Production Studies International Conference 25-28 March 2024
Revised Program with abstracts (v 3 -21 Feb 2024 ) PANEL S AND TIMES MAY CHANGE!

Simultaneous Interpretation ( PT-EN-PT) Convened panel		room #1 (Floor X Old Library)	room #2.21 (Floor X Old Library)	room 2.22 ? (Floor X SML/Old Library)	room 2.29
MONDAY 25 MARCH	13.30-14.00	Registration - OLD LIBRARY /SML -
	14.00-14.30	Welcome from TF/TK team [work out how to show - in divided spaces]
	14.30-15.30	Translations Across Spaces
	15.30-16.00	Tea / Coffee (Floor 2, OLB)
	16.00- 18.00	1 Technology, Labour and Construction Workers I	2 Her Know-how I	3 Migration & Mobilities in Production	4 Production of The Architect
	18.00-19.30	Keynote - Sérgio Ferro: From production studies to emancipatory practices
	19.30-20.30	Architecture from Below - Book launch, meet your panel - Gallery 1st floor - Architecture Building
TUESDAY 26 MARCH	Tues 9.00-11.00	5 Sérgio Ferro and Arquitetura Nova	6 Her Know-how II	7 Methods for Studying the Building Site I	8 The Architect On/Off Site ^[a]
	11.00-11.30	Tea / Coffee - (Floor 2, OLB)
	11.30-13.30	9 Production Histories I	10 Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies	11 Methods for Studying the Building Site II	12 Challenging Separated Design
	13.30-15.00	Production Pedagogies Lunch Barbara Strang #?
	15.00-16.00	Keynote Christine Wall: Absent voices: working lives Interpretation Suite /
	16.00-16.30	Tea / Coffee
	16.30-18.30	13 Ferro - History and Theory	14 Violence and Production	15 Production Histories II	16 Production Pedagogies: Architectural Education i ^[b] n Construction
	18.30-20.30	Farrell Centre Exhibition Preview BUILDING: An exhibition under construction ( Farrell Centre 1st Floor)
WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH	Wed . 9.00-11.00	17 Ecologies of Production II	18 Production beyond Architecture	19 "Guest" Workers and Labour Mobility	20 Building Alternative Pedagogies
	11.00-11.30	Tea / Coffee (Floor 2, OLB)
	11.30-13.30	21 Production and Communities	22 Manufacturing Materials	23 Narratives of Builders	24 Theorizing Production
	13.30-14.30	Lunch (Floor 2, OLB) Book Launch [CHECK TITLE IN PROGRAMME] (room near lunch) 2.21
	14.30-16.30	25 Self-build and Co-operation	26 Afterlives of Production / Production of Afterlives	27 Valuing Labour, Knowledge and Know-how
	16.30-17.00	Tea / Coffee (Floor 2, OLB)
	17.00- 18 .30	Keynote Usina CTAH Evaniza Rodrigues and Giovana Martino
	19.00 -late	Pizza party and closing remarks (Newcastle Arts Centre - Basement) 67 Westgate Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1SG
THURSDAY 28 MARCH	Thurs. 10.00-12.00	Next Steps brunch (Barbara Strang - ?Building )
THURSDAY 28 MARCH	afternoon	Visits - to be confirmed. Sign-up required (fee may apply for some)

KEYNOTE speakers

Sérgio Ferro (France/Brazil) ↩

From production studies to emancipatory practices

My first objective is to salute the courageous and timely initiative of Katie Lloyd Thomas and the entire TF/TK research team to resume studies on production in the field of architecture. The second one is to propose applications that demonstrate the validity of these studies.

The current economic model, based on industrialisation and automation, cannot avoid its fundamental contradiction: almost autonomous machinery and real subsumption of labour, which guarantee capital's dominance but tend to reduce the average rate of profit. In these circumstances, the only revolutionary potential lies in the concentration of workers on a significant scale — as was proven by the biggest ever general strike in Western Europe in 1968, and then suppressed by capital through the social and spatial dispersion of large conglomerations of workers.

Our métier was born to increase their exploitation on construction sites, alongside the form of production that Marx calls manufacture. Today, capital is forcing us to carry on in this direction with increasing voracity. Since the industrialization of social production has accelerated in the nineteenth century, the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit has forced the field of construction to increase its sectoral rate of surplus-value, at the price of destroying any inheritance of knowledge and know-how, and adopting irresponsible construction practices. Its enormous weight in the equalisation of sectoral profit rates makes the horror of Qatar, Dubai and Co. the likely model for the ‘development’ expected in construction, further constraining our possibilities for a professional practice with ethical premises.

However, origin does not equal principle. In our long history, there are people who have tried to resist this fate, such as John Ruskin and William Morris, Viollet-le-Duc and various architects of technical eclecticism. None of them were perfect, but we can move forward from the examples they set. As it remains a manufacture , construction still has great transformative potential. There are alternatives.

One of them is linked to the place where almost all of us are or have been: university. As well as the obligation to teach, we have the obligation to take care of the ethical dimension of our profession, and ethics cannot just be the subject of theses. It requires action, example and behaviour. Our university duty includes effective practice, concrete and as exemplary as possible, with the creation of objective conditions for critical experimentation with other relations of production.

Other options are maturing in reality. In Latin America today, there are several experiences of alternative and potentially emancipatory practices. They take many different forms and vary in scope, but they have one common feature: they involve those who lack everything, the wretched of the earth. Among them, germs of another architecture emerge. There is, for example, the promising Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, which has already achieved the goal of organic food autonomy and may start a programme of constructive autonomy from a socialist perspective, with innovative relations of production. These are my suggestions for building on the TF/TK project.

Usina ^[c] CTAH (Brazil)

Christine Wall (UK) ↩

Absent voices: working lives

Sergio Ferro argues for an architecture that does not erase the traces of labour, or the hands of the workers, so that the building site becomes both focus and locus of analysis to enable ‘the history of architecture seen from the building site’. This talk also positions the building site, understood here primarily as a workplace, and the experiences of the workforce at the centre of analysis. The key methodology used for understanding the working lives of those on site is that of oral history interviewing, contextualized with wider documentation and imagery of production.

As a method oral history requires careful and critical practice: an awareness of power and status imbalances between interviewer and interviewee and a commitment to, in Bourdieu’s terms, an avoidance of ‘symbolic violence’ at any stage of the process of interviewing, interpretation and archiving. In oral history practice this is achieved through the ethics of informed consent throughout the interviewer/interviewee encounter. Bearing these factors in mind, oral history interviewing, remains a powerful tool for introducing the voices of those with lived experience of building work. These voices undermine simple formulations of labour as a homogenous entity necessitating awareness of difference; between workers, for example skill and gender, class and race; as well as modes of production, whether hierarchical or co-operative, highly supervised or autonomous. At the same time, they also recall the power of collective action both through industrial relations and unofficial gestures of solidarity and camaraderie between workers. As a method oral history reveals, in short, the many facets of social relations implicit in production. However, interpretation and analysis of these memories requires understanding and awareness of how memory is both constructed and narrated in the context of contemporary social and wider historical forces. People do not simply and spontaneously recall the contents of a life lived, but shape and compose remembrance, reviewing it, and constructing it in the light of subsequent experience and articulated amid relationships in the wider collective.

Using examples from a research archive of interviews recorded over a period of thirty years this talk begins in the immediate post-war years with accounts of work on major architectural and infrastructure projects. Following on to a period of intense political activity and change concerning the built environment in the 1970s and 80s which highlights feminist actions, including squatting, women’s training workshops, building co-ops and employment in local authority building departments. Drawing on personal experience of training and working as carpenter and related contacts built up over an adult lifetime this talk is necessarily a partisan account. Nevertheless, these accounts of site practices subvert dominant authorial architectural narratives and provide unique insights into working life on site, despite being only rough outlines of the deep complexities underlying working lives that were, and still are, almost always precariously balanced between exploitation and fulfilment.

Bio:

Professor Christine Wall is Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at the School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, and former Co-Director of the Centre for Research into the Production of the Built Environment (PrOBE). She trained and worked as a carpenter and trade trainer before studying architecture and entering academic research, later to study for her PhD at Cambridge with supervisor Andrew Saint. She led the Leverhulme Trust funded project, Constructing Post-War Britain: building workers' stories 1950-1970, together with Co-applicant Linda Clarke, and has published widely. Her current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is ‘If I had a hammer’: feminist activism and the built environment in Britain 1975-2000. She was Co-ordinating Editor for the Construction History Journal 2016-2023, served as a Jury member for the RIBA Research Awards in 2019 and 2020 and is currently an Editor of the Oral History Journal. Her books include, An Architecture of Parts: architects, building workers and industrialisation in Britain 1940-1970 . Routledge, 2013; (with John Kirk), Work and Identity: historical and cultural contexts , Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, and (with Linda Clarke et.al.) Women in Construction , Reed, 2004.

EXHIBITION opening

Building: An Exhibition Under Construction

@ The Farrell Centre ^[d]

PLENARY sessions ^[e]

Production Pedagogies

Is it inevitable that architectural education generally maintains and retains and reproduces the same separated design and wilful neglect of building labour found in the wider discipline? Since the TF/TK project began, its researchers and core team members have been collecting minority practices and historical exceptions, and experimenting with pedagogic approaches that put the design-labour relation at the centre, whether introducing the construction site into history and theory courses, studio teaching or alternative forms of collective action beyond the academy. This was also one of Sérgio Ferro’s main contributions during his time as a professor of architecture at the University of Grenoble in France.

Examples of these practices include students’ political allegiances with workers and unions, and their experiences through outreach activities and social movements like EMAU (Architecture and Urban Planning Model Office) in Brazil. We aim for one output of the TF/TK project to be the formation of a new network compiling curricula and resources for educators to reference and apply in their own teaching.

In anticipation of two very exciting conference panels about architectural education – ‘Production Pedagogies: Architectural Education in Construction’ and ‘Building Alternative Pedagogies’ - we are organising a Production Pedagogies lunch to foster discussion and sharing of your own experiences. This is the third such event. The first took place at our TF/TK symposium at Centro Maria Antonia, São Paulo in April 2023. It was devised and convened by Lara Melotti, Tilo Amhoff, João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, João Fiammenghi, and Ana Carolina Buim. The second was an invited keynote at the Architecture 101 Conference here at Newcastle University in November 2023, when the Production Studies Group (Tilo Amhoff, Lara Melotti, Will Thomson, Katie Lloyd Thomas) hosted a plenary workshop. There, a general audience of architects and educators discussed questions such as, ‘ Where are the sites, workers and labour of building in architectural education and how could they inform future education?’ They added their responses to tablecloths which documented previous insights gathered at the São Paulo workshop. Now, with this remarkable gathering of educators, researchers and practitioners here with us at PSIC2024, we invite you to contribute to this discussion over lunch. We will provide a short presentation and some questions to prompt your own responses, and ask you to add your answers to the napkins provided on the tables, and/or to a Padlet at this link https://padlet.com/ katielloydthomas ^[f] /psic-2024-production-pedagogies-lunch-ec2cxsszjryozgka

The Production Pedagogies lunch is organised by five researchers from the Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges project who, like Sérgio Ferro before them, are concerned with the invisibility of the building site and building labour in architectural education. Tilo Amhoff is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Humanities at the University of Brighton. Lara Melotti is a PhD researcher at the University of São Paulo. João Marcos de Almeida Lopes is Full Professor at the University of São Paulo. Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Newcastle University. Will Thomson is a Research Associate at the University of Newcastle.

Translating Acros s Spaces

What does it mean to ‘translate’ the work of Sérgio Ferro? And what might the work of ‘translation’ mean within Production Studies? This roundtable brings together members of the core TF/TK project team and affiliate researchers who participated in reading early translations of Ferro’s work. Drawing on what we have learned from our four-year collaboration, we explore translation across cultures, geographies, and histories; consider how seemingly abstract architectural and philosophical terms can be worked into and out of concrete locations; and encourage delegates to tread carefully, as we busy ourselves in the workshop of production studies that is the conference.

Architectural debates are not based on an unambiguous technical terminology. People from different contexts may have different realities in mind when they come across words such as city centre, architect, labour, participation, or self-building. Even the understanding of abstract concepts is influenced by associations that languages and space-related imaginaries evoke. Acknowledging differences rather than taking a universal pattern for granted is thus crucial not only for ‘Translating Ferro’, but even more so for ‘Transforming Knowledges’ in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial direction.

Take, for example, autogestāo, autogestion, or self-management. In Brazil today it has a radical potential, while for most architects schooled after the break-up of Yugoslavia it bears a painful memory of a project buried before it was dead. Stemming from the latter experience, yet unable to shrug off architects’ infatuation with futurity, we discuss how translation from personal into political and vice versa affects the way we think of emancipatory praxis.

Furthermore, following Stuart Hall, we suggest that the dialectical movement between concrete and abstract requires a constant process of reconstruction or translation of our concepts, in and through analysis of specific phenomena. Discerning at what level of abstraction the concepts and categories we use operate is just as significant for the interpretation of Ferro’s work as it is for all production studies that take up notions from other fields, domains, times and places.

However, even the most careful translation might be haunted by ‘remainders’, resistant to being rendered transparent. In the interest of social justice, the everyday use of a word like architect, in places far away from Europe, needs to be understood both in terms of colonial epistemology and in terms of local genealogies. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s dilemmas on translation, we highlight other temporalities, motivations, determinations that are at play, for example the invocation of the divine in the building process itself.

At the end of our journey through diverse times and spaces, we bring our attention back again to a concrete case in Newcastle. This will help exemplify that, even when focusing on tangible locations, one must be aware of the necessary interplay between the particular and the universal at place, and how intrinsic concepts, values and issues one has in mind affect our understanding. We argue that if we are not careful and patient enough to go beyond formal and linguistic operations, we might still get very easily lost in translation.

Bio

Silke Kapp is Professor at the School of Architecture of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and a founding member of the group MOM. Her research focuses on critical theory and experimental practices. As part of the TF/TK project, she leads the team translating Ferro’s work into English.

Tijana Stevanović is a lecturer in architectural history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is researching the intersection of political and personal in architectural history and historiography. She wrote her PhD at Newcastle University on the contradictions of incorporating workers’ self-management in architectural production in Yugoslavia.

Nick Beech is Associate Professor (Social Policy) at the University of Birmingham, where he leads the Stuart Hall Archive Project. As an Affiliate Researcher on the TF/TK project, he has explored the distinct reading of William Morris offered by Sérgio Ferro, in juxtaposition to the New Left in Britain.

Megha Chand Inglis is Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and Research Affiliate on the TF/TK project. Her research focuses on ‘non-modern’ practices at the juncture of local genealogies, colonial epistemologies and diasporic cultural arenas, in the context of temple builders and practices in the Indian subcontinent.

Mariana Moura is an architect and researcher interested in the intersections between feminism and decoloniality in architectural historiography. She has taught at the School of Architecture in the Federal University of Minas Gerais and is one of the postdoctoral researchers of the TF/TK project, collaborating in the translation process.

LAUNCHES

Sérgio Ferro, Architecture from Below: An Anthology (MACK, 2024)

Production Studies Series Booklets/Set 1

Book launch of “O Canteiro e o Desenho," Portugal ^[g]

[The building site and the design] by Sérgio Ferro by Dafne Editora. The editors, Bernardo Amaral and Joana Vieira da Silva, invite Silke Kapp for a conversation with the author Sérgio Ferro.

Newcastle University, Room___ 13:40-14:2

First published in Brazil in 1976, "O Canteiro e o Desenho” (The building site and the design) by French-Brazilian architect and theorist Sérgio Ferro is a seminal essay on architectural theory and a critical analysis of its production processes. In recent years, Sérgio Ferro's work has been progressively recognized and valued, with various international initiatives aimed at promoting discussion around his work. This edition participates in the current movement of international dissemination of Sérgio Ferro's thought, publishing his most representative essay for the first time in Portugal. From a critical perspective on the harsh working conditions in the building site, Sérgio Ferro criticizes the "separated design" and reveals how architectural drawing, since its origins, has gradually separated the authorship of the project from the construction site, disregarding the material and labor conditions of production. This new annotated edition of "O Canteiro e o Desenho" includes an unpublished interview with the author and a photographic essay by Fernando Stankuns.

