Profile
Chelsea Spencer is an architectural historian and editor. At Rice, she is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Architecture and the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL). She teaches history and theory at Rice Architecture and is helping to develop CERCL’s public-engagement programming, including the Thinking About Thinking initiative.
In her research, Chelsea explores the practice and production of architecture—broadly construed—from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular interest in architecture’s interactions with media, law, and capital. As a scholar and teacher, she seeks to build more nuanced understandings of architecture’s conditions of possibility in the modern world while also reaching beyond disciplinary boundaries to connect architecture to broader histories of political and economic life.
Chelsea’s current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the long nineteenth century, a period known in legal history as the “age of contract.” The project studies how contracts became the fundamental medium linking architectural design to construction during this time and how nineteenth-century ideas about freedom, risk, and value shaped the professionalization of architecture and the institutionalization of the building industry.
Chelsea received a Ph.D. in history, theory, and criticism of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.Des. from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a B.A. in art history from Emory University. With a longtime interest in architectural publishing, she has taught writing at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, worked as the managing editor of Log, and cofounded a student zine at the GSD called Open Letters. Her writing can be found in Grey Room, Places, and Log.