Pernicious Effects

Professional architects have a thin track record of shaping federal legislation favorable to their interests. The Tarsney Act of 1893 is the rare exception, marking the first time practitioners organized to gain an economic and cultural foothold. But like the Sherman Antitrust Act of three years earlier, the measure ultimately accomplished the opposite.

Prior to the passage of the Tarsney Act, a single office presided over the design and construction of nearly all public buildings—post offices, customs houses, courthouses—in the United States. Based out of the top floor of the Treasury headquarters in D.C., the Office of the Supervising Architect oversaw a small army of over 100 architectural workers. Their labors created and moved markets, instituted widespread building practices, and set a basic standard of architectural quality, not to mention concretized an increasingly grandiose national narrative.

In her book Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect’s Office, Antoinette J. Lee tells of how this design body came to represent “…