Lançamento de “O Canteiro e o Desenho” de Sérgio Ferro pela Dafne Editora. Conversa com os editores, Bernardo Amaral, Joana Vieira da Silva e com o autor, Sérgio Ferro e a convidada Silke Kapp.

Newcastle University, Room ____13:40-14:20

Publicado pela primeira vez no Brasil em 1976, “O Canteiro e o Desenho” do arquitecto franco-brasileiro Sérgio Ferro é um ensaio seminal da teoria da arquitectura e da análise crítica dos seus processos de produção. Nos últimos anos, a obra de Sérgio Ferro tem vindo a ser progressivamente reconhecida e valorizada, com várias iniciativas internacionais de divulgação e de promoção do debate em torno do seu trabalho. Com a presente edição, participamos no actual movimento de divulgação internacional do pensamento de Sérgio Ferro, publicando pela primeira vez em Portugal o seu ensaio mais representativo. A partir de um olhar crítico sobre as violentas condições de trabalho na construção, Sérgio Ferro formula a crítica do «desenho separado» e revela como o desenho de arquitectura, desde as suas origens, imprime uma separação gradual entre a autoria do projecto e o estaleiro de obras, desconsiderando as condições materiais e laborais de produção. Esta nova edição anotada de “O Canteiro e o Desenho” inclui uma entrevista inédita ao autor e um ensaio fotográfico de Fernando Stankuns.

Production Studies Audio Episodes - TF/TK with Cap-a-Pie ^[h]

PANELS AND SESSIONS

1 - Technology, Labour and Construction Workers ↩ (Convened Panel)

Conveners: João Marcos de Almeida Lopes / Raíssa Pereira Cintra de Oliveira ( Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP )

This session solicited papers that critically and carefully scrutinize the various dimensions of technology in architecture and urbanism, reaching not only technology’s most evident objects, but also the grounds that support them, such as:

the violent exploitation of work on the construction site
the extraction and exacerbated consumption of mineral and energy resources that are necessary for it
the contested disposal and displacement of waste produced by the sector
the insatiable greed for real estate based on the consumption of technologically urbanized land.

We encouraged papers to take a historiographical approach or adopt political economy as a reference and take the form of case studies or theoretical reflections. We invited contributions that unveiled the various aspects of technologies deployed in construction, as understood through Production Studies.

Conveners’ Biographies:

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes is an architect and urbanist (1982), PhD in Philosophy (2004). Full Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism - USP. Currently, coordinator of the Postgraduate Program at IAUUSP. Founder of the USINA - Work Centre for the Inhabited Environment, general coordinator between 1990 and 2005 and remains as an associate until the present.

Raíssa Pereira Cintra de Oliveira is a Post-doctoral fellow (FAPESP) at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, IAU-USP, in São Carlos/SP. She is a member of the Housing and Sustainability Research Group (HABIS) and the Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge in Architecture, Design and Work into a New Field of Production Studies (TFTK).

Building technology for construction of autonomy

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Universidade São Paulo - USP
Raíssa Pereira Cintra de Oliveira Universidade São Paulo - USP

Dissonant paths for prefabrication in Latin America

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal da Bahia (FAUFBA)

In The Making: Performing the creation of 'Baranovich' technology in the building site ^[i]

Hadar Porat Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Sugar in the walls: Reconstruction on the Plantation Periphery in Mauritius

Alistair Cartwright University of Liverpool

Technology and labour in contemporary adobe production

Thiago Lopes Ferreira Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana UNILA

2 + 6 - Her Know-how: Gendered struggles over skill in the production of space ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Mariana Moura (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG), Mariana Borel (Arquitetura na Periferia, UFMG), Carina Guedes (Arquitetura na Periferia), Kaya Lazarini (FAUUSP/Usina), and Katie Lloyd Thomas (Newcastle University).

In Sérgio Ferro’s analysis, struggles over know-how are at the heart of the separation of design from the building site under capitalism. [1] To hold onto construction skill is to hold onto power and, increasingly, to face technical, bureaucratic and violent efforts to seize that know-how or render it redundant or impotent. But what about her know-how, when, as Linda Clarke and Christine Wall claim, ‘skilled’ status since the eighteenth century has been preserved as a masculine property’? [2] In this panel, we focus on that other separation, that of a gendered nature, to further examine the implications of the claims over skill for the production of space.

While we recognize that building as specialised knowledge has worked against women and other marginalised groups entering the building trades within capitalist society, we are also interested in debating diverse aspects of skilling and deskilling and how they have affected or interfered with these marginalised subjects contributions to the production of the built environment, historically and in present times. The panel will therefore present contributions that convey different spatial practices, social and cultural contexts, organised in two sessions. In the first session, we will each briefly present our papers, and introduce how each specific case relates to the question of skill. In the second session, we will proceed with some themed discussions which were decided collectively in order to explore the convergences and divergences at place in the gendered analysis of the production of space

A first themed discussion will focus on how skilling women in building and decision-making about their own space can be emancipatory and open 'non-hegemonic fissures', looking at the contradictions and difficulties faced in that process and its potential to address current crisis and concerns. Second, we will look at which skills, materials, technologies and forms of work have been devalued, marginalised or ignored by architectural histories and discourse and discuss how these can contribute to and challenge the current status of many omitted subjects from our field. A third theme asks how gender and skill can serve as a starting point to a wider debate on the recognition of the political implications of the transformation of space, urging for its constant analysis in intersectional ways.

Convenors’ Biographies:

Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and Principal Investigator (UK) of the TF/TK project. Publications include Building Materials: Material theory and the architectural specification (2023), and with Tilo Amho and Nick Beech (eds.) Industries of Architecture (2015).

Carina Guedes is an architect, founder of Arquitetura na Periferia, and President Director of IAMÍ - Institute of Innovation and Technical Assistance for Women. Through IAMÍ, she develops and coordinates actions aimed at strengthening women's protagonism and promoting self-management initiatives, as strategies for consolidating citizenship and combating inequalities.

Mariana Borel is an architect, with a master's degree in Architecture and Urban Planning and a specialisation in Public Administration. She is currently a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and works as coordinator of the Architecture in the Periphery project and as communication and relationship manager at IAMÍ.

Kaya Lazarini, PhD candidate at FAU/USP, where she holds a Master’s degree. Architect and urbanist and specialising in Solidarity Economy and Social Technology in Latin America at UNICAMP. Member of USINA since 2010, providing technical assistance to social movements in popular housing. As an Affiliated Researcher at TF/TK, she explores self-managed habitat production.

Under Construction: Queer Cultures of Materiality and Making

Jane Hall University of Cambridge

Off Site and Out of Sight: Skill and women’s work in the interwar building products industry

Katie Lloyd Thomas Newcastle University

Building systems of care into construction spaces

Mads Mordigan ab_ Research network

On the other hand: interior design

Aline Kedma Araujo Alves University of São Paulo

Embracing the periphery: ‘Women building for women’ and care(ful) renewal in West Berlin

Tijana Stevanović University College London, The Bartlett School of Architecture

Building houses and overthrowing the patriarchy: Women from the Arquitetura na Periferia project at the forefront of space production

Carina Guedes TF/TK - Affiliated Researcher

Mariana Borel Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

Typing and Type-ing: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Gladys Boutilier, and the Implicated Subject

Albert Brenchat Aguilar UCL

Unearthing women's know-how: how and why have women stopped learning to build?

Mariana Moura Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

The Struggle of Piquiá: Habitat Self-Management in a Mining Hub of the Brazilian Amazon
Kaya Lazarini University of São Paulo and Usina CTAH

3 - Migration and Mobilities in Production ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Will Thomson (Newcastle University), Megha Chand Inglis (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)

This panel considers migration and the migrant experience in the building industry. We aim to take up a social and cultural lens to explore issues around labour and the processes of building and space-making.

Architecture and construction projects provide the resources and opportunities for employment, but migrants bring their own ambitions, life experiences, projects of worldmaking and value commitments into the construction of architecture. Whether internal migration, rural work that builds the urban landscape, or international immigrant experiences, we ask contributors to consider economic, social, cultural, and ideological effects of the borders and border crossings undertaken within the architecture-construction continuum of production. Their contributions extend beyond the normative categories of achievement and value that the discipline typically recognizes as “architectural.”

While workers in construction and designers both contribute to the production of architecture, their labour moves in different circuits, shaped by the interaction of different economic, technical and social determinants. Architectural designers—and academics—enjoy the relative privilege of global mobility afforded to the professional managerial classes. Migrant construction workers are more often subject to the harsher logic of national control and regulation typically applied to the movement of manual and working-class subjects.

Production Studies as a field is committed to recognizing and accounting for the full social world of architectural production along with an expanded inventory of cultural questions that should be properly the concern of the study of architecture.

We ask:

How does architectural discourse understand the contributions and cultural distinctiveness that workers bring to the construction of the built environment?
How can we account for the global nature of building construction and communication across the design-construction boundary?
How do migration patterns shape specific building cultures around the world?
What can Production Studies add to a vocabulary that describes the distinctive lifeworlds encountered on the construction site?

Conveners’ Biographies:

Free Black American Exiles’ Construction Labor in British Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Jonah Rowen The New School - Parsons School of Design

Labor and Land - An Alternative Model of City-Building Without Finance Capital through Construction Cooperatives ^[j]

Jieqiong Wang Nanjing University

Fields of Concrete Trees: Agricultural narratives in Indian construction worlds.

Namita Vijay Dharia Rhode Island School of Design

Exploring Production Studies in fringe communities – the Case of Kirombe and Kitintale Informal settlements in Kampala- Uganda

Finzi Saidi University of Johannesburg

Nomalanga Mahlangu University of Johannesburg

4 - The Production of the Architect ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Miriam Delaney (TU Dublin), Nick Beech (University of Birmingham) and Liam Ross (University of Edinburgh)

Sérgio Ferro has described how the role of architect emerged in relation to technologies of drawing that allowed the work of design to separate itself from the construction site.[1] He has detailed how, in Classical, Gothic[2] and Modern[3] periods, the architect and design came to assume roles within capitalist modes of production. Almost 50 years on from the first iteration of ‘Design and The Building Site’ we ask if Ferro’s concepts of the ‘separated drawing’ and ‘separated design’ remain valid, and what are the forces that define the architect’s relation to (and separation from) construction today? What are the roles of disciplinary technologies – such as pedagogical practices, professional codes, building information modelling, specifications, modes of procurement – in producing and reproducing that relationship? The panel aims to provoke a critical discussion on how the normative formation of the architect as professional is produced and re-reproduced today.

This panel sought papers which interrogate the contemporary forces which shape the production of the architect as professional, positioning these within wider political and economic structures. We invited examples of modes of operation within and outside of the profession (contemporary or historical), which subvert the binary of architect/ builder, or which demonstrate solidarity across trades, disciplines and professions.

[1] In Sérgio Ferro, Design and The Building Site

[2] In Sérgio Ferro, Construction of Classical Design

[3] In Sérgio Ferro, ‘Concrete as Weapon’

Bios

Miriam Delaney (TU Dublin),

Miriam Delaney is an architect, lecturer and PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Building and Environment, TUDublin. Miriam was one of the Free Market team which represented Ireland at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, her current research interests lie in the limits of professionalism in architectural pedagogy and practice.

Trades and Labour Clubs: Tools of approximation and nuance for a collective architectural production

Paul King The Bartlett School of Architecture & Sheffield Hallam University School of Architecture

A Curious Failure to Correlate and Co-ordinate: The RIBA Joint Consultative Committee’s 1956 Conference on Building Training

Ray Verrall Newcastle University

Stone-Thinking Assemblies: A conversation with Hutton and Albion Stone quarries.

Niki-Marie Jansson Newcastle University.

Emergence in Disciplinary Crises: Cultural Studies and Production Studies

Nick Beech University of Birmingham

Common Building: The Educational Reforms of William Lethaby

Hugh Strange Hugh Strange Architects / AHO, Oslo

5 - Sérgio Ferro and Arquitetura Nova (with simultaneous interpretation) ↩

Report: Sergio Ferro Collection

Raíssa Pereira Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)

Flávio Imperio. Scenes from a cultural void

Isobel Whitelegg School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester

The Work Encampment: A Utopia (1981) x Dessin/Chantier (1979)

Ana Carolina Buim Universidade São Judas Tadeu - USJT

Ana Paula Koury USJT and Mackenzie

Grignan’s Building Sites: Sérgio Ferro and architectural praxis

Felipe de Araujo Contier Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie

José Tavares Correia de Lira FAU-USP

7 Methods for Studying the Building Site 1 ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton) and Will Thomson (Newcastle University)

Working conditions on building sites, the labour of building workers, and their relation to architectural work have re-emerged as key concerns in the profession and discipline of architecture. The newfound architectural interest in building labour raises questions—both technical and ethical—about the nature of academic writing about manual work. Taking the building site as an object of research also raises issues of how to represent the complex social world of construction accurately, insightfully, and respectfully. It calls into question the relations between writers and workers, and between the nature of their respective work on the building site and at the writing desk.

How do we know about the building site and building work?
What does it mean to write about the building site and building work?
What do we make of the contradictions of academics writing about the building site, away from the building site?

Architecture’s professional design practices are largely self-archiving processes that produce documents and statements as its direct products. By contrast, the processes of construction largely disappear with only the trace of the finished building left behind.

What creative media and methods allow engagement with construction?
What aspect of the building site and building work might be revealed or concealed by specific methods?
We are inviting contributions from those interested in exploring various methods and media that describe the social, technical, and cultural life in construction and its encounter with architecture.
Approaches may include those from anthropology and ethnography, oral history, alternative archive methods, personal experience, or fictional accounts in literature and film.

Conveners’ Biographies:

Tilo Amhoff i s Senior Lecturer in Architectural Humanities at University of Brighton. His research explores the social, economic, and political conditions of the production of architecture. He co-edited Produktionsbedingungen der Architektur (2018), with Gernot Weckherlin and Henrik Hilbig, and Industries of Architecture (2015), with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Nick Beech.

Will Thomson i s a Research Associate for TF/TK in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. He holds a PhD in socio-anthropology from NYU. His current book project, China Constructs is based on two years of fieldwork in Xi’an, China, including working on construction sites alongside rural migrant builders and with architects in local design studios. ^[k]

Talking Time on Site

Prue Chiles Newcastle University

History on Concrete Casting Yard

Pinai Sirikiatikul Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University

Being on Site- Ethnography as a Method, Theory, and Ethics on a Chinese Construction Site

Will Thomson Newcastle University

Twelve grooves: impressions of labor on architectural ceramics

Rosa Glaessner Novak Phd Student, University of Michigan

8 - The Architect On/Off Site

Architects ↩

Separated Design in Danish professionalism: the hygge way to architectural production (1993-2016)

Angela Gigliotti ETH Zürich

Back to the Building Site. Lina Bo Bardi and Arquitetura Nova in the Divino Espírito Santo do Cerrado Church

Davide Sacconi Royal College of Art / Architectural Association

Building Redemption: Race, Religion, and the Coloniality of Labor in Mid-century Latin America

Maria Gonzalez Pendas Cornell University

Designing with reused precast concrete elements - Architectural production in the circular economy

Helena Westerlind KTH Royal Institute of Technology

9 - Production Histories I & II:
(Convened Panel with Simultaneous Translation) ↩

Convenors: José Lira (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo Universidade de São Paulo FAU-USP) and Danielle Child (Manchester Metropolitan University)

In drawing on Sérgio Ferro’s work, Production Studies opens up historiographical potentials still little explored by the histories of architecture, art and construction. This session aims at bringing together works that have been facing different aspects of the material production of art and architecture from the point of view of a social and cultural history of labour in different scenarios.

Architectural labour, tectonics, building cultures are approached through diverse methodological tools, including the political economy of construction, post-colonial and de-colonial relations; labour divisions and power relations involved in design, planning and building sites; historiographic issues concerning sources, filed work, evidence and traces, or on the connections between historians and their institutional and cultural milieu.

