In the early United States, two forms of competition had profound effect on the formation of the architectural profession: the design competition and the competitive bid. Both were causes for complaint amongst architects, yet both only increased in use over the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the competitive bid system, which pitted builders and material suppliers against one another, became one of architects’ primary means for asserting control over the building site. Design competitions, on the other hand, pitted architects against one another under judgment by people architects often felt had no right to be judging them. Why did architects increasingly participate in these systems they often describe as detrimental to their profession?

Focusing on several early nineteenth-century projects in Philadelphia and New York, this talk will explore how the development and usage of the contract form shaped and expanded these two modes of competition. Bryan Norwood will explore how the use of contracts and competitions shaped the bourgeoise private-practice system of architectural practice in the early United States and nurtured architects’ conception of their profession as a benevolent, self-sacrificial practice. That is, the contract provided a technical means to simultaneously insert architectural work into market-based competition while also imagining it to be of a nobler, higher order.