Collective Signature and the Big MAC  --  Michael Kubo

Full Citation
Kubo, Michael. `Collective Signature and the Big MAC'. Log 54 (2022): 69 - 77. Print.


Notes
- The way experiments in collective authorship after WWII lead to the architectural corporation (pp. 69)
- The Architects Collaborative (1945) becoming a huge corporate architecture producer by the 70s (pp. 69)
- The postwar search for "design identity" without the "genius" signature of The Architect; TAC goes for a collective signature (pp. 69) 
- Signature and identity as important to these practitioners as a mark of disciplinarity (pp. 69-70) 
- The transformation from "collaborative ethos" to corporate ethos; the search for "corporate identity"; corporate consistency (smoothness) or "virtuoso architect" at top of the ladder as identity-forming (pp. 70) 
- The end of TAC in 1995 was the moment when architectural corporations were displaced by the Multinational Architectural Corporation (MAC) (pp. 70)
- Marked by expansion of scope of practice: diversified services (Architecture, Engineering, Construction all in one AEC) (pp. 70)
- Architectural design as one small component of a whole range of services (pp. 70)
- Marked by extensive and often unclear involvement in built environment & lack of "corporate identity" but for their scale (pp. 71) 
- MACs are not architectural firms, but larger, more distributed entities which essentially do everything (pp. 71) 
- Marginalized design output, anonymity, yet largest employers of architects (pp. 71) 
- Factors that gave rise to MACs: legal and economic challenges to architects that pushed for diversification of practices and agglomeration (pp. 71) 
- "merger mania" leading to concentration of work in the hands of fewer, larger, global practices, following globalizing incentives of "corporate world at large" (pp. 71) 
- Kinds of architectural corps: "A" (Architect), "AE" (Architect Engineer). "EA" (Engineer Architect), "EAC" (Engineer Architect Contractor) (pp. 72)
- Design without "the architect" and often without professional architects at all (pp. 72)
- AECOM as a case study (pp. 73-77)
- Significance of having grown up out of an oil company (pp. 74)
- The taking of government contracts: military, prisons, etc. (pp. 74) 
- The significance of it being an ESOP (pp. 74)
- Note Kubo's central question of "what is it?" which hinges on identity and definition (pp. 75) 
- Work in the Emirate region (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, etc.) (pp. 76) 
- The questions that arise: "how then to produce a historiography of the MAC...?" (pp. 77)
- "...how MACs have gained such an outsize footprint in the global design market without the need for legible authorial identity..." (pp. 77) 
- Ontology questions and questions of disciplinarity (pp. 77)