Testing the Establishment: Authorial Signature and Professional Method in the Architecture of Gunnar Birkerts, 1958-81

Abstract

Though he was once among the most recognizable names in American architecture, Gunnar Birkerts has largely been overlooked in the historiography of late modernism. Birkerts was an unusually introspective and self-reflective architect and his collections therefore offer a view into the complex intertwining of the personal and the professional for entrepreneurial architects with eponymous firms. Through analyses of Birkerts’s projects, practice, and pedagogy, the dissertation narrates the confluence of two realities: the persistence of a belief in the artistry of architects and the emergence of conditions that stretched their model of production to its breaking point. Consisting of intensive analyses of four key projects across the US by the firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates (GBA), the chapters outline the ideas about artistry that continued to shape this firm’s working methods even as large projects prompted Birkerts and his employees to take on new management protocols. Archival records of these projects illustrate the ways Birkerts assured that his authorial signature matched the output of GBA, and vice versa. The dissertation shows how architecture’s turn toward Postmodernism directed architects to fashion themselves as distinctive personalities with signature approaches to design, and that for Birkerts, this self-fashioning was accompanied by a rejection of more bureaucratic working methods and by increased focus on, and specialization within, the more obviously artistic domains of architectural practice.