Papers include various case studies focusing on local theoretical arenas, individual, collective and official practices, and regional peculiarities around the production of the built environment in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, and the various conceptions of architect and worker on the building site.

José Lira is a Full Professor of Architectural History at the School of Architecture and Urbanism in the University of Sao Paulo and a member of the TF/TK core-team, working on the edition of the 'Production Studies Series' of booklets. Among his books are 'Warchavchik, fraturas da vanguarda' (2011), 'Memoria, Trabalho e Arquitetura' (2014, co-edited with João Marcos de Almeida Lopes), 'O visível e o invisível na arquitetura brasileira' (2017) e 'Arquitetura e escrita: relatos do ofício' (2023)

Danielle Child is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Deputy Head of Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (PAHC) at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research adopts an historical materialist approach to explore the relationship between contemporary art and capitalism through the lens of labour. She has published articles in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art & the Public Sphere and Sculpture Journal. Danielle is co-Lead on the AHRC-funded Mapping Creative Labour in Contemporary Art network and co-host of the podcast Classed Acts. Her book Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism was published in January 2019 with Bloomsbury Academic and she is currently working, as editor, on The Routledge Companion to Art and Capitalism.

Histories of technique and the production field , São Paulo 1969-1979 / Histórias da técnica e o campo da produção, São Paulo 1969-1979

João Bittar Fiammenghi Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP)

The specificity of Latin American colonial architecture lies in the production

José Rodolfo Pacheco Thiesen Universidade Federal de Goiás

The Caste Question in Architectural Tectonics

Leon A. Morenas School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi ^[l]

A Dialogue With Silence: Re-assembling the Architect, Incognito

Saptarshi Sanyal School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi

10 - Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Liam Ross (University of Edinburgh) and Jon Goodbun (Royal College of Art)

Marxist accounts of Political Economy recognised ‘nature’ as a source of use value, but their understanding of multiple metabolisms, both within human production, and between human production and the wider web of life, has been a source of much debate and new research in recent years. In our era of ‘generalised ecology’, one that recognises the mutual imbrication and enfolding of everything technological and natural, how can we ‘ecologise’ the study of Production; how might we recognise Production as both a surrounding in which we live, as well as an actor that impacts its living surroundings through the production of natures? This panel invites original research that studies social relations of production in the construction of environments, built or otherwise ‘produced’. It invites contributions that consider the dependence and impact of production on other living organisms, and wider natural environments. Recognising that our multiple environmental crises are produced, this panel contends that Production Studies must recognise and engage with both the Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies.

This panel is linked to Ecologies of Production II . Both sessions explore the relationship between construction processes, labour relations and environmental justice. They examine how culturally specific processes of planning, design and development may enable a greater relationship between architecture and ecology.

Convener Bio

Liam Ross is an architect, senior lecturer in Architectural Design, and Director of Education at Edinburgh College of Art. Liam’s recent teaching and research studies the way architecture and urban design is shaped by fire and fire-safety regulation. His work reflects on the partiality of standards, the contingency of norms, and the often surprising side-effects that standards have as they are ‘captured’ and re-interpreted by those who work closely with them. This work has been published in Pyrotechnic Cities: Architecture, fire-safety and standardisation (Routledge, 2022), as well as in article for Arch +, arq, Architectural Theory Review, Candide, Gta Papers and Volume, the edited collections Industries of Architecture and Neoliberalism on the Ground, and at the British Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. He is currently working on a project called ‘Thinking with Fire’ which explores the way in which fire has come to be a key object of study, and conceptual tool, for understanding the relationship between built environments and the broader eco-system. ^[m]

Jon Goodbun trained as an architect and currently is a researcher, practitioner and educator. He runs Rheomode, an ecological design, teaching and research project, and Derailed, a nomadic teaching experiment, as well as teaching on the MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. Jon’s research develops an understanding of architecture in relation to a wider field of systems-theoretic discourses. His recent research and publications have focused on the need for an dialogical re-conception of design, planning and strategy in relation to the emerging demands for global and local Green New Deals, while his co-authored 2014 book The Design of Scarcity has recently been translated into German (2018) and Greek (2020). Jon is currently working towards a book entitled The Ecological Calculus, which reads together the work of two very different systems theorists: Karl Marx and Gregory Bateson, and is a Co-I on the AHRC funded ‘Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’. ^[n]

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Timber frontiers: Rethinking the place of materials in urban change

Heini-Emilia Saari London School of Economics and Political Science

Building on Waste: A Political Ecology of Bagasse-based Construction

Elliott Sturtevant Princeton University

Relations between energy and value: a proposed framework for ecologizing events of extraction

Alina Paias

Producing 'the tree / timber known as Hoop Pine’: a gathering of situated knowledges ^[o]

Anna Tweeddale Queensland University of Technology

11 - Methods for Studying the Building Site 2 ↩
(Convened Panel)

Conveners: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton) and Will Thomson (Newcastle University)

Opaque windows into building workers’ pasts: Construction site photographs from twentieth-century India

Sarah Melsens French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and FLAME University, Pune

Mallika Mahesh, CEPT University, India

Archive of Building Work: The Production Literature of the GDR

Tilo Amhoff University of Brighton

From Arquitetura Nova to Cinema Marginal: Construction Labor and the Problem of Representation in the Films of Ozualdo Candeias

Ian Erickson-Kery Duke University

Sidewalk Superintendents: The Public View of the Building Site

Timothy Hyde MIT

12 - Challenging Separated Design ↩

The role of architectural drawing in separated design: rethinking architecture from its beginnings

Joana Vieira da Silva Universidade Portucalense

Verified in Field: Drawings of Builders

Kristin Washco Virginia Tech, Carleton University

Marisa Ferrara Metier Projects

Filling in Silence: Archiving architecture as narratives

Parul Kiri Roy School of Planning and Architecture New Delhi India and Investigating Design

Stage Directions: Interpreting A Written Instruction

Andjeas Ejiksson Gothenburg University

Joanna Zawieja

13 - Ferro - History and Theory ↩

Arquitetura Nova, half a century later

Carlos A. Ferreira Martins São Paulo University at São Carlos

Free architecture in the metropolis of São Paulo

Claudio Amaral Universidade Estadual Paulista ( UNESP)

Francisco Barros, Luis Octávio de Farias e Silva, Mariana Guarnieri Tebet, Laura Peres, Myrian Brandão

The Urban Space and the Labour Construction Radical Criticism and Emancipation in Sérgio Ferro and David Harvey

Pedro Fiori Arantes Universidade Federal de São Paulo

Mariana Fix Universidade de São Paulo

14 - Violence and Production ↩

The Militarization of Construction

Michael Osman UCLA

Interwoven: Neoclassical–Plantation Production in 1840s Havana

Dante Furioso Princeton University

Cartographies of Cleansing: Exploring the Material Contradictions of Johannesburg's Post-Apartheid Museums

Simphiwe Mlambo University of Johannesburg

Dessin/Chantier/Produit: Forced Labour’s Victims and Victors in Building Material Supply Chains

Franca Trubiano University of Pennsylvania

A Tragedy Under the Capitalist Mechanism of Architectural Production

Nihal Evirgen Kabal Middle East Technical University (METU) / Chamber of Architects Ankara Branch

15 - Production History and Historians as Producers 2:
Building Capitalism And the Other ↩
(Convened Panel)

On Complaint: Architects, Capitalism, and Building Labor in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century US

Bryan Norwood University of Texas at Austin

Elemental aid: the production of African roofs, 1940s-1970s.

Hannah le Roux University of the Witwatersrand & University of Sheffield

Exploring the role of ‘the civil servant architect’ through an examination of the work and legacy of the UK's Property Services Agency (1972-1993)

Emma Rowden Oxford Brookes University

Building other tales: heterodox historiographic practices of construction workers

Eric Ferreira Crevels Delft University of Technology

Débora Andrade Gomes Moura Universidade do Minho

New Research Gestures for Production History

Mariana Moura Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

16 - Production Pedagogies: Architectural Education in Construction ↩

Bridging the gap between design and construction. Training architects to build

Pascal Rollet AE&CC, School of architecture, University of Grenoble-Alpes

Constructing an Alternative Vision for Material Production ^[p]

Nathalie Tornay ENSA Toulouse - LRA ^[q]

Mud on the Floor: Pedagogies of the In-Between

Sarah Nichols EPFL

Construction Labs Won’t Save Us — unless they get critical

Silke Kapp Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

"Re-enacting Fisac: a critical reconstruction of his material practice with flexibly formed concrete

Ivan Marquez Munoz Newcastle University

17 - Ecologies of Production II ↩
(with simultaneous interpretation)

This Was All Fields: Using arts approaches to understand the ecological impact of urbanisation

Julia Heslop Newcastle University

Environmental inadequacy of modern architecture: expropriated work and exploited Nature

Rita Saramago Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)

Just Transitions: Climate+Construction+Architecture

Peggy Deamer Yale School of Architecture

Habitat da resistência: estratégias territoriais dos povos tradicionais brasileiros

Cecília Lenzi Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo

18 - Production beyond Architecture ↩

Crossed Wires: The production of telephone exchange buildings in the UK (1945-1981)

Lisa Kinch Lancaster University

Illuminating Production Network: Labour and Materiality in the Development of Lighthouse Network in Treaty Port China

Huirong Ye Harvard University

Illuminating the Enlightened. Maritime Labor, Candles, and the Architecture of the Enlightenment

José Monge UCLA

Disposable Energy Landscapes of Corsicana: New Rifts

William Truitt University of Houston College of Architecture and Design

19 - "Guest" Workers and Labour Mobility ↩

Masterbuilders of the Gulf OR "the sea of changeable winds"

Suha Hasan ASH / AA Visiting School

Beyond the construction-site settlement: Architecture's interaction with labour in the construction of Douro’s dams in the mid-twentieth century

Catarina Ruivo Dinâmia'CET, ISCTE-IUL

Ivonne Herrera-Pineda Dinâmia'CET, ISCTE-IUL

From Gastarbeiter to Contemporary Labor Exploitation: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Labor in Western Europe's Construction Industry

Jakob Draž

Temporary forever

Hugo Lindberg

20 - Building Alternative Pedagogies ↩

Sérgio Ferro and Production Studies: pedagogical approach for a new architecture

Lara Melotti Tonsig Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)
João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP

Sites of Learning

Scott Batty University of Westminster

Ann-Melody Akanji

Repositioning Architectural Education in South African Universities: Fostering an Architecture of Resonance for African Students

Nomalanga Mahlangu University of Johannesburg

The Architecture of Architecture Student Debt

Sben Korsh Taubman College of Architecture and Urban, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

21 - Production and Communities ↩
(with simultaneous interpretation)

Remembering Production: Favela Museums, Building, and the Production of Space

Matt Davies Newcastle University and PUC-Rio

Renata Summa University of Groningen

The role of migration in the growth of the city of Mauá-SP (1950-1980)

Jayne Nunes dos Santos Universidade de São Paulo - USP j

An Essay on the Urbanization of the Post-Revolutionary Mexican Ejido

Kaya Lazarini FAUUSP e USINA CTAH

The Modeling Game – A New Tool to Produce Space

Maria Júlia Marques Rocha Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

2 2 - Manufacturing Materials ↩

Transparency and the Construction of Modernity: Nature and Labour in the French Glass Industry, 1850-1950

Jean Souviron École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville

Political Economies of Norwegian Timbers

Maryia Rusak ETH Zurich

Digital Concrete: How Robots Keep Us Dependent on Cement

Kim Förster University of Manchester

Entanglements in Transparency: Glass Production in Architecture

Aki Ishida Virginia Tech School of Architecture

23 - Narratives of Builders ↩

The life and times of a New York carpenter in the 1890s

Alexander Wood Massachusetts College of Art and Design

'From mud to chaos': three favela carpenters in mid-20th Century urban Brazil

José Tavares Correia de Lira Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo

Gestures in Building and Painting – Reversing the Narrative

Junia Penido Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

Labour, production and capital in YouTube building explainers

Adam Sharr Newcastle University

24 - Theorizing Production ↩

Labour, Luxury and the Phenomenology of Value in the Production of Architecture

Douglas Spencer Iowa State University

Architectural Production in the Marxist Frame: Ideology relativity, working class and revolution.

Gregorio Carboni Maestri Université libre de Bruxelles; LAA, Laboratoire Analyse Architecture (UCLouvain)

Object-building: the dialectics of the non-architectural work on the rise of modern architecture
Felipe Franco Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

Construction without urban: hyper-management in housing production from public companies in Brazil

Lucia Shimbo Universidade de São Paulo

José Baravelli Universidade de São Paulo

25 - Self-build and Co-operation (with simultaneous interpretation) ↩

From Self-Builders to Industrial Assemblers': On-Site Practices Redefined in Chile's Operación 20.000/70

Felipe Aravena Manchester School of Architecture

Self-construction and Colonization between 1850 and 1950

Flávio Higuchi Hirao Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP)

Assembling the collective worker: the contribution of cooperativism and self-management in contemporary architectural and building practices

Bernardo Amaral Coimbra University - DARQ

Design-build Cooperatives under Capitalism: two Brazilian Cases

Milena Rezende Torino Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Collective Improvisation: when making becomes a social process

Daniel Mallo Newcastle University

Abigail Schoneboom Newcastle University

Armelle Tardiveau Newcastle University

2 6 - Afterlives of Production / Production of Afterlives ↩

(Im)material production: investigating the spatial-ecologies born out of new bio-based architectures

Charlotte Taylor University of Bath

George Ridgway Royal College of Art

Dispositional Productions: Architectural Design beyond the Visible and Tangible

Simone Ferracina ESALA, The University of Edinburgh

Soil as Resource, Not Waste: A Trans-material Approach to Architectural Production

Zumrut Sahin Ozyegin University

Nilsu Altunok Yildiz Technical University,
Nehir Ozdemir Politecnico di Milano

The Afterlives of Excavation: Or What to do with Nineteen Million Tons of Rock?

Matthew Ashton RMIT Melbourne / KTH Stockholm

2 7 - Valuing Labour, Knowledge and Know-how ↩ ^[r]

Valuing labour as the dynamic change in the process of producing the built environment

Fernando Duran-Palma Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) - University of Westminster

Linda Clarke Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) - University of Westminster

Jörn Janssen Indutriegewerkschaft Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt, IG BAU

Building scaffolds: the bricklayer as an architect

Helena de Madureira Marques
Universidade de São Paulo

The meanings of Technique in architecture: between domination and appropriation, praxis and poiesis

Carolina Akemi Martins Morita Nakahara Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)

Drawing a plan like an architect (Trase yon plan kòm yon achitek)

Irene Brisson Louisiana State University

ABSTRACTS:

Technology, Labour and Construction Workers

1 Dissonant paths for prefabrication in Latin America

Sergio K. Ekerman Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal da Bahia (FAUFBA)

sekerman@ufba.br

Abstract:

Prefabrication in architecture and engineering was a frequent technological response to the reconstruction of developed countries shortly after the Second World War, promising scale of production, speed of execution and modernized conditions at the construction site. In Latin America, the construction industry similarly sought to leverage the use of these processes to deal with pressing needs, especially those linked to housing in the continent's large urban centers.

However, challenges were faced in achieving these goals on a large scale, generating an uncomfortable idea of delay in the industrialization of the construction sector in countries like Brazil. High costs, low demand and logistical difficulties limited the scope of such initiatives as real modifiers of this productive field, in a context of abundant cheap and precarious labor, usually frustrating the commitment to the industrialization of construction through heavy and highly mechanized prefabrication.

In this sense, the focus on prefabrication alone could not guarantee a permanent and more comprehensive improvement in working conditions on site, in the architectural and constructive quality of the final product, nor in the housing conditions of a large part of the population, whether in cities or in the countryside.

Part of the thematic panel "Technology, Labor and Construction Workers", this work seeks to delve deeper into the bibliographic debate that, since the seventies of the last century, has sought to identify alternative paths for prefabrication in Latin America and Brazil, reflecting on the adequacy of such processes to the political and economic reality of the continent. This debate forged the conceptual basis of experiences such as that of the architect Lelé with light prefabrication, among others, based on the notions of “technology and autonomy” and “possible prefabrication” created by authors such as the American architect Ian Donald Terner and the Spanish engineer Júlian Salas, who we bring into participation to the formative dialogue of these "Production Studies".

