11 ARCHITECTS’ HIDDEN BUILDING SIGNATURES Paul Emmons Throughout history, some architects have signed their buildings, asserting authorship of their designs. Yet, this practice, varying in specifics across time and place, appears in only a minority of architect-designed buildings. 1 Occasionally buildings are prominently signed in such a way to be obvious at first glance, 2 but most often, the signatures are discrete, hidden or entirely ob- scured. Why is it that architects choose to sign their buildings and simultaneously conceal their own signatures? Unlike painters or sculptors signing their artworks, architects sign their buildings infre- quently. An “architect’s signature,” as the phrase is used in this chapter, solely identifies a pri- mary building designer whose presence is inscribed in one way or another on a building. The architect’s name is not to be taken as an indexical autograph of a single individual but rather as the corporate and collective undertaking of a complex entity. While the romantic myth of the inspired individual genius architect stubbornly continues, the “author function” of the practic- ing architect was widely dispersed within and beyond architectural firms long before the writ- ings of French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). 3 Differing from architect’s signatures, “building credits” list owners, architects and builders, unfailingly in that order. The patron, architect and contractor all build, though each in a different sense. In Aristotle’s terminology, they reflect, respectively, the efficient, formal and material causes. 4 Unlike the direct control of clients on expenditures and builders’ authority for construction, only the architect relies on indirect influence for the ultimate outcome of the build- ing. Because of the ambiguous relationship of architects to the making of buildings as evidenced by their in-between position in building credit plaques and their contribution during construc- tion, legally known in the US as ‘construction observation,’ architects have been described as the third person at a wedding. On the one hand, patrons’ names, to the exclusion of architects, are the dominant presence on buildings because of their power of the purse. True not only of New York’s Trump Tower, ancient Rome’s Pantheon memorializes Marcus Agrippa’s patronage in large bronze letters on the entablature, while the architect’s name is unrecorded. 5 Ancient temple dedications to de- light the divinities may have led to the prohibition of architects’ signatures to ensure the gods bestow benefits upon those who paid for the building. In the fifth-century BCE, for example, DOI: 10.4324/9781003356950-18