Architecture and bureaucracy: indissociable and irreconcilable? The two spheres are often seen in opposition — the latter curtailing the former’s creative power — yet might they not also overlap, partake and occasionally coincide in their processes? Dismissing the role of bureaucracy in architecture as extraneous or detrimental seems to hinder our capacity, as thinkers and producers of architecture, to work through this relationship and explore ways of dealing with a pervasive tool of contemporary societal organisation; whereas understanding the fraught relationship might help us bridge the gap that, in many contexts, separates architecture and the communities it exists to serve. This special collection explores how architecture and bureaucracy have negotiated their stances in the twentieth century. In particular, it aims to shed light on instances where knowledge of architecture was an element in, and a product of, the machinery of bureaucracy. Beyond the notion of bureaucracy in architecture as a site of imposition and control — and the vivid sentiments of frustration and deception it prompts — lies a terrain where less contrasted, more fine-grained actions and exchanges occur. The ways in which these two spheres relate are diverse and merit scholarly attention, as the articles that follow demonstrate.

This article investigates the impact of managerial ideologies on projects for new governmental office buildings in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the prewar publication of F. W. Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ theories, the scientisation of office activities was propagated by efficiency experts throughout the western world. In Belgium, as in France, the work of the mining engineer Henri Fayol was particularly influential. According to Fayol, private and public bureaucracies had to follow identical managerial principles, notably that all employees were to observe one another as much as possible. These ideas of visibility overlapped with the emphasis on transparency and open planning coming from quite a different quarter, namely Le Corbusier, Hannes Meyer and other modernist architects in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet how Fayol’s ideal was to be realised without compromising the traditional need for privacy for high-ranking office workers remained unresolved. The article explores the ideas of two crucial expert groups — architects and managerial experts — over these issues as they developed in Belgium in the inter-war years. In the 1920s, the mining engineer Max-Léo Gérard called for ministerial buildings that facilitated ‘collaborative work’ and the information scientist Paul Otlet advocated an ideal type of government offices based on an architectural diagram that facilitated mutual observation. In the 1930s, the architect Stanislas Jasinski proposed remodelling the centre of Brussels as a series of office blocks, in a design copied from Le Corbusier’s cruciform skyscrapers in the Plan Voisin. Such ideas received official endorsement with the Royal Commissariat for Administrative Reform under Louis Camu, which proposed to strengthen the societal role of governmental bureaucracy by rehousing the civil service in an enormous office complex close to the parliament. Contrasting with the idealism of these unrealised plans was one of the few government projects actually built, the Ministry of Science and Arts headquarters designed in 1929 by the in-house architect Georges Hano.

Between the first and second world wars, the London County Council (LCC) provided 82,000 working-class cottages and flats, of which 25,000 were built on the vast Becontree estate in the east of the metropolis. With these immense housing operations in hand, the LCC drastically increased its technical and administrative staff, becoming one of the largest municipal housing authorities in the world. This article sheds light on the organisation and functioning of the LCC Architect’s Department through analysis of the Becontree estate. Despite the extensive literature on municipal housing in the inter-war years, the council’s own architects during this period have remained almost entirely unknown. Contrary to the widespread preconception of the ‘official architect’, the LCC Architect’s Department evaluated and revised its organisational structure and managed to maintain a remarkable variety and complexity in its urbanistic approach — despite the overarching principles of standardisation and simplification, and despite its limited influence in relation to other departments within the LCC. Analysis of archival sources reveals the identity of these official architects and questions whether the organisational structure of the LCC Architect’s Department as a bureaucracy was reflected in the character of its housing estates.

The history of twentieth-century architecture in Turkey can be presented as a conflict between a powerful state bureaucracy and an independent architectural community: the former producing most of the buildings and infrastructure but with little verbalisation; the latter producing most of the discourse but building relatively little. This article examines a case that challenges this dichotomy. It focuses on the architectural department of SİSAG (1969–77), a company associated with Hacettepe University in Ankara, and the organisational, institutional and occupational modes and practices that it employed. The article explores both the architectural production of SİSAG and its role as the setting for the first white-collar strike in Turkey, and it unearths the intellectual and institutional discourse on the organisation of architectural production that surfaced with this confrontation. The article shows how, in the relationship between bureaucratic tradition and professional discourse, SİSAG took an ‘in-between’ position, its architects seeking to replace conflict with cooperation, and to reconcile ideas of public service, public interest and social engagement on the one hand with disciplinary knowledge, planning and design and independent research on the other.

In Italy following the second world war, the Vatican-controlled real-estate developer and contractor Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI) emerged as a major force in the country’s reconstruction process. From its Rome headquarters, the ‘Leviathan’ (as the journalist Antonio Cederna called it) devised, delivered and managed dozens of schemes across the peninsula — from residential and commercial developments to industrial, road transport and water infrastructure. None of this would have been possible without the establishment, immediately after the end of the war, of a centralised administrative system coordinating the work of the company’s 10,000 employees. Making use of the company’s unpublished documents, this article examines the bureaucratisation of SGI’s design and construction processes in the period 1945–73. It looks at the development of the company’s in-house information management system; the criteria it adopted in appointing its architectural staff; the modernisation of the company’s office space in Rome; the predicament of the architects on its payroll; its use of high-profile ‘signature’ architects for prestige projects; and the firm’s later adoption of project management techniques developed in the United States. It also looks at the way that the company exploited national and municipal planning regulations (and the gaps within them) to produce building types and urban configurations not previously seen in Italy. Overall, the article situates SGI’s ‘bureaucratic drift’ in the context of the increasingly corporate and specialised professional world of post-war western architecture.

In the 1950s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) undertook a strict centralisation and collectivisation of the construction industry, including the entire field of architecture. As a result, architecture was practised almost exclusively within the framework of state-controlled enterprises, the units of which formed ‘collectives’ that structured professional cooperation. In line with the political and organisational significance of the collective, the aim was continuously to enhance the efficiency of the construction industry and to integrate into the socialist system a branch — namely, the architectural profession — that tended to be perceived as bourgeois and individualistic. Against this background, both the role of the architect within the collective and the best functioning of such units on a creative and economic level were subjects of constant discussion. Yet the system also allowed various possibilities for latitude. Facilitated by individual personalities and intersubjective processes, personal and creative possibilities existed within an otherwise highly regulated system. This article explores the three levels of the meaning and function of the collective — as a political, bureaucratic and social space — by addressing its historical origins and nature and by examining two case studies in which, notwithstanding official theory, individual architects were able to exercise a considerable degree of creative autonomy.

This article explores the relationship between architecture and public administration at the Swedish National Board of Public Building (Kungl. Byggnadsstyrelsen, or KBS) in the years 1963–74. This government agency, which existed from 1918 to 1993, was in charge of planning, designing, producing and maintaining public service buildings and facilities. During the 1960s, it was subject to a number of major administrative reforms which, by rationalising the organisation’s activities, sought to make both the construction and maintenance of buildings more cost-effective for the taxpayer. These reforms paralleled rationalisation efforts in the field of architectural design, where structural and material efficiency were sought in the adoption of large-scale systems. The administrative reforms thus went beyond the reorganisation of departments and work priorities to permeate all aspects of the agency’s activities. The article presents the architectural activities of KBS as innovative and experimental responses to bureaucratic structures and requirements. Examination of the design and building processes of three projects — the national telecom headquarters in Farsta, the Garnisonen office complex in central Stockholm and Linköping University — uncovers some of the administrative structures deployed at KBS, and the creative and novel architectural solutions triggered by their integration into design and planning practices.