vintage): 129-38; Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, (New York: Routledge, 1999).
4. On changes to academic culture, and the flurry of new and recently-founded institutes at universities and other para-academic organizations, see Susanne Schindler, “The Institutions Must be Designed Before the Buildings,” Perspecta 53 (2020): 110-135.
5. This time period is often historicized against the backdrop of a series of ideological shifts from the import of the military-industrial-academic research complex (during the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s) to a critique of humanism and the myths which previously justified scientific research, producing what has been called the “cultural turn” during the Kennedy and Johnson administration in late 1960s and early 70s.
6. For example, to mention but a few of these, which indicates the overall trend at this moment: at University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Urban Studies (IUS) and Institute for Architectural Research (IAR), which both were replaced by Institute for Environmental Studies in 1965 (IES); at University of California, Berkeley the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) and Center for Environmental Structure (CES); at Columbia the Center for Environmental Studies; at Princeton the Research Center for Urban and Environmental Planning and Bureau for Urban Research; at Rutgers the Built Environment Group; at MIT the Laboratory for Environmental Studies; at Cornell the Center for Housing and Environmental Studies; MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, and many others of a similar ilk.
7. Provisional Charter of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, the University of the State of New York Education Department, issued September 29, 1967. Courtesy of New York State Education Department, Office of the Board of Regents.
8. Irene Sunwoo, “Between The “Well-Laid Table” And The “Marketplace”: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments In Architectural Pedagogy,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2011), iv.
9. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014): 14.
10. Eventually, bankruptcy ensued shortly thereafter in 1984, and at the end of its existence, sheriffs came to lock the doors and hold a bankruptcy auction, which led to ten or so filing cabinets lost or destroyed in the process. The exact contents of their file cabinets remain unknown. Author conversation with Silvia Kolbowski, February 13, 2022; and author conversation with Julia Bloomfield, May 22, 2022.
11. See: Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practice. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 108-132.
12. Sociologist Robert Gutman observed this trend toward bureaucratization in his observations about the trend away from independent proprietorship and toward salaried employment in private firms, which followed “an underlying social process which accompanies the advance of industrialization known as the ‘dequalification of labor.’” Gutman characterized this process as the “tendency of work to be broken down into smaller and more limited tasks requiring less sophisticated training and expertise,” while “at the same time elevating the responsibility of a tiny segment of the professional labor force that has the task of coordinating and managing.” Bureaucratization and more paperwork were one of the most immediate and most obvious outcomes of this dequalification. See: Robert Gutman, Architecture from the Outside in: Selected Essays, ed. Dana Cuff and John Wriedt. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 38.
13. Lisa Gitelman, “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.pdf,” chapter 4 in: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014): 111-135.
14. Reinhold Martin, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020): 1.
15. Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Center for Architecture, Montréal, “1969 Policies and Procedures.”
16. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
17. Roger L. Geiger, “Organized Research Units–Their Role in the Development of University Research,” The Journal of Higher Education, (January – February, 1990, Vol. 61, No. 1): 3.
18. Ibid.
19. Mary Lou Lobsinger, “Two Cambridges: Models, Methods, Systems, and Expertise” in: Arindam Dutta, editor. A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘techno-social’ Moment. Cambridge, MA: SA+Press, Department of Architecture, MIT, 2013.
20. See: Giovanni Borasi, editor. The Other Architect: Another Way of Building Architecture. (Germany, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2015).
21. Emilio Ambasz, Sound Recordings of Museum-Related Events, no. 72.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; as quoted in: Felicity Scott, “On the “Counter-Design” of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Symposium at MoMA,” Grey Room (2004) (14): 46–77.
22. Charles Rice & Barbara Penner, “Introduction: the foundations of architectural research,” The Journal of Architecture (2019) 24:7, 887-897.
23. R. Kent Weaver, “The Changing World of Think Tanks,” Political Science and Politics (Sept 1989): 563-578. Weaver defined a think tank by noting that “one recent press report suggested that a think tank might be defined as ‘an arrangement by which millions of dollars are removed from the accounts of willing corporations, the government, and the eccentric wealthy and given to researchers who spend much of their time competing to get their names in print.’” Ibid.
24. Jonathan Levy, “From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through: Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation” in: Corporations and American Democracy. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, William J. Novak, editors. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017), 213-244.
25. William J. Novak, “The Public Utility Idea and the Origins of Modern Business Regulation,” in: Corporations and American Democracy. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, William J. Novak, editors. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017), 139-176.
26. Michael Sorkin, Exquisite corpse: Writing on Buildings. (United Kingdom: Verso, 1991), 110-113.