"General Contracting in the Age of Contract: The Transformation of American Building"
December 4, 2025
12:15 pm- 2:00 pm EST
The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
Lecture by Chelsea Spencer
Chaired by Jeremy Kessler
The heroic claims of architects notwithstanding, modern American architecture was built by general contractors. This new type of builder was unknown to US Americans before the Civil War, but by the turn of the twentieth century, they commanded a powerful position in the widening gulf between architects and the construction of their buildings. Operating at the critical inflection point between projection and materialization, paper and concrete, contractors appealed to investment-minded clients as fellow businessmen, offering them what neither craft builders nor professional architects could deliver: a completed building, for a fixed price, on a guaranteed schedule. Yet from the beginning, general contractors were seen—not without reason—as unscrupulous middlemen and incautious adventurers, suspected of incompetence, corruption, or both. “What is a ‘general contractor,’” asked the New York Times in 1884, “and what is it that he proposes in general to contract?”
This talk explores this deceptively simple question in the shifting legal landscape of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period known as the “age of contract.” Sketching a brief history of how building became contracting, it proposes that historicizing the category of contract—not as an inert medium but as a political idea—is key to understanding the vexed relationship between architecture and building in the modern world.
Part of the Fall Thursday Lecture Series events at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center, the event is open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected]. Visit The Society of Fellows/ Heyman Center's website for more information.