Bio:

Sergio Ekerman is an architect and Associate Professor at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal da Bahia (FAUFBA) since 2011, teaching design studios and technology topics, with a research focus on light prefabrication. He also collaborates with the post graduate course in architectural heritage and served as the school dean between 2020 and 2024.

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1 In The Making: Performing the creation of 'Baranovich' technology in the building site

Hadar Porat Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

po.hadar@gmail.com

Abstract:

The emergence of 'Baranovich' building technology in the early 1980s defied initial expectations, ultimately commanding nearly two-thirds of new residential high-rise construction two decades later. This semi-industrial, Israel-exclusive method seamlessly produces a constructive concrete wall with stone cladding set on pre-prepared metal moulds in one go - on site. But planning regulations that allowed the rising prevalence of this technology as a top-down decisions in the beginning of the 2000’ are also what invigorate the construction industry to make it a monopoly and consolidate its power. This work elucidates the enigmatic construction processes of 'Baranovich,' meticulously exploring its technical dimensions and on-site performance as seen by and through its labour. The dissemination of knowledge among laborers, mechanical enhancements, and the increasing reliance on dedicated production devices are key drivers of its contemporary monopoly in the industry sector. Based on local information engendered in the building site and cumulative knowledge based on practical experience, the study relies on multiple sources as interviews within the building site, scrutiny of regulatory documents, and examination of photographic collections. By critically analysing collaborations and disputes, this work constructs a comprehensive understanding of the triangular relationship between policy, production, and design, practically manifesting within the construction site. This examination provides insights into the trajectory of 'Baranovich' technology as a socio-political agent that is derived from a unique construction practice.

Bio:

Hadar Porat is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Architecture at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and holds an MA degree in History and Critical Thinking from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. Her research examines the production of energy-intensive building technologies and their interrelation with material culture, energy economies in historical context. ^[s]

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1 Technology and labour in contemporary adobe production

Thiago Lopes Ferreira Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA/Brazil) thi.lopes.ferreira@gmail.com

Abstract:

The historical process that culminates in the introduction of industrialised materials and components into the construction market has led, among other transformations, the gradual devaluation and replacement of the technical knowledge of using natural materials such as earth, wood, bamboo, among others. This article seeks to deepen knowledge in the field of earth production studies, specifically around adobe scale production modes. Taking the dimension of work as central, three different production lines are compared, from the author's interviews and photographs: one based on manual and animal force, another with low mechanisation and, the third, mostly mechanised. The comparative analyses provide a basis for understanding the productive arrangements as strategies of resistance, maintenance and viability of this ancient construction technique, permitting to recognise the adobe as both a technical and political object. Understanding that its production is not a concentrated, closed and determined process, but takes place in an open and flexible arrangement, expands the potential for envisaging new, less impacting and concentrating production matrices, considering the opening up of new scenarios with the recent standardisation of the adobe in Brazil.

Bio:

Architect (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil), Master in Rural Development (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro), specialisation in Earth Architectures (CRATerre/ENSAG/France) and PhD in Architecture (University of Grenoble/France and University of São Paulo/IAU/Brazil). Currently, he is professor at the Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA/Brazil).

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1 Sugar in the walls: Reconstruction on the Plantation Periphery in Mauritius

Alistair Cartwright University of Liverpool alistair.cartwright@liverpool.ac.uk

Abstract:

Sugarcane, as well as being a key commodity of the British empire, has had a long history as a building material – from the use of sugarcane straw for traditional thatch to more recent applications of bagasse (the leftover fibre from the milling process) in particle board and fibre-reinforced cement. Through an historical case study of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, this paper will trace the contested incorporation of such agricultural waste materials into capitalist circuits of production.

The paper will argue that these once traditional materials, which featured prominently in Mauritius’s vernacular architecture, should be located initially in the plantation periphery, a space with its own unauthorised as well as highly surveilled topography. Rather than ‘indigenous’ materials of the pre-capitalist ‘commons’, the use of plantation waste in construction runs parallel to modern labour struggles, which can be linked to the transition from slavery to indenture (1834-1925) and finally ‘free’ labour. The paper seeks to specify the ambiguous status of these building materials, considering the extent to which their use in Mauritian workers’ housing was acknowledged as a non-financial recompense, or else unofficially ‘pilfered’.

Shifting focus to the 1950s-70s, the paper will examine the attempted incorporation of bagasse into more formal circuits of capital via experiments with bagasse-reinforced cement and other materials. It will be argued that architectural discourses connecting these innovative materials to low-cost modular housing, as well as capital intensive concrete structures symbolic of modernisation, cannot be separated from the drive to stabilise a sugar industry buffeted by perennial cyclones, labour unrest and imperial decline. A history of sugarcane waste as a building material thus challenges us to think more critically about questions of labour, technology and ecology raised by the current push for sustainable building materials.

Bio:

Alistair’s work focuses on the contested afterlives of built spaces. He has written mostly about ‘rented rooms’ in Postwar London, including the politics of race and class and the history of building regulations. His current research, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, examines post-disaster reconstruction in Mauritius during decolonisation.

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1 Building technology for construction of autonomy

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Universidade São Paulo - USP

jmalopes@sc.usp.br

Raíssa Pereira Cintra de Oliveira Universidade São Paulo - USP

raissapco@usp.br

Abstract:

Ridiculously tall buildings, such as those erected in Dubai; desert towns in the middle of the endless Mongolian steppes, like Kangbashi, in Northern China; the ghastly misery of Mike Davis's nefarious "planet of slums"; the "hunger stone", exposed by drought on the River Elbe, in the city of Decin, in the Czech Republic; the exacerbation of damage brought about by extractive practices to obtain ores and basic materials for the production of “comfort machines” (BÉGUIN, 1978); nothing more than symptoms of a profound crisis in the production of space - to which Construction contributes as the prime mover and vector.

However, the role that Construction - and, ultimately, Architecture itself - plays in this crisis is often overlooked or underestimated. First, because of the practical difficulty involved in discerning all the segments of the extensive, dispersed production chain that sustain it, arising from the intensified processes of the division of labour and its worldwide dispersion. On the other hand, the recurrent separation between Construction Site and Project (according to Sérgio Ferro's formulation) has become clear, thereby isolating Construction as a subaltern productive moment of Architecture and Urbanism. In addition, the systematic reproduction of this dichotomous conception in the education of architects and urban planners has reproduced and perpetuated the paths of a profession that specializes in the production of “palaces, prestige projects, company headquarters, bourgeois residences, etc.” (FERRO, 2010) - which has decisively contributed to maintaining the current state of affairs.

These are at least three aspects which, as this study intends to discuss, fuel one another and contribute to maintaining and deepening what we have identified as a crisis in the production of space.

The Architecture and Urbanism practiced today has resulted from the agency of a technological apparatus historically determined by the mode of production (MARCUSE, 1999). Thus, within this context, which didactic approaches, the teaching and learning strategies, promote or instruct this agency? Which technologies are taught, that determine the Architecture and Urbanism, which is produced? Moving in a reverse direction, how then may an “emancipatory education” in Architecture be conceived?

Based on the critical reflection of some extremely particular teaching experiences, this study intends to reflect on the meanings and contents of another form of teaching Construction in Architecture and education for architects. As Sérgio Ferro has argued, perhaps it is possible to experiment with new relations of production, even in the adverse context in which we live.

Bio:

Architect and Urbanist (1982), PhD in Philosophy (2004). Full Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism - USP. Currently, coordinator of the Postgraduate Program at IAUUSP. Founder of the USINA - Work Centre for the Inhabited Environment, general coordinator between 1990 and 2005 and remains as an associate until the present.

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2 + 6 - Her Know-how: Gendered struggles over skill in the production of space

2 Off Site and Out of Sight: Skill and women’s work in the interwar building products industry

Katie Lloyd Thomas Newcastle University

katie.lloyd-thomas@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract:

When women’s conditions of employment are depressed beneath those of men by patriarchal forces it is to be expected that employers developing new products will endeavour to devise new forms of labour process and locational policies to take advantage of women’s labour.'

Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work (1986)

During WWI, with men away, numbers of women involved in the building trades in the UK rose by as many as 24,000. But they disappeared after the war, due especially to the 1919 ‘Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act’ which obliged employers to exclude women from jobs performed by men before the war. This paper argues that the manufacture of building products – which expanded enormously during the interwar period – was one means to involve women in the thriving building industry despite these limitations. I assemble scant evidence – often photographic – of women’s work making sheet glass, cables and plumbing components, and (using a newly-discovered collection of in-house journals) in paint production. Restricting women to the factory, and the division of labour that occurred there, ensured that women’s work was labelled ‘semi-skilled’ against the skilled work of the trades. This kept their wages low, and also kept their work out of the historian’s sight. As Miriam Glucksman argues, the image of the skilled artisan whose know how was snatched by techniques of mass production has loomed so large it has overshadowed these other stories.

Bio:

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2 Under Construction: Queer Cultures of Materiality and Making

Jane Hall University of Cambridge

jane@assemblestudio.co.uk

Abstract:

Construction is viewed as a military operation with an implicit male-led hierarchy, fostering a homogeneous, hostile environment where gender norms persist, evident in continued on-site segregation. Regulations and conventions reinforce bodily expectations. Standard brick sizes are tailored to the male handspan, and until recently, a maximum lifting weight of 25kg was enforced with the traditional male physique in mind. Therefore, apprehension about the involvement of those who embody different forms of masculinity continues to restrict possibilities for how we build.

The construction site, however, has been demonstrated as a vector for queer and gender non-conforming experiences and empowerment as an embodied revolt against patriarchal power, not least as a site of waged labour. Prevalent in the United States, groups like Slaghammers!, the Mudgirls Construction Collective, Dykes with Drills and Hilda’s Builders in the UK express alternative gendered approaches to building. A strong correlation exists between this emphasis, framed by the climate emergency, and their methods, rooted in traditional building knowledge and craft skills tied to female wisdom stretching back millennia.

The paper highlights a rich history of women collecting water and sand, mixing mortar, demolishing walls, thatching roofs and digging ditches, highlighting a contemporary alignment between gender variance and building with bio-based materials, including hemp, cob, solid timber and straw. Non-proprietary and non-standardised, they can be cut, moulded and shaped by hand, avoiding extraction from the Earth and the disobedient body.

The paper examines the socio-political, gendered logic of building and the contemporary landscape of gender variance in the industry worldwide, linking racialised, sexualised and class-based bodily identity to construction materials. Following Cara Daggett’s Petro-Masculinities, it questions consumer-driven material choices, promoting emerging calls for degrowth by showcasing unconventional forms of building delivery, suggesting a relationship between decarbonisation and a material culture underpinned by heterogeneous genders and queering of building practices.

Bio:

Dr Jane Hall is a founding member of the architecture collective Assemble, which won the Turner Prize in 2015. She is the Director of Studies for Architecture at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and the author of two books published by Phaidon on the work of women architects and designers.

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2 Embracing the periphery: ‘Women building for women’ and care(ful) renewal in West Berlin

Tijana Stevanović University College London tijana.stevanovic@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract:

Starting from the example of the Women’s Centre Schokofabrik this paper debates in what ways feminist activism, associated with spatial occupations and lesser-known environmental struggles, may have been decisive for the policy of ‘careful urban renewal’ in West Berlin in the 80s. Here, the case study protagonists and subjects are commonly considered marginal: four women architecture graduates worked for very little money over a couple of years on building with and for the local women activists and migrant women. Unlike the poster projects of the contemporaneous IBA ‘87, the refurbishment of an old factory into FZ Schokofabrik, arguably, did not bear the recognisable architectural signature of its designers (Müller, 2017). Could a careful view into the reasons for the latter pry into its emancipatory ‘non-hegemonic fissures’? This women-for-women project operated deliberately on the periphery of architectural production focusing on unproductive time, but embodied a structural contradiction of West Berlin.

The contradiction here identified is that women, caring for migrant women of colour may be continuing the ‘imperialist subject constitution’ as theorised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, thereby failing to contribute to the empowering struggle that would go beyond the conceptualisation of the Other based on the ethnocentric subject. This is even more potently observed in such a case study where the problem is perpetuated by the practice of precisely those protagonists who are the most concerned with embracing the heterogeneity of the Other (woman as the Subject). We may question to what extent were the young women architects in this example embodying the masculinist imperialist method of Spivak’s proposition: ‘white men saving the black women of black men’. Furthermore, speaking from a paradoxical position of a subaltern woman intellectual, I am interested in challenging the very lens focusing on women’s contribution to architectural production via ‘skills’. To what extent such a direction may actually perpetuate the repression while pertaining to the objectivity of this category?

Bio:

Tijana Stevanović is a lecturer in architectural history and theory at the University College London and an affiliated researcher in the TFTK project. She is researching the intersection of political and personal in architectural history and historiography. She wrote her PhD at Newcastle University on the contradictions of incorporating workers’ self-management in architectural production in Yugoslavia.

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Building houses and overthrowing the patriarchy: Women from the Arquitetura na Periferia project at the forefront of space production

Carina Guedes TF/TK - Affiliated Researcher
Mariana Borel Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG

Arquitetura na Periferia (AnP) is a technical assistance group based in Brazil that brings together and empowers women to be independent in renovating and building their homes. Using a method based on formal and local knowledge sharing, it promotes the learning of design practices and techniques, planning and execution of works by women with low economic power. The work seeks to highlight and strengthen the decision-making power of participants in the process, offering tools that enable them to expand their capacity for analysis, discussion, prospecting and cooperation. AnP has been operating since 2013, always with small groups, made up exclusively of women. In the reproduction of life and the struggle for housing, they are the most relevant figures, at the same time that they suffer from the invisibilization and subordination imposed by a patriarchal society. The formation of these groups creates bonds of cooperation and strengthens them, both as a group and individually. AnP's technical assistance, as a process of contextualised actions, opposes the focus only on the architectural project or the built object, opening up other perspectives of understanding and analysing the production of space. Our objective, in this panel, is to present the conceptual and methodological strategies of AnP's technical assistance, based on the stories of women who have experienced it.

Bio:

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2 On the other hand: Interior Design

Aline Kedma Araujo Alves University of São Paulo

alinekedma@usp.br

Cibele Haddad Tarali, University of Sao Paulo ^[t] ^[u]

Abstract:

Interiors are often described as a hybrid field, which coincides with other disciplines related to production of spaces and objects. Linked mostly to intuitive home decoration by housewives and upholsterers, this activity has been associated with the feminine, domestic, and amateur universe. Because of long-term historical processes, women were in the realms of the private sphere doing manual-artistic and decorative labour, while men were in the public sphere. This situation contributed to forming a gender bias to the production of interior spaces and the professionals who were making it.

In the building industry women skills are gendered: as architects and designers, we have tended to accept smaller roles, raise domestic buildings and deal with a range of gender issues in professional daily life. Thus, domestic architecture and interior design can be categorised by types of work that provide women ‘back door entry’ to the production of buildings, because they are considered easier and more appropriate to women. Women in this role are facing the contradiction of acting in an area that is expected from women but at the same time working in a masculine environment such as the building industry. Therefore, the main objective of this presentation is to discuss the complexity of the interior design profession permeated by gender issues. We intend to discuss how this activity has been marginalised as a female and queer profession over history based on sources from the ongoing PhD study, where this discussion is developing. We hope to contribute to gender approaches in architecture and interior studies as well as feminist epistemologies, to expand production studies and explore concerns around gender and sexuality, opening it to different perspectives, bodies of research and practices.

Bio:

Aline Kedma i s a PhD candidate in design at University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her main topics of research are interior design, material culture and gender studies. She holds a Master in Visual Arts from Fine Arts School from Federal University of Bahia with a multidisciplinary study involving gender studies, press history and design history.

