Who Really Authors a Building, and Why Do So Few of Them Get the Credit?

[Hannah]

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Architizer, like all media companies, has a set of editorial standards we live by. Call it a house style (avid readers of The New Yorker will be familiar with that magazine’s equivalent, seen in the occasional British spelling or the famous diaeresis); it’s an in-house standard that makes the pieces read uniformly, ensuring they are readily recognizable to readers.

You might notice that we consciously shy away from the Oxford comma, and that “façade” is always spelled with cédille. American cities are accompanied by their state, whereas urban centers elsewhere in the world get paired with their home country. These are largely stylistic choices, but some of them have larger implications, structuring how we talk about architecture and design.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the standard image caption. We have it structured as “[Project name] by [Firm name], [City], [State/Country].” If the firm has uploaded details about the photographer, we then add “Photography by [Name]” (firms reading this: please don’t forget to name your photographers when you upload a project!), and if the project has won an A+Award, we’ll follow up with that, along with the category.

Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus at the University of Toronto by WEISS MANFREDI Architecture Landscape Urbanism, Toronto, Canada | Popular Choice, Higher Education and Research, 14th Architizer A+Awards


This type of caption is pretty standard across the industry, yet it reinforces the idea that a build has a single author — a single firm, behind which there is a team of people, of course. Still, it leaves out so much. The dialogue between team members, the persuasion of a client, a collaboration with a glass manufacturer, the work of structural engineers, lighting designers, interior designers, contractors and more. And in all of these collaborations, there are tensions that get worked out in conversations; these relationships are both the foundation and the fabric of design.

Still, the caption is a convention as much as it is a credit. At the end of the day, we can’t write a full project genealogy below every image — the captions would almost certainly run longer than the paragraphs below them. And architects do act as leaders who orchestrate the symphony of collaborators participating in any given design. As with so many things in human society, it’s helpful to identify leaders.

At the same time, I do think it would be helpful for more of us to acknowledge how many people are missing from any given caption. Their absence shapes the general perception of how architecture gets made. Think about it: if a firm is particularly skilled at collaborating with a client and they promote that in the stories they tell about their buildings, perhaps future clients might be attracted to their collaborative design process.

Northcote House by LLDS | Jury Winner, Private House XS, 14th Architizer A+Awards


It’s worth remembering that the single author is a fairly recent idea, and a contestable one. Half a century ago Roland Barthes announced “the death of the author,” arguing that a work’s meaning lives in how it’s received rather than in the intentions of whoever signed it. Michel Foucault took this further, pointing out that authorship is less a natural fact than a function — a role a society assigns to certain works to organize them and give them weight, while also assigning responsibility.

While both were ostensibly writing about writing (texts), architecture throws this point into sharp relief. A book really can be written by one person (who exists in a network of influences that shape their thoughts, often with editors refining their texts). The same cannot be said about a building: very rarely is a structure the work of a sole person. And yet architecture continues clinging to the single name, attaching it to a product whose production is inherently productive.

Things could be different. In the past years, I’ve taken up the ritual of sitting in the cinema and reading through to the end of the credits. I want to honor the long list of people who have dedicated years of their lives to producing the piece of art I’ve just experienced. Of course, I still have my favorite directors, whose names I associate with a particular style that draws me to the cinema. But I increasingly see their authorship — that is, their success as a director — as part of assembling and orchestrating a stellar crew of experts to collectively produce a complex work. Why is it that architecture has no direct equivalent?

Flat Ourânia Studio by Studio MK27 | Popular Choice, Residential Interiors, 14th Architizer A+Awards


Again, I’m not saying that we eradicate the image caption — I’m simply using it as an entry point into discussing a larger problem. It’s an issue with how we discuss and write about architecture. We either publish drawings after a firm has won a competition, or images of the finished building, credited to one firm. Both of these contribute to telling stories about an object rather than narrating how it was made. The single-name caption and the single-author feature are the same habit at two scales.

Was this a habit that was at once produced by the starchitect phenomenon, while also intensifying their power? By this I mean the architect-as-brand, and the building as the expression of one visionary. In recent years, we’ve written about the decline of the starchitect as a figurehead for the industry, and the rise of context, which necessitates a view of design as a collective, negotiated and interdisciplinary act. The trouble is discourse is still catching up. It’s not just about crediting a project — it’s about seeing a project as a process. This has been the knock-on effect of the starchitect era: an emphasis on architecture as image, and architecture as completed building. Because to talk about the design itself is to talk about the years of sustained, ongoing conversations and negations that led to a work being built — and the teams of people and complex multi-stakeholder relationships that brought it into being.

So the more interesting thing we could do — as a publication, and as a reader — is shift the lens from the object to the process. Less of the hero shot of the finished façade, more a mix of drawings, models, construction and the final building. More conversations about foreclosed options, conversations that shaped the final outcome. It’s a harder narrative to tell than simply describing the finished product, but it also makes for a much more interesting story — and one that showcases the value of the truly multi-talented individuals that all architects are by necessity.

Process Department of Shamim Polymer Factory by Davood Boroojeni Office | Jury Winner, Factories and Warehouses, 14th Architizer A+Awards


This is also why the argument feels urgent now rather than merely overdue. This year’s A+Awards are built around a deceptively simple idea — that the future of architecture is human. As AI learns to generate the image of a building in seconds, with no team, no client, no engineer, no one at all behind it, the question of who authors architecture exceeds academic or philosophical musing.

The 15th Architizer A+Awards are our attempt to take it seriously — to celebrate architecture as the human, collective, argued-over thing it has always been, rather than the work of a lone name beneath a photograph. We’d love to hear about the design process in your entries, and our coverage of the winners will seek to spotlight different voices on your team, as well as the different stakeholders involved. I’d love to see your practice in the running, with all of its people in view!


The 15th Architizer A+Awards has officially launched! Seize the lowest pricing of the season by entering before October 23rd, 2026. Learn more →


Top image: The Cabanon – the biggest smallest apartment in the world by STAR strategies + architecture, Rotterdam, Netherlands

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