ABSTRACT
The vectors of architectural influence are often understood to travel from master to disciple, elder to younger, “genius” to emulator. Such models, based on traditional notions of singular authorship, are at odds with the collective and corporate architectural practices founded in the years after World War II. I explore one such practice, The Architects Collaborative (TAC), established in 1945 as an experiment in team-based methods by seven young practitioners together with Walter Gropius, the German émigré and founder of the Bauhaus. TAC’s founders were joined not by an indebtedness to Gropius, as has conventionally been assumed, but rather through a network of personal and professional connections in a shared climate of collective ideals at the start of the postwar building boom. A reassessment of this context against the accepted historiography of TAC reveals the contested stakes around questions of anonymity, authorship, and influence within collaborative architectural practice after 1945.
