Vol. 1 No. 17 (2025): Collaborations

Architecture is a collaborative activity. A poet only needs pen and paper to compose a poem (Homer did not even have those), while Giotto only needed a chipped stone to show Cimabue his ingenuity. The situation is different for someone who has to construct a building: ideas and savoir-faire are not enough; they also need a lot of hands, a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of skills… a lot of contributions from a lot of different people. Of many of these we will never know the name, nor the specific role; of many of those we will never be able to grasp all the efforts, the nuances, the implications. However, it is probably not (only) because of their elusive nature that collaborative practices have been, and often still continue to be, rather underexplored by historiography. Doesn’t their opacity somewhat obscure the image of the architect as deus ex machina of construction projects, that for centuries in Europe architecture practitioners have sought to propagate?