Accounting and the construction of the standard house

Abstract

Georgian architecture dominates much of the urban vista of the British Isles and is also evident in many former British colonies. A product of the eighteenth century, it is an architectural style richly embedded in its social and political context. The defining feature of a Georgian building: a perfectly proportioned, standardized and symmetrical façade echoes the balance inherent in Pacioli’s double entry treatise. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the construction and widespread adoption of the standard Georgian house. It finds that eighteenth century builders’ price books (“estimators”), disseminating detailed materials and labour costing information on all components of house construction, inherently acted as norms or standards of cost behaviour. Essentially, it is argued, they constituted a form of human accountability which, located within a broader network of diverse actors, culminated in the diffusion of Georgian Classicism.