Teamwork and collaboration: Case studies in architectural practice

This dissertation examines the permutations that working collaboratively takes on in the professional practice of architecture. How do teams collaborate in an architecture office among themselves and with consultants? What makes possible the conception and execution of a project in a design firm? Given the sharp differences in skill sets, performance, temperament, commitment to one's own work, individual's sphere of power and influence, and vulnerability of staff to the volatility of the world economy, all of them invariably impinging on the project outcome, how does collaboration happen? I adopted the case study research method and selected four large-scale practices representative of a wide range of types of group work and recipient of various levels of recognition in the world of signature architecture and engineering. Four narratives- two ethnographic accounts and two qualitatively driven reports- of the everyday life of four large-scale architecture and engineering firms in the United States are the settings for my data retrieval. They are Eero Saarinen & Associates; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM); Anshen+Allen (A+A), and The Arup Group. The four firms are here accounted around varying gradations of design authorship, from the individual to the anonymous, gauging the degrees of freedom to point to individual contributions within each organization when the work is presented in the public realm. Targets of inquiry of this study are the physical layout of these offices, their subculture, their management styles, their reward system, their ideology and allegiance to their particular understanding and ethos of modernism, and their formulation of collaboration.In the context of this dissertation, collaboration is here defined as a joint, willful, synchronous, and professionally horizontal action toward the production of a detailed response to a complex design problem. The findings of this dissertation support that individuals do not collaborate as a default way of working but do work together under specific motivational structures: capital, reputation, a sense of destiny about themselves, and more.