Cibele Haddad Tarali h olds a PhD and master in Architecture and Urbanism (1984; 1993) from University of São Paulo. Currently is professor and advisor at Graduated Program in Design - PPGDesign FAU- USP. Have experience on teaching and research on Architecture, Urbanism and Design field, mainly on: industrial design, social and service design, design and teaching, material culture and design. ^[v]

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2 Typing and Type-ing: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Gladys Boutilier, and the Implicated Subject

Albert Brenchat-Aguilar UCL a.brenchat@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract:

In this paper, I explore the position of Jacqueline Tyrwhitt as author, editor, translator, and typist — and Gladys Boutilier as typist — of architecture and planning reports by networks of consultants in the wake of decolonisation struggles ending the British Empire. Reports were the main instrument of the scientific cognitive empire of architecture consultancy culture — the culture by which architecture consultants from the Global North advised consultees from the Global South on matters of the built environment to replicate, in essence, the environment of the first. As a result, the action of typing reports ended up also ‘type-ing’ or defining the regions and the people they described and planned. From this perspective and for this panel, I suggest typing as a bureaucratic know-how controlling the architecture know-how of other regions in the globe.

I suggest typing — a feminised skill since the First World War and performed for the most part by women, friends and partners, students, and assistants — as a creative and product-oriented skill burdened by emotional labour, mental load, and executive intelligence, unacknowledged and underpaid. A consequence of this acknowledgement is the undecipherable position (alongside that of the consultant) of the typist of the cognitive empire. I here explore the category of the implicated subject (as theorised by Michael Rothberg) which qualifies individual responsibility attached to every collective responsibility for contemporary and inherited structures of cognitive oppression in which all workers are involved.

I approach this paper from my experiences as an assistant of architects, planners, consultants, and administrators where I typed pages, filled in forms, drew plans and conceptual graphs, and designed the graphics of documents that were to define certain aspects of the built environment of regions I knew very little about.

Bio:
Albert is a Lecturer (teaching), Departmental Tutor, and co-Director of Public Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is currently finishing his CHASE-funded PhD thesis titled ‘Architecture’s Human Resource: Kumasi, London, and the consultancy for independence’. His co-edited volume Wastiary: A bestiary of waste was published by UCL Press in Winter 2023.

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2 Building systems of care into construction spaces

Mads Mordigan ab_ Research network

madsmordigan@gmail.com

Abstract:

Are construction sites inherently violent and harmful spaces? This research examines the transformative potential of developing construction sites as spaces of care and support. It questions the inherent violence and harm associated with construction sites, emphasising their roots in pre-establishment phases such as designs, methods, budgets, and deadlines formulated within architecture and design studios. An intersection of sexism, ableism and capitalism perpetuates a predisposition for strength, speed, and a perceived necessity to sacrifice personal well-being, resulting in misogynistic and ableist spaces whose underlying logic often goes unscrutinized.

As a worker in construction sites, I have observed advocacy for care being misconstrued as an emotional reaction or an idealistic sensitivity, unfairly tied to gender. Calls for safe working environments and measures are commonly dismissed as unnecessary and impractical. This research posits care advocacy as a critique against the prevailing capitalist assumption that harm to workers is inevitable, challenging the notion that, as 'less educated' labourers, our bodies are treated as currency, exchanged at the cost of physical and mental well-being.

Originating from discussions with workers reflecting on a recent problematic construction project, this research examines innovative projects explicitly created to counter prevailing norms. It investigates techniques, methods, and structures aiming to replicate construction sites with systems fostering supportive and nourishing environments.

By utilising construction projects as experimental and research spaces, we aim to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how we can construct equitable, inclusive, and supportive sites.

Bio:

Mads Mordigan is a Carpenter, Educator, Project facilitator and Researcher with ab_ a trans-disciplinary research network. Facilitator at Holdfast Wood School, Drying Time, Polestar project and ab_ creating construction courses, sites and project-based research examining the possibilities of construction sites as spaces of care and learning.

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2 - Unearthing women's know-how: how and why have women stopped learning to build?

Mariana Moura Federal University of Minas Gerais
marimoura.arq@gmail.com

Abstract:
Back in 2022 I initiated visits to Quilombo Mata dos Crioulos, the ‘place where women build everything ’. Focused on self-built architectures as a domain of female participation, my intention was to interview women who knew how to build with earthen materials. While searching for locations, these exact words were used to describe the quilombo, a maroon community of freed black people from colonial times. Through multiple fieldwork visits, collection of oral history narratives and some hands-on building experiences, I gained insights into the constructive know-how of these women builders.

Within Mata dos Crioulos, a rich building expertise flows through generations. Women, from a young age, actively engage in building activities, learning from their parents and grandparents. As self-builders, these women exhibit autonomy in decision-making, determining house sizes, the best place to build them, and the materials they want to use. They also show great ingenuity in finding solutions to their common needs which are determinant to the production of their spaces.
However, further investigation reveals a recent transformation in women's participation in construction. When the earthen materials usually employed are substituted by brick and mortar, women are gradually excluded from the process. Newer, 'modern' houses are mostly constructed by men, with limited evidence of knowledge-sharing between the family. In this paper I delve into some of the reasons behind this shift, exploring how and why these changes occur. The objective is to uncover the multifaceted aspects influencing the social relations of production in these self-produced sites, and particularly the gendered dynamics in place.

Bio:

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2 - The Struggle of Piquiá: Habitat Self-Management in a Mining Hub of the Brazilian Amazon

Kaya Lazarini University of São Paulo and Usina CTAH
kaya@usp.br

Abstract:

This paper addresses the community struggle of Piquiá de Baixo in Maranhão against the impact of pig iron industries linked to the mining company Vale S.A. The primary focus is on the construction of the community's resettlement between 2012 and the present, exploring counter-hegemonic habitat production, self-management of space by social movements, and issues related to technical advisory groups. The pivotal role of women in the conception and management of the project is emphasised, proposing urban spaces linked to the reproduction of life. During the construction, women played significant roles in management, coordination, kitchen administration, and in income-generating groups. However, self-management faced contradictions, especially in terms of gender, concerning the recognition of women's work, and, in another aspect, regarding family protectionism reinforced by the women themselves. The text also explores technological and productive issues, analysing the complexity of self-management, highlighting system short-circuits, boycotts, and the resulting damages. In conclusion, it addresses, on one hand, the resistance to self-management, and on the other hand, the open (and ongoing) possibility brought about by the experience itself.

Bio:

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3 - Migration and Mobilities in Production

3 Exploring Production Studies in fringe communities – the Case of Kirombe and Kitintale Informal settlements in Kampala- Uganda

Finzi Saidi University of Johannebsurg
finzis@uj.ac.za

Nomalanga Mahlangu University of Johannebsurg

finzis@uj.ac.za

Abstract:

Emergent cities in Africa are created of an eclectic mix of production processes, many of which can be termed illegal or informal, depending on by-laws applied by local authorities. This paper argues that even the so-called 'informal' production processes of the building hold lessons in creativity and innovation for builders and architects of cities. Critical observation of the production processes of the dwellers and makers of informal settlements reveals the inherent ingenuity in sourcing and utilization of local materials and conditions. Informal settlements are crucial to emergent cities because they provide housing and livelihood where local authorities and governments have failed. Informa settlements emerge to take advantage of opportunities to fulfill the basic needs for shelter, food, entertainment, work, and the general failure by local authorities to provide adequate housing. Informal production processes of cities become a vital contributor to city-making and housing.

Informal settlements are the first sites of accommodation in cities of both local and international migrants and have the potential to transform into formal and approved sections of emergent cities. However, their conditions are ignored as sites of study by architecture and urban design programs. This is so because the informal is deemed to be illegal. In this paper, we argue that more healthy, functional, and sustainable transitional settlements could emerge by carefully observing informal settlements' building production processes coupled with student architects' creative thinking.

This paper uses a case-study method and design exploration to interrogate an edge settlement of Kirombe and Kitintale on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kampala. The study investigates the landscape ecologies of rural-urban migrants with minimal resources to begin life in cities.

Key Words: informal settlement; migration; emergent cities; transformative curriculum.

Bio:

My research interests are in public spaces in African cities. My research Unit 15X has collaborated with African universities on public space research projects in cities of Johannesburg, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Gaborone. We explore contemporary public space change in cities in Africa.

Ms. Mahlangu is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Research co-leader of Unit 15X in the Graduate School of Architecture at the university of Johannesburg.

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3 Free Black American Exiles’ Construction Labor in British Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

Jonah Rowen The New School - Parsons School of Design rowenj1@newschool.edu

Abstract:

In 1796, British authorities forcibly relocated Jamaican Maroons from the Caribbean to Canada, and subsequently to Sierra Leone, to assist in “colonization and improvement”—clearing land, building houses—after the American War of Independence. In their materiality and building techniques, the architecture and urban spaces these refugees produced index their builders’ variegated journeys from the Caribbean and North America to the Maritimes and Western Africa. Drawing from officials’ and settlers’ firsthand accounts, this paper argues that despite contemporary abolition of slavery and rhetoric of emancipation, these colonial schemes maintained racial exploitation through construction projects and practices.

The free Black Jamaican exiles acceded to building Halifax’s Citadel, Government House, and roads. But initial praise for the Maroons’ vigorous construction labor soon faded as racial prejudices resurfaced, and colonial administrators set about relocating the Maroons to Freetown, Sierra Leone, a building site-cum-colony. High-quality construction was essential to demonstrate the new Sierra Leoneans’ industriousness as free economic agents: “Civilization,” symbolized by architecture, in turn represented morality. Thus Sierra Leone Company abolitionist-speculators supplied building tools, materials, and prefabricated parts, alternately commending the settlers’ “great desire to acquire a knowledge of handicraft trades” and complaining, “scarcely a man of them could be prevailed upon to work steadily, in building the hut that was shelter to him.” Following successful erection of Halifax’s “Maroon Bastion,” the newly-arrived Jamaicans were induced to build Freetown’s fort as “apprentices,” with negligible payment. The Black builders found working conditions little better than the enslavement from which many had escaped.

The moralistic paternalism that undergirded “apprenticeship” and skills training barely concealed complicated racial dynamics on the Canadian and African colonial construction sites alike. Both, indeed, were built to deter both looming rival European and local Indigenous forces dispossessed of lands that the British annexed using the Lockean rationale that “improvement” justified ownership.

Bio:

Jonah Rowen is an architectural historian. His work focuses on intersections between architectural technics, economics, materials and commodities, and race and labor in the British Atlantic world around the turn of the nineteenth century.

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3 Fields of Concrete Trees: Agricultural narratives in Indian construction worlds.

Namita Vijay Dharia Rhode Island School of Design

namita.dharia@gmail.com

Abstract:

What role does the agricultural play within the architectural? How do migrants work through the disparities between urban and rural life? What boundaries and borders does migration reveal in the development of urban regions? This paper analyzes the lives of construction workers in India’s National Capital Region, arguing that an agricultural imagination and infrastructure infuses and supports urban architecture through the dual lives migrant workers lead. Emic understandings of agriculture—such as the workings of soil, mixing fertilizer, and understanding of plant growth stages –support the logics of construction, agricultural cycles feed urban growth, and prolific drawings of rural flora and fauna challenge the vocabularies of architecture under construction. The paper draws from a larger ethnographic project on the construction industry in India’s National Capital Region. The project comprised 15 months of fieldwork in India’s National Capital Region and examined the intertwined work of different classes of people in the construction industry.

Bio:

Namita Vijay Dharia is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. She works across the themes of materiality and aesthetic studies, political ecology, labor studies, and planning and development politics. Dharia has practiced and taught architecture in India and the United States, worked as an architectural journalist, and collaborated on design research projects in Delhi, Allahabad, Coimbatore, and Detroit. Her most recent article, entitled Construction Site Pedagogies, was published in the Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South. She is the author of the Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and love in Indian Architecture and Construction, a monograph published with the University of California Press in its competitive Atelier Series.

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3 Labor and Land - An Alternative Model of City-Building Without Finance Capital through Construction Cooperatives

Jieqiong Wang Nanjing University jieqwang@nju.edu.cn

Abstract:

From 1992 to 2009 in Shenzhen, thousands of medium-rise apartment buildings ranging from 5 to 9 stories were built in peri-urban sites that had once been rural villages. These new apartments were constructed on the footprints of the older timber-structured courtyard houses that they replaced, built so close together that they came to be known as “hand-shake buildings,” commonly seen in the expanding southern Chinese cities. In 2009, when Guangdong Province started the “Three Old” (old towns, old factories, and old villages) urban renewal program, many targeted villages already housed more than ten thousand tenants in each of them. The local villagers became de facto affordable housing providers and became landlords to the city’s new arrivals of migrant labor. The labor-intensive construction processes in these urban villages created not only a unique form of urban housing but also an alternative approach to the local building and housing economy. Unlike the large-scale urban housing projects, which typically involve bank loans, investments from real estate developers, project management, and architectural planning, these smaller-scale constructions were primarily managed by local villagers and construction workers. The construction workers and local villagers themselves collaborated as the major actors to combine their investments of capital and knowledge, creating a cooperative mode of investment in housing. Whereas the cash-short local villagers provided land, the construction workers provided construction materials and labor. In return, construction workers got shares from the income of housing rents and more projects. This cooperative approach bypassed traditional financing and development structures, making villagers and construction workers the leading players in the housing business. By closely examining the building processes in the urban village, this paper presents a counterexample of the more typical massive construction practice in modern city building where the residents and the workers are leveraged.

Bio: ^[w]

Jieqiong Wang is a postdoctoral researcher in history and theory at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Nanjing University, China. She received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Michigan. Her current research engages with spontaneous architecture and urban communities in China.

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The Production of the Architect

4 Emergence in Disciplinary Crises: Cultural Studies and Production Studies

Nick Beech University of Birmingham n.d.beech@bham.ac.uk

Abstract:

In this paper, I will argue that ‘production studies’ emerges at a moment of crisis for the built environment professions themselves. Drawing analogy with the emergence of cultural studies in the 1950s, that Stuart Hall argued was the result of a crisis in the humanities, I set out some of the main epistemological, discursive, and practical fault lines of the built environment. Taking the architectural profession in Britain as exemplary, I show that the nature of this crisis is over-determined – that is, the crisis is not reducible to the logic of capital, but results from the intersection of distinct structural elements and forces that have different trajectories and durées. Following Sergio Ferro and Silke Kapp, I indicate the extent to which architectural knowledge is implicated within the social division of labour and the exercise of power in capitalist modes of production, as evident in dominant conceptions of ‘design’ and ‘drawing’. Using Raymond Williams’s distinction between bourgeois ‘servant’ ideologies and working class ‘solidarity’ ideologies, I examine the ethics assumed by professional architects, particularly as these are reproduced within the professional institution of architecture and design teaching studio. Following Katie Lloyd Thomas, and her discussion of ‘performance specifications’ and ‘informed materials’, I read practices of technical specification in architecture as produced by and productive of market and social-power logics. Finally, and referring to the research of Who Builds Your Architecture?, I consider both the global division of labour into which architects in Britain are inserted, and the racialisation of architectural knowledge and practice that is required to enable that insertion. All of these, I will suggest, over-determine the profession of architecture, and simultaneously produce professional architecture’s effects in those crises (ecological and social) that many designers and students try to address.

Bio:

Nick Beech is Associate Professor (Social Policy) at the University of Birmingham, where he leads the Stuart Hall Archive Project (https://stuarthallarchive.bham.ac.uk/). As an Affiliate Researcher on the TF/TK project, Nick has explored the distinct reading of William Morris offered by Sérgio Ferro, in juxtaposition to the New Left in Britain.

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4 Stone-Thinking Assemblies: Managing Complexity in a Risk-Averse Age

Niki-Marie Jansson Newcastle University and NM Jansson Studio.

niki-marie.janson@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract:

“The desire to neutralise difference, [...] arises [...] from an anxiety about difference, which intersects with the economics of global consumer culture. [...] Modern society is ‘de-skilling’ people in practising coopertion.”1

The evolution of architectural practice is inextricably linked to modes of extraction and production of building material, where, for example, over the past century we see post-war economic thinking manifest in the form of attempts to ‘simplify’ the building envelope through material homogenisation and a layering of hybrid systems separated by trade.

A growing conscience towards material resourcefulness, climate-anxieties, doubts concerning carbon-zero targets, RIBA’s push for a ‘retrofit-revolution’, and limitations brought about by a growing skills gap, put the construction industry at a critical crossroads. Stone —being inherently low in carbon and abundantly available in the UK, with a rich history to support its use— presents itself as a promising material protagonist, providing architects with genuine opportunities for innovation in the way we think about, procure, design, assemble, maintain and reappropriate buildings sustainably. But what does this actually mean for the practice of architecture? How do we begin to manage the complexities of working with this natural material in a structural capacity, in a context where restrictive contractual set-ups and insurance risk frameworks govern the design specification process?

The paper examines the above through the lens of how current supply and production chains of indigenous stone are held together by default architectural applications and specification methods, identifying current issues, limitations and possibilities for future local industry. The inquiry incorporates case study-based evidence from working relationships with Albion Stone, the UK’s largest Portland Stone supplier, and Hutton Stone, currently operating between three sandstone quarries and two production sites on the border of England and Scotland.

Questions will be asked on what constitutes ‘better practice’, drawing from interdisciplinary knowledge-bases, first-hand industry encounters, and architectural precedents. Concluding with a reflection on the importance —and potential— of relationality in the management of complex assemblies, the paper will consider what this means for an evolving profession, building envelope design and a generation of aspiring architects.

1 Sennet, R. “Together: The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation”, 2008, p 8.

Bio:

Niki-Marie is an independent architectural practitioner and researcher pursuing an ethical approach towards traditional practice and innovative design research. She is co-leading an MArch design studio at Newcastle University focused on material-centred approaches to place making and stone vernacular architecture, and is a visiting critic at The Bartlett UCL, UAL, the AA and Westminster.

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4 Trades and Labour Clubs: Tools of approximation and nuance for a collective architectural production

Paul King The Bartlett School of Architecture & Sheffield Hallam School of Architecture
paul.king.16@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract:

“The values that define a discipline are maintained through its conventions. Conventions are what is taught, what is banded down, what links generations. They consist of tools and techniques, norms and models for the production and interpretation of what qualifies as significant work. Conventions specify acceptable modes of appearance, verify expertise, and narrate lineage. They defend the boundaries of what constitutes a discipline. Accordingly, all conventions are necessarily biased, they are established to maintain the privilege and power of certain groups at the expense of others. But this does not mean that they are stable, permanent, nor completely dependent on origin.” (Young 2021)

This paper will show that vagueness and nuance are not only intrinsic to architectural drawing, communication and production, but are indeed key drivers of built production. Physical, material construction tolerances can be viewed as a collaborative place and a collective design environment in its own right. The collaborative qualities of this place signal its importance for reaching agreements and offering common ground solutions during the design and construction process of architecture. Construction tolerances belong to every member of the design team, they’re universal, and therefore carry the hallmark of a collective design tool. Conceptualised as a place and distinct design environment of architecture, the universal language of construction tolerances enables a blurring of the traditional disciplinary locations. My research proposes a counter-narrative to the notion that flawless, high-definition and digitally perfect three-dimensional visualisations relate to built architectural outcomes. Exploring the challenges, complexities and opportunties of architectural production, the paper suggests that architectural production is better described using a fuzzy logic and indeterminate precision.

Young, M. (2021). Reality Modelled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics After the Digital Image. Routledge.

Bio:

Paul is an architect, educator and academic researcher based in Sheffield, UK. Studying Architecture at The University of Manchester, he has practised as an architect for over 20 years in Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield. He is now Head of School at Sheffield Hallam University and a PhD candidate at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

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4 Common Building: The Educational Reforms of William Lethaby

Hugh Strange Hugh Strange Architects / AHO, Oslo

hs@hughstrange.com

Abstract:

Asked in 1901 to give a paper to the Royal Institute of British Architects on the subject of Education in Architecture, the Arts & Crafts architect, William Lethaby, purposefully, and perhaps a little provocatively, chose the title, Education in Building. Decrying the transformation of builder into the role of contractor, or contracting agent, Lethaby’s paper proposed the reinvigoration of the system of apprenticeships and the improved provision of technical education in new Building Schools. In such an establishment bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and plasterers might study side-by-side. Only then does his paper suggest that here, in this context of open collaboration of trade and craft, was the architect to be trained, suggesting: ‘We must draw near to the workmen by every means in our power.’

This paper will retrace the ways that Lethaby later sought to challenge and close the distance between architects and builders through his proposals for educational reform and his work towards the integration of a joint education program. Particular reference will be made to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and to the later, London County Council School of Building, established in 1904, and based in Brixton, South London. The paper will conclude by examining the relevance of Lethaby’s final remarks in this text, that architecture be ‘refounded on common building’; a term significantly redolent of both the idea of the ‘commonplace’, and of ‘building in common’.

Bio:

Hugh Strange is founding director of the architectural practice, Hugh Strange Architects, based in London. Hugh is currently completing a PhD at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, titled, ‘Architecture at the Building Site.’

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4 ‘A Curious Failure to Correlate and Co-ordinate’: The RIBA Joint Consultative Committee’s 1956 Conference on Building Training

Ray Verrall Newcastle University

raymond.verrall@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract:

Most discourse around questions of professional identity in British architecture acknowledges the importance of the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference on Architectural Education, which framed its subject as an academic pursuit designed to produce a technocratic elite. What is sometimes overlooked is the story of how things could have taken a different turn, towards what Lethaby might have termed ‘the setting up of contact between the workman and the workmaster [...] in schools common to all.’[1] This paper tells part of that story.

In 1956, resulting from a recommendation in the RIBA’s 1955 “McMorran Report”, a one-day Conference on Building Training was organised to explore the possibility of joint training schemes ‘for all sides of the building industry [...].’[2] This conference, much smaller in scope than the later Oxford Conference, reflected both a surprisingly resilient “Lethabitic” ethos within certain parts of architectural practice and education, and a desire by other building industry actors to develop higher standards for the ‘technical, managerial, and professional components’[3] of their respective fields.

The RIBA hosted the conference, and its Journal published summarised proceedings, but the subject was seldom discussed further institutionally. Generally resistant to the idea of potentially “levelling up” building subjects (and fearing its own subject’s subordination), the RIBA instead focused on redefining and raising its own educational standards, resulting in the far more decisive deliberations of the Oxford Conference.

Using journalistic and archival material, this paper illuminates and contextualises this “last stand” of those seeking to overcome the ‘highly artificial separation’[4] of the architect from the rest of the British building industry.

References:

[1] William Lethaby, ‘Architectural Education: A Discussion’, Architectural Review, November 1904, pp. 157–62 (161).

[2] ‘The McMorran Report’, Architects’ Journal, 10 February 1955, p. 195.

[3] Harvey Frost, ‘Training Schemes in the Industry’, Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1955, p. 10.

[4] Lethaby, p. 161.

Bio:

Ray Verrall is an architect, educator, and PhD candidate at Newcastle University. His doctoral research explores histories of architectural education and professionalisation in Britain—specifically focusing on the convergence of discourses that conditioned the 1958 RIBA Oxford Conference. He has taught architecture at foundation, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels.

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Sérgio Ferro and Arquitetura Nova

5 Grignan’s Building Sites: Sérgio Ferro and architectural praxis

Felipe Contier Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie

felipe.contier@mackenzie.br

José Tavares Correia de Lira FAU-USP
joselira@usp.br

Abstract:

Sérgio Ferro's transfer from Brazil to France in 1972 represented a turning point in the direction of his theoretical, political and professional work, marked by a growing distance from the professional practice of architecture and construction. What has been less observed is that alongside his intense activity as an intellectual and painter, Sérgio Ferro found a marginal way of working as an architect in recent decades, renovating his houses and studios in the commune of Grignan. Faced with its genesis, processes and materiality, this practice, although discreet, reveals important aspects of his theoretical-critical reflection on architecture and sheds light on issues such as the relationship between technology and know-how, division of labor and manpower, commission and project, the new and the pre-existing, architecture and painting. This work presents three works built for his own use, carried out by the architect and his wife since 1990, in particular the couple's current home at rue du Petit Faubourg, acquired in 2003. Through these construction sites, we propose an analysis of the design and construction of the house and a review of the architect's intellectual career up to the present day.

Bio:

Felipe Contier is a professor of architectural history at Mackenzie Presbyterian University. Architect graduated from FAU-USP, has a doctorate from IAU-USP and researches the work of Sérgio Ferro.

Jose Lira is a full professor of architectural and urban history at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism in the University of Sao Paulo, and director of Maria Antonia Cultural Center in Sao Paulo.

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5 The Work Encampment: A Utopia (1981) x Dessin/Chantier (1979)

Ana Buim USJT

anacbuim@gmail.com

Ana Paula Koury, USJT and Mackenzie

apkoury@gmail.com

Abstract:

During our research, titled 'Rodrigo Lefèvre and The Work Encampment: A Utopia' (MARQUES, A. C. B. A., 2022), we identified gaps in the specialized literature on the Grupo Arquitetura Nova and their contributions to Brazilian modern architecture. Authors like Arantes (2002), Koury (2003), and Buzzar (2019) emphasize the collaborative work among architects Ferro, Lefèvre, and Império and the projects carried out in partnership. However, the individual contributions of architects Rodrigo Lefèvre, Sérgio Ferro, and Flávio Império have only more recently been addressed individually (Pio in 2006, Gorni in 2004, Contier in 2009, among others).

Our main objectives in that research were to engage with works that explore the individualities of architects Ferro, Império, and Lefèvre by analyzing the works of Rodrigo Lefèvre, in particular, their work 'The Work Encampment: A Utopia' (1981), which remained unpublished until 2019. The literature review pointed to gaps in comparative studies. We noticed that authors rarely addressed the distinct perspectives and interpretations of similar themes. A path that seemed quite promising to us in terms of elucidating dialectical and critical approaches present in the structuring of debates that undoubtedly fueled the intellectual production of these authors.

Our participation in the research group 'TF/TK: Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Fields of Production Studies' helped us better understand Sérgio Ferro's approach in 'Dessin/Chantier ' in the context of the development of their critical thinking about architecture. The paths opened by participating in the reading groups of Sérgio Ferro's works allowed us to establish comparisons between Ferro and Lefèvre's approaches to construction sites. This paper approaches, in a comparative perspective, the texts 'The Work Encampments: A Utopia' by Rodrigo Lefèvre and 'Dessin/Chantier' by Sérgio Ferro.

Bio:

Architect and urbanist from Mackenzie with a master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism from USJT. Scholarship recipient from CAPES - Brazil. Currently pursuing a specialization in Art Education and is Ph.D researcher/student. Specialist in architectural graphic production and 3D modeling. Coordinates the Docomomo SP, researching modern architecture. Contributed to the Lina Bo and P.M. Bardi Institute / Glass House.

Architect and urbanist, Ph.D. in Architecture and Urbanism from FAUUSP, with a postdoctoral degree from the Institute of Brazilian Studies at USP. Is a professor in both graduate and undergraduate programs at the University São Judas and Mackenzie Presbyterian University. As a Fulbright Visiting Professor, contributed to the research project "Planning for a Global Democracy." Is a consultant for the Fulbright Commission of Brazil and is a member of the Technical Scientific Committee of the Journal of Urban Technology and Sustainability. Since 2017, has been coordinating the Itaim Paulista Laboratory, an extension project involving collaboration with local authorities.

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5 Flávio Imperio. Scenes from a cultural void

Isobel Whitelegg Art Museum & Gallery Studies, University of Leicester icjw1@le.ac.uk

Abstract:

Flavio Imperio (1935-1985) is a name little cited in the English language, but it one that can be found in prominent places. He was a founding member, with Sergio Ferro and Rodrigo Lefebvre, of the Arquitetura Nova group; a participant in the celebrated art exhibitions Opinião (1965) and Nova Objetividade Brasileira (1967): a friend of Lina, and a colleague of Boal. Flávio was an architect, artist and pedagogue, but more than anything else a scenographer. He made scenes.

By centring on Imperio, I offer a perspective on how Arquitetura Nova’s critical concerns bled into other fields of cultural production within Brazil, before and during Brazil’s 1964-1985 military regime. Placing scenography at the centre of his production while encompassing his work as architect, artist, exhibition-maker, and teacher, I draw on an expanded conceptualisations of scenography to address the aesthetic dimensions and critical capacities of Imperio’s interventions within and beyond theatrical contexts.

From the poetics of economy that characterised his staging of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Morte e Vida Severina (Teatro Natal, Sao Paulo, 1960) to a subtle critical contribution to Boals’ celebrated Arena conta Zumbi (1965) and the organisation of collective exhibitions that countered the commercialisation of the 1970s Paulista artworld, the scenes that Imperio made now offer a situated perspective on the shifting social, political, and economic contexts that he navigated over the course of a working life that spanned the dictatorship.

Bio:

Isobel Whitelegg is an art historian, curator and Associate Professor in Art Museum & Gallery Studies, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. She specialises in contemporary art in and from Brazil; the dynamically-formed legacies of non-collecting arts organisations (such as biennials and arts centres), and the history & historiography of contemporary art.

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5 Report: Sergio Ferro Collection

Raíssa de Oliveira Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)

raissapco@usp.br

Abstract:

The proposal is a brief summary of the work that will be developed at IAU USP during the second half of 2023.

Sergio Ferro's collection was donated to the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (IAU USP). Today the IAU USP is undergoing a major renovation to expand its facilities, providing an appropriate place for the storage, treatment and research of some important collections in the area of architecture and urbanism. The aim is to organize Sergio Ferro's collection during the period of IAU USP's renovation so that it will be made available as soon as the new IAU USP buiding are inaugurated.

The collection is still being recognized by the team that received it, however, it basically deals with the documentation held by Sergio Ferro, therefore, in general it deals with his career as an architect, painter and teacher in Brazil and France. There are manuscripts, reports, drawings, writings, notes, catalogues, projects and guidelines that are still being revisited, but which can contribute to future research, especially those linked to Production Studies.

Also part of the work is the organization of this collection within the TFTK website. The proposal is to present the result of this systematization of the website's material during the conference.

Bio:

Post-doctoral fellow (FAPESP) at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, IAU-USP, in São Carlos/SP. She is a member of the Housing and Sustainability Research Group (HABIS) and the Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge in Architecture, Design and Work into a New Field of Production Studies (TFTK).

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Methods for Studying the Building Site 1

7 Being on Site- Ethnography as a Method, Theory, and Ethics on a Chinese Construction Site

Will Thomson Newcastle University

wthomson@gmail.com

Abstract:

This paper explores ethnography as a method for architecture through the different positionalities of an anthropologist and architect on the construction site. I draw on two years of fieldwork in China, which included three months of participant observation on a construction site of a high-rise luxury mixed use commercial office and apartment building in the expanded Goaxin District of Xi'an. I also travelled to the hometowns of migrant construction workers in villages, for a wheat harvest, tomb building, and Spring Festivals. On the other side of the division of mental-manual labour, I spent time in local design offices in Xi'an and conducted interviews with American and European architects working in global firms in Beijing and Shanghai.

Reconsidering architecture as viewed from its margins, I detail the effects of what I term design ideology and how it often overdetermines much of what is admitted to the discipline as a legitimate and central subject of “architectural” knowledge. The presentation explores ethnography’s promise as a research practice for shifting architectural perspectives. Finally, I propose an alternative methodological approach for Production Studies, centred in the first instance around interrogating the “design-labour relation,” to reconstruct the architectural subject along a multi-dimensional conception of the levels of designed production beyond the physical, completed building.

Bio:

Will Thomson is a Research Associate for TF/TK in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. He holds a PhD in socio-anthropology from NYU. His current book project, China Constructs is based on two years of fieldwork in Xi’an, China, including working on construction sites alongside rural migrant builders and with architects in local design studios. ^[x]

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7 Twelve grooves: impressions of labor on architectural ceramics

Rosa Glaessner Novak University of Michigan
rosagn@umich.edu

Abstract:

A 1910 special volume of the Geological Survey of Ohio titled The Manufacture of Roofing Tiles includes photographs of two roof tiles produced in the late nineteenth century. The tiles’ surfaces are indented with lines running down their length. On one, seven lines come together in a single curve at its rounded end, whereas on the other, five impressions run down the tile and straight off its edge. In the text, ceramic engineer and tile plant designer Wolsey Garnet Worcester speculated on the making of the tiles’ indentations, writing that the “grooves were produced by the fingers of the workmen, each finishing his tile with lines that seemed most appropriate to him.” Woolsey’s words are a rare example of the presence of workers–their fingertips and preferences–in this text on clay mining and ceramic production.

This talk will explore methods for studying the production of the built environment through late nineteenth and early twentieth century histories of the labor of roof tile production. It will follow the traces of workers through trade texts. Likewise, it will explore the ways in which production processes and the workers performing them can be read in the built environment, from the surfaces and curvature of roof tiles, themselves–such as those photographed and printed in the pages of Worcester’s text. Finally, the talk will suggest that oral storytelling plays a central role in the passing down of these histories from generation to generation of clay workers. How might anecdotes about the laboring body become an alternate or supplementary source to the archival record for the writing of histories of the built environment?

Bio:

Rosa Glaessner Novak is a PhD student in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her recent work traces the histories of land and labor involved in the production of ceramic building materials. Novak holds a BFA in Ceramics from California College of the Arts.

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7 History on Concrete Casting Yard

Pinai Sirikiatikul Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University sirikiatikul_p@su.ac.th

Abstract:

Unlike a prefabrication system developed in post-war Europe, precast concrete explored in this paper involved labour-intensive, craft-based, and heavy job site operation. Given the constraints under which architects during the 1960s and 70s in Thailand worked -- the availability of cheap, unskilled labour and the deficiency in industrial productive capacity -- none adjusted themselves better than Amorn Srivongse to develop rapid construction of cheap precasting to meet the government's demand for speed up construction of provincial universities. As the architect had to work from his Bangkok office, he had to rely on his construction forepersons for site supervision to record the daily progress of the construction and notify him of any urgent tasks the architect had to solve the site's emerging problems. The paper looked at the building records to investigate the history of building sites through the perspectives of the architect and his forepersons. It inquires how the architect and his engineers divided their time between desk work and site supervision and what was instrumental to the building works' success. Drawing upon archival materials from Amorn Srivongse's archives, the research explores how the building works were carried out and, in particular, how the architect set out to deal with the production of precast concrete components on the site. The finding is that the building site constitutes constructive possibilities in its process, creating a physical framework for processing financial, technical, and material resources. As such, it enables architects to define their role in relation to their workers, acting as a process where dynamic dialogue and action between such men through attention to practical aspects of building can be exercised. The paper argues that the ability to think of possible building methods in any given site situation, regardless of the architect's presence at the site, is instrumental to the work's success.

Bio:

Pinai Sirikiatikul is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. He studied architecture at Silpakorn University before receiving his PhD in Architectural History from University College London in 2012. Since then, he has developed a strong interest in the construction history of Thailand since the late 18th to 20th centuries.

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7 Twelve grooves: impressions of labor on architectural ceramics

Rosa Glaessner Novak University of Michigan
rosagn@umich.edu

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7 Talking Time on Site

Prue Chiles prue.chiles@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract:

The site of architecture and the building of architecture take place at the intersection of temporalities - in time as much as in space. This paper builds on my research on time as a method in understanding the processes of building on site and to question how our disciplines, knowledges (knowhow) and backgrounds shape our formal and informal temporal practices. The everyday meanings and mis-understandings in communicating effectively on site, highlight our sense of identity, our concerns and our values

How do you research and represent this in language, text and drawing? I have found that actions on site can be situated through visual time-based collages and contrasted with the limitations of written instructions and description. Images and narrative show the lingering resonance of past events on a changing site, as well as the intensities, banalities, ethical dilemmas, common experiences and strange encounters. Ernst Bloch’s concept of discontemporaneity points us to different temporalities that co-exist in places, historical periods, social groups and individuals that are contrary to everyday experience. How can we highlight the messy, feminine, everyday process of getting to know each other, running alongside a more formal economic and practical process of building where everything is mapped out and kept to time? Fieldnotes and conversations are interwoven as a narrative of preoccupations on site, talking of a more human-focused approach to working together on site. The indispensable role of storytelling can allow a more ‘conscious communicative praxis’ The imaginative textural practices of Benjamin can help us appreciate dialogue and conversations on site across different temporalities and to examine the co-existence of the past present and future. We have the potential to influence each other and be more aware of alternative actions we can take, building towards a more ethical practice.

Bio:

Prue Chiles is Professor of Architectural Design Research at Newcastle University, UK. Her work seeks to strengthen connections between people and design, combining architectural practice with research and teaching. Prue’s research is now focused on finding new ways to think about the relationship between theory, research and practice, particularly on the building site and using time as a method. Prue still practices with CECA - Chiles Evans and Care founded in 2000.

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8 Back to the building site. Lina Bo Bardi and Arquitetura Nova in the Divino Espírito Santo do Cerrado church.

Davide Sacconi Royal College of Art / Architectural Association davide.sacconi@rca.ac.uk

Abstract:

The Divino Espírito Santo do Cerrado church in Uberlândia, designed between 1976 and 1982 by lina Bo Bardi in collaboration with the parish community, was partly built by mutirão – a form of self-construction and self-organisation of the building site involving both professional builders and local inhabitants. Such an experiment in the production of architecture through participatory design and building remains a unicum in the work of Lina Bo Bardi, but nevertheless represents a turning point in her idea and practice of architecture. The project concludes a decade of desertion from architecture (1965-1975), partly triggered by the rise of the military dictatorship in 1964. In these years Bo Bardi worked exclusively on exhibitions, film sets, theatre scenographies, experimental furniture and texts, collaborating with key figures of the Brazilian counter-culture and developing a stronger political approach to architecture. In the Uberlândia church the anthropological approach to architecture – already developed by Lina Bo Bardi through her work in Bahia (1960 - 65) – encounters a radical political ethos that brings together form, representation, building technique and organisation of the construction site into a collective form of design, practice and use. Ultimately, the project manifests the crucial but overlooked influence exerted on Bo Bardi by the radical critique of architectural production proposed in those same years by Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Imperio and Rodrigo Lefèvre.

Bio:

Davide Sacconi explores forms of buildings, cities, production and research through designs, exhibitions, books and pedagogical projects. He is Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, teaches the Diploma Unit 20 at Architectural Association and is founder of the collective CAMPO.

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8 Designing with reused precast concrete elements - Architectural production in the circular economy

Helena Westerlind KTH Royal Institution of Technology helena.westerlind@arch.kth.se

Abstract:

In the vast transformation of material resources that is the built environment, every design decision has potential large-scale environmental consequences. With this comes great responsibilities, but also great opportunities for architects to contribute to more sustainable material flows. While architecture has traditionally focused on new construction with virgin materials there is an urgent call for a professional and disciplinary shift towards maintaining and reusing the existing building stock. This means expanding the focus of design to encompass the whole life cycle of a building and to recognize existing buildings to be valuable material storages that, if demolition cannot be avoided, can be harvested, and used in new construction.

This paper describes the design and completion of a temporary pavilion made with reused precast concrete elements, which began with first sourcing precast concrete elements from the surrounding area by collecting demolition permits. Precast concrete elements have a long service life and are usually heavily standardized, which make them particularly suitable for reuse. However, the reuse of structural building components has significant implications on the architectural design process in that it fundamentally challenges the separation that typically exists between design and construction. Simply put, this entails starting with a known set of building components instead of specifying materials after the completion of a design. The sourcing of building material is just one example of the new set of skills that architects will need in the transition to circular construction. Another is to design with the end life of the building already in mind, or so-called design for deconstruction.

Bio:

Helena Westerlind is an architect and postdoctoral researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Her work explores material processes and techniques in architectural production with specific focus on cement-based materials, reuse and 3D printing.

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8 Building Redemption: Race, Religion, and the Coloniality of Labor in Mid-century Latin America

Maria Gonzalez Pendas Cornell University

mg995@cornell.edu

Abstract:

Amidst the wooden frame of the formwork waiting for the liquid concrete, workers erected a cross. The gesture is hardly extraordinary given that the building under construction was a church: The Altillo Church, designed in 1956 by architect Enrique de la Mora and structural consultant Félix Candela, built in 1958 in the heart of Mexico City, and soon after deemed a quintessential example of Candela’s thin-shell concrete roofs. To be sure, the ad-hoc cross served the symbolic and functional aspects of the building-to-be. But what are its implications when we consider architecture history as a history of production?

This paper takes cue from the worker’s cross to explore the religious, racial, and colonial resonances that were at play in the material execution of two highly innovative systems of structural design of the period and region: the concrete thin-shell system that Candela invented and deployed by the hundreds in Mexico and the terracotta vault system devised by engineer Eladio Dieste in Uruguay. Both designers employed these systems most spectacularly in churches, contributing to the history of Catholicism and modernity in the region in crucial ways. My interpretation goes beyond addressing the programmatic or formal aspects of their buildings, however, to instead question the politics and technologies of race and religion that sustained their working sites. Drawing from construction photographs, technical drawings, legal and financial paperwork as well as the material evidence of the buildings themselves, this paper reconstructs part of the construction processes to argue for the dialectics of modernity/coloniality that were here at work. On the one hand, Candela and Dieste—both technical experts of white European descent—thought of quasi-artisanal ritualistic building practices as socially and spiritually productive, as corporeal technologies potent enough to shape workers—Amerindian peones—into modernity and modernity itself into a new “humanist” universality. On the other hand, this vision and the craft practices that were associated with it hinged on a deeply religious and colonial resolve: one that, in claiming redemption through construction all but relocated the labor/racial matrix of power that had structured Spanish imperialism to the construction sites of postwar development.

Bio:

Maria Gonzalez Pendas is an assistant professor in the History of Architecture and Urban Development Program at Cornell University. Recent publications include a co-edited special issue for Grey Room titled 'Pious Technologies and Secular Designs' and an essay on 'Labor Unimagined' for the JSAH. She’s currently finalizing a manuscript on the relationship between fascism, religion, imperialism, and modern architecture in the context of Franquista Spain.

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8 Separated Design in Danish professionalism: the hygge way to architectural production (1993-2016)

Angela Gigliotti ETH Zürich
gigliotti@arch.ethz.ch

Abstract:

One of the field that often have been addressed framing the last 30 years regards architecture and labour. However, scholars seldom have discussed the Danish case, the current neoliberal turn of the Welfare State and the existing wide variety of practices operating within, against and besides neoliberal professionalism (Gigliotti, forthcoming). Sérgio Ferro's conceptualization of "separated design" might be interestingly addressed to the Danish case in which yet how the economic system has shaped the architectural modes of production has not been widely debated, on the opposite of when facing a globalized shared condition of being an architect under neoliberalism (Spencer, 2016; Deamer, 2020; Aureli 2018). What has happened to Danish architectural production lately?

This paper aims to work in this niche based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation (The Labourification of Work, Arkitektskolen Aarhus 2020) unfolding the current Danish modes of architectural production. It departs from the general and specific implications that a Neoliberal turn of the Danish Welfare State has had on architectural professionalism (1993-2016) in order to investigate the variety of Danish practices that have been able to be active, fight, survive and procure jobs. Specifically, the paper introduces the outcomes of a grounded theory methodology and a series of semi-structured interviews made to several representatives of current Danish architectural practices. The main argument is that, the "New Wave" (Vindum, Weiss 2012) turned out to be a tsunami, with a detrimental shaping of professionalism toward commodification and the establishment of an "Hygge Architecture".Nonetheless, current practices have been able to establish several tactics to counterconduct and operate towards the economic system. The paper will introduce those tactics under two substantive grounded theories the “shapes” and the “mechanisms”, instrumental to cross the nineties, the noughties and the tens in Danish architectural history and interpret the heterogeneous sample of Danish professionalism under neoliberalism.

Bio:

Gigliotti (M.Sc. Arch. PhD) is an architect, educator, and researcher. Her interest focuses on architectural professionalism and cross-cultural architectural modes of production, under instances of Danish Welfare State and Swiss coloniality. She is currently HM Queen Margrethe II’s Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow (Carlsbergfondet 2021-24) and External Lecturer and Research Faculty at DIS Copenhagen (s. 2016).

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9 The specificity of Latin American colonial architecture lies in the production

José R P Thiesen Universidade Federal de Goiás

joserpt@ufg.br

Abstract:

My research seeks to capture, throughout the history of colonial Latin America, some moments that allow us to analyze architecture from the perspective of labor and production. Latin American colonial architecture is often analyzed by form. The aspects that bring it closer to or distance it (in an original way) from European architecture of the same period are usually valued. I argue that the big difference between European and Latin American architecture from the 16th to the 18th centuries was not in form, but precisely in production and labor. When researching, I realized that Latin American colonial construction sites were very diverse in terms of ethnic composition, hierarchies, forms of organization, forms of financing, labor conflicts, and even the economic role played by the production of architecture varied greatly. These variations gravitated mainly towards two focuses: Brazil with the predominance of the work of enslaved people originating from the African continent; and the central regions of Mexico and the Andes, whose construction sites were full of indigenous workers fulfilling tax obligations. In both cases, European masters and officials used strategies to dominate the top of the hierarchical pyramid or at least maintain a higher status than natives and Africans. They have not always been successful, and it is necessary to shed light on exceptional cases. Still, the last barrier remained economic. Even though indigenous people, Africans and people of African descent have achieved important positions, they have hardly became rich through work on construction sites, while for Europeans the production of architecture has often been seen as an efficient means of enrichment. This entire set of questions is based on production as the center of the analysis and forms the universe of reflections that I intend to encourage.

Bio:

José R P Thiesen - Brazilian, architect, worked at Usina-CTAH and is currently a professor of design and construction technology at the Federal University of Goiás, Campus Goiás. Member of the Motyrõ research group. PhD student at the Federal University of Bahia, researching labor on construction sites in the production of Latin American colonial architecture.

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9 The Caste Question in Architectural Tectonics

Leon Morenas Goa College of Architecture

leon.a.morenas@gmail.com

In his seminal work, Studies in Tectonic Culture, the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton located the etymology of the word tectonic to the Sanskrit root taksan which refers to the art of carpentry. He observed that the term is found in “Vedic poetry” and “refers to an artisan working in all hard materials except metal.” This paper begins by interrogating some of the early sources that Frampton relied on to construct his theory of tectonics. Many of the romantic nineteenth century German thinkers that Frampton cites, saw the Vedas as foundational texts to construct a mythical Aryan identity. The Aryan myth privileged certain segments of society at the expense of invisibilizing or even demonizing the contributions of the non-Aryan other. In India, these divisions are built into the social structure of caste and their ascriptive occupations. I will be arguing that the privileging of carpentry over metalwork should be seen through such a caste lens. Historically taksan was considered a dharmashastra with foundations in the Rig Veda whereas lohá or metalwork is considered manual work or mistri. More specifically, modern caste structuring has resulted in the shastri (scholar)— mistri (manual worker) distinction resulting in architects being culturally insulated from technical and mechanical skills and artisans and construction workers denied academic knowledge and opportunities to become white-collared workers. The paper concludes by drawing from social reformers like Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar to overturn some of these entrenched discriminatory practices and propose more inclusive practices of production. The implications of this proposed new practice will have profound implications on architectural theory, including tectonics.

Dr. Leon Morenas is the Principal of the Goa College of Architecture.Leon Morenas was an Associate Professor of Architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. He has been a Fellow (2016-18)at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and also a World Social Sciences Fellow in Sustainable Urbanization (2014). ^[y]

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9 A Dialogue With Silence: Re-assembling the Architect, Incognito

Saptarshi Sanyal School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi

saptarshi@spa.ac.in

Abstract:

In societies under colonial rule, the kind of building practices self-taught builders or designers engaged in far outnumbered those of architecture and engineering professionals. However, these practices remain largely absent from architecture's histories, owing to overwhelming archival silences. The proposed paper, by illuminating the practice of one such self-taught architect in twentieth-century colonial India, Surendranath Kar, makes a case for how architectural histories could harness the affordances of production studies to penetrate these silences. For architectural historians in particular, Kar is a frustratingly silent personality. Deeply reticent and self-effacing, let alone his own efforts, his writings about architecture appear non-existent. Nor do any architectural representations he might have created survive. This reflects in how little space Kar’s work finds within historical narratives of South Asia’s modern architecture, and how reductively it is viewed even when acknowledged. Both through his own silence and that about his work, Kar, I suggest, emerges as an architect, incognito. Yet, I argue that recognising Kar’s training as a visual artist proves crucial to unravel his novel modes of shaping architecture and space. Piecing together an archive from stray fragments of information: voices of those touched by his myriad contributions as an artist, educator and administrator, and some testimonials from inhabitants of spaces he created, I uncover how Kar’s ‘architectural’ process operated in a shared field spanning art pedagogy, the design of theatre sets, and even developing landscaped spaces. Such evidence illustrates how, unlike professional architects, his practice did not separate thinking and doing. Extending my archival production to documenting and analysing some key built projects by Kar, moreover, has revealed his nuanced spatial and formal thinking. Re-assembling Kar’s practice thus, underscores why architectural histories cannot afford to overlook how architecture is very often produced, silently, at the building site rather than the architect’s atelier.

Bio:

Saptarshi Sanyal is an architectural historian, educator and conservation architect, currently Assistant Professor at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. His research explores the intersections of architectural authorship, modernity and colonialism, and has most recently featured in publications like the Architecture Research Quarterly, Architecture Beyond Europe and Landscape.

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9 Histories of technique and the production field, São Paulo 1969-1979

João Fiammenghi Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAU-USP)

joao.fiammenghi@usp.br

Abstract:

In the early 1970s, at the same time that marxist thought was being renewed in the University of São Paulo and in its School of Architecture (FAU), Sérgio Ferro's criticism of modern architecture and industrialisation of construction ideologies have taken place, courses in the history of technique and technology were consolidated. Many genealogies can be traced for this turn towards historical production issues in the pedagogy that trained architects: from the interest in building traditions and Brazilian cultural heritage to the need to support the industrial design courses that reshaped the scope and meaning of this architecture school as a whole. In this presentation, however, I seek to reconstruct histories of the technique - its approximations, differences and contradictions - from the point of view of three protagonists involved in its teaching at FAU: Júlio Katinsky, Ruy Gama and Carlos Lemos. This approach aims to deepen some issues raised in my text for the TF/TK edited collection, with the focus of drawing up a panorama of statements about production that have not yet been studied, allowing us to understand this field of study as fundamental in the training of architects and industrial designers at that historical moment in São Paulo. On the other hand, by returning to these three authors from history of technique, my goal is to draw possible parallels and dialogues with the radical critique elaborated by Ferro in those same years and cultural environment.

Bio:

Architect with a degree from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), Brazil. He is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture Department at the same institution (2021-2027) and his research focuses on the place of material production in the teaching of industrial design and architecture in the 1960s and 1970s.

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9 New Research Gestures for Production History

Mariana Moura Federal University of Minas Gerais

marimoura.arq@gmail.com

Abstract:

This paper aims to explore diverse methods for architectural historiography, with a particular focus on the history of informal building sites, aligning with the broader objective of “re-writing” women into architectural and construction history. In doing so, the research grapples with the question of which histories we tend to perpetuate, and which fall into obscurity, critically examining the role of historians as producers. Recognizing that women in many parts of the world have participated (and, in many cases, still participate) in constructing their own houses, I am interested in questioning which narratives could be found or imagined if we divert our attention from formal sites of construction to those which are self-managed.

When examining the history of informal architectures, we are confronted with the limitations of archives, stemming from architectural history’s tendency to focus on monumental developments and neglect everyday buildings. Many scholars have addressed the power dynamics behind this, highlighting the discriminatory essence of archives (Hartman, 2008; Azoulay, 2019). Yet, some authors have also stressed that the interaction between archives and researchers redefines their value, emphasizing the disruptive experience of users (Mbembe, 2002). Sérgio Ferro’s work (2018) is a great example of such ‘disruption’: by focusing on the relations of productions rather than the isolated finished product, he unearths often-overlooked subjects, such as construction workers, putting them at the “front” of architectural historiography.

This research follows Ferro’s steps and delves into the challenges of investigating an ‘incomplete history’ and finding ways to bring forth narratives of the ‘mundane’ (Hartman, 2021).To that end, I present my findings in researching women builders in an Afro-Brazilian community (quilombo) and introduce the notion of 'disruptive research gestures' as a methodological approach. These gestures encompass a range of actions designed to tackle archival silences and omissions, including the use of oral history and critical fabulations, employing innovative investigative tools and drawing from diverse, often stigmatized sources. Throughout this session, I hope to explore these new research gestures and their potential to shed light on the history of informal construction, offering a novel perspective to architectural historiography.

Bio:

Mari Moura is an architect and urban researcher interested in self-construction processes and informality in the global South, particularly exploring women’s roles in architectural history. She has taught at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and is now a post-doctoral researcher in the TF/TK, working along the translations team.

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10 Relations between energy and value: a proposed framework for ecologizing events of extraction

Alina Paias Independent
info@alinapaias.com

Abstract:

The field of Production Studies emerges in a context of consolidated race studies and feminist theory and their intersections with new materialism, science and technology studies, and research tracing relations between extraction, pollution and work within the environmental humanities. At the same time, the build-up of cybernetics and relational thinking towards a general ecology provides this emerging field with the framework and the incentive to ecologize its central concern with the extraction of surplus value within the construction site, establishing relations of familiarity and continuity with other forms of maximum extraction of value in a global ethical-juridical-economic system grounded on resource and land exploitation. This paper argues that a common framework to describe different processes of extraction can aid the identification of relations between them and that this common framework is one that situates them as events of violently commanded transduction, accumulation and dissipation of energy. The elaboration of this framework is primarily grounded on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s recent development of a theory of raw materialism, which describes transduction within a colonial and post-colonial global system as a violent process of extraction of both energy and total value; and on thermodynamic processes as conceptualized by Bernard Stiegler, with a focus on the relationship between technics, entropy and the potential for the destruction of life. The activation of these concepts will be supported and validated by the parallel engagement with situated instances of extraction, redirection and dissipation of both energy and total value relating to architecture, and with how they become visible in material overexertion and exhaustion, damage, and the collapse of places and bodies as systems.

Bio:

Alina Paias (São Paulo, Brasil) is an architecture worker and independent researcher. She is one of the curators of the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and is part of the Editorial Team of Footprint, the TU Delft Architecture Theory Journal.

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10 Building on Waste: A Political Ecology of Bagasse-based Construction

Elliott Sturtevant, Princeton University

es16@princeton.edu

Abstract:

Using examples of bagasse-based building materials, such as Canec developed in Hawaiʻi and Celotex in the American South, and bagasse-based dwellings, such as those built by the United Fruit Company at the turn of the century in Cuba, this paper analyzes contemporary claims made regarding biomaterials and circular business models by examining historical examples of what it has meant to build with “waste.” In doing so, the paper shifts the register of current discussions from techno-solutionism to political ecology.

Bio

Elliott Sturtevant is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University and Managing Editor of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative’s online platform we-aggregate.org.

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10 Timber frontiers: Rethinking the place of materials in urban change

Heini-Emilia Saari, London School of Economics and Political Science

Timber architecture is envisioned as a progressive response to a range of urban issues, from redeeming the carbon emissions of new development to enhancing the wellbeing and productivity of urban dwellers. In this paper, I turn the city-centric perspective on timber around. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Finland, I trace the construction of timber between peripheral forests, rural industries and urban architectural praxes. Based on the analysis, I argue that in recasting timber as an urban fix to complex environmental and social crises, architects and policymakers largely overlook its broader landscapes, social relations and material ecologies, and, as a result, its insurgent possibilities for transformation. Building on feminist scholarship where materiality has long been a topic of critical interest, this work foregrounds different voices from the margins and frontiers of sustainable urban futures to enrich and contest mainstream visions of timber. While the production of building materials is crucially shaped by shifting urban imaginaries, it can also reshape them in turn, opening radical possibilities for designing and building otherwise.

Heini-Emilia Saari is an architect and geographer studying the socio-environmental dynamics of urbanisation. Her current research on Finnish timber architecture focuses on the interconnections and asymmetries between urban and rural landscapes, spatial practices, and future imaginaries.

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10 Producing 'the tree / timber known as Hoop Pine’: a gathering of situated knowledges

Anna Tweeddale, Queensland University of Technology

Plywood and other timber products are produced from 'the tree / timber known as Hoop Pine’ in S.E. Queensland with/in a complex web of ecological, historical, colonial, economic, aesthetic and cultural relations. Naming the lens of inquiry becomes a critical site of this research as it is not yet possible to write about this tree / timber without re-producing problematic colonial relations in each sentence. Situated knowledges and partial perspectives, as introduced by Donna Haraway, support engaging with this complexity by gathering multiple, partial perspectives. Under dominant paradigms, knowledge of this timber production re-produce problematic relations. Firstly, certain knowledge-making perspectives are privileged over others, often conveyed as universal truth (particularly amidst ongoing settler-colonial regimes). Secondly, partial knowledges are siloed by disciplinary and cultural boundaries, rarely brought together in a way that might produce new dialogues, collectivities and solidarities. This research is grounded in the proposition therefore that new approaches to research, as well as substantial efforts, will be required to gather a fuller rendering of the material-discursive co-production of this timber, an associated timber/plywood industry, a material/architectural culture, and a bio-region amidst settler-colonial conditions. This study is a necessary first step to expand on these relations, through attending to the figure of one particular tree species (referred to here as 'the tree / timber colloquially known as Hoop Pine') using a selection of complimentary creative and traditional research methods. This research praxis of attentiveness to situated material entanglements with regard to the production of 'the tree / timber known as Hoop Pine’, in turn does more than close a research gap, rather this approach acts to generate and identify the new lines of inquiry and research collectivities that are critically necessary.

Anna Tweeddale lectures in the school of architecture at Queensland University of Technology.

11 Opaque windows into building workers’ pasts: Construction site photographs from twentieth-century India

Sarah Melsens French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and FLAME University

Indiasarah.melsens@flame.edu.in

M Mallika
m.mallika@alum.cept.ac.in

Abstract:

This paper assesses the potency of photographs to uncover histories of building workers in (British) India. Construction site photographs, such as those of Indian labor building Le Corbusier’s capital city of Chandigarh, increasingly feature as ‘illustrations’ in architectural and construction historiography on the region. Yet, such photos have not themselves formed the object of methodological scrutiny. Current historiographic efforts to ‘let the subaltern speak’ are predominantly focussed on textual records such as colonial gazetteers, documents, and reports that often subdue the richness of actors and (inter)actions occurring at the building site. Drawing upon recent insights in (post)colonial photography, this paper compares three collections of building site photographs from twentieth-century (British) India: photos from the Pune Region Public Works archives (1930s-1980s), the Tata Steel Archives of the Jamshedpur company town (1900s-1920s), and Pune building contractor Ranade & Sons (1920s-1970s). Situating each photo series within their contexts of production and archiving, the questions this paper seeks to answer are primarily methodological: To what extent do intent and authorship circumscribe the aspects of the building site that get recorded in historical photographs and the meanings they evoke? How does the availability or absence of annotations and complementary source materials (memoirs, archival records, contemporary literature) affect our ability to draw inferences from photographs? Do such related ‘texts’ color our readings of working conditions and building labor? Drawing upon Elizabeth Edwards’ work in visual anthropology, the paper seeks to demonstrate the potential of photography to not only display hegemonic agendas but also unintentionally ‘spring leaks’ to alternative viewpoints. We will argue that building site photographs, precisely because of their complexity and ‘recodability’, can effectively be deployed in collective events of participatory history-making that extend beyond academic boundaries.

Bio:

Sarah Melsens is an architectural and construction historian. She employs ethnographic approaches to investigate built environments and their relation with the documentary tools and societal contexts of building practices in (British) India. Her ongoing postdoctoral project is entitled ‘Omitted from history: How workers on India’s building sites mediated twentieth-century modernity’.

M Mallika is an architectural historian and independent researcher. Her interests lie at the intersection of architecture-materiality-technology, and visual methods within archival-historical research. Mallika’s recent work focuses on architectural production in Jamshedpur during the early 20th century vis-a-vis building production and making, providing an alternative writing of Indian architectural modernity.

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11 Sidewalk Superintendents: The Public View of the Building Site

Timothy Hyde MIT

thyde@mit.edu

Abstract:

In November 1938, the building site at Rockefeller Center in New York City was a large pit dug deep into bedrock, filled with the activity of bodies and machines. This activity was closely observed by a delegated and dedicated group of public observers, the Sidewalk Superintendents, who paused by the pit each day to see the works, and to offer criticism and praise to the workers on site, judgments on their skill, effort, and performance. Formally convened as the Sidewalk Superintendents’ Club, these observers had their own clubhouse, a roofed platform running for one hundred feet along the eastern edge of the building site, with raised steps inside to enable a crowd several rows deep to look through the framed windows facing the excavations; membership cards were issued, complete with tongue-in-cheek rules about removing top hats and not dropping children over the fence.

Beginning with the Sidewalk Superintendents’ Club, this paper traces out a history of public observations of building sites in North American cities in the 20th century, focusing specifically on the mediation of that observation through structures (such as the clubhouse at Rockefeller Center) but also construction hoardings (legally regulated by ordinances in the United States) and finally by media such as closed-circuit television (first used at a building site in Chicago in 1961). This history of the mediation of the building site for public encounter and observation will be used to open questions about the nature and direction of academic encounter and observation of the building site.

Bio:

Timothy Hyde is professor of architectural history and theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye.

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11 Archive of Building Work: The Production Literature of the GDR

Tilo Amhoff University of Brighton

T.Amhoff@brighton.ac.uk

Abstract:

This paper turns to literary fiction as means of critical insight and suggests literature as one archive for studying the building site. The Production Literature of the GDR, the literary engagement with the new socialist production, its new subjectivity and collectivity, often centred on the physical and mental experiences on building sites. This paper asks how these experiences were registered and accounted for and focuses on two clusters of literary fiction connected to real existing sites.

The first on the figure of the Activist and Hero of Work, the bricklayer Hans Garbe, who rebuilt a brick oven at the Siemens-Plania power plant while in full operation. The contradictions around his activist work, which was celebrated by the state and criticised by his colleagues, was the base for the report Vom Schweren Anfang (1950) and the novel Menschen an unserer Seite (1951) by Eduard Claudius, himself a bricklayer, and the production play Die Lohndrücker (1956) by Heiner und Inge Müller.

The second will discuss the description of building work in the novel Erziehung eines Helden (1959) by Siegfried Pitschmann, based on the building site of the gas works Schwarze Pumpe (1955-63), where he went to work as a concrete worker years before the cultural policy of the ‘Bitterfelder Weg’ (1959-64) asked writers to join workers in their socialist reality. The novel follows the hero and his experiences on the building site. The reading will focus on sections written from the worker’s perspective, his bodily experience, or what ‘The Newcomer’ calls the “economy of muscle play.”

What can be mobilised by the interpretation of socialist Production Literature and Production Plays that is relevant for architectural pedagogy, architectural production, and architectural design today? What fictional insights, to use a concept developed by Katherine Shonfield, about building sites and building labour can be gained?

Bio:

Tilo Amhoff is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Humanities at University of Brighton. His research explores the social, economic, and political conditions of the production of architecture. He co-edited Produktionsbedingungen der Architektur (2018), with Gernot Weckherlin and Henrik Hilbig, and Industries of Architecture (2015), with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Nick Beech.

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11 From Arquitetura Nova to Cinema Marginal: Construction Labor and the Problem of Representation in the Films of Ozualdo Candeias

Ian Erickson-Kery Duke University

ie13@duke.edu

Abstract:

Arquitetura Nova—the collaborative theoretical and design practice