Introduction

In an article published in Architectural Review in 1945, American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock distinguished two types of buildings: the architecture of bureaucracy and the architecture of genius. The former refers to the product of large-scale architectural organizations (such as Albert Khan, Inc.), from which personal expression is absent; the latter refers to buildings designed by creative individual architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. This categorization pointed out the marked difference between pragmatic, collective production and artistic, individual creation that existed then and continues to exist in the building industry today. While Hitchcock claimed that the bureaucratic and creative practices had different purposes (to fulfill practical versus spiritual needs) and should be judged by different criteria, they were in reality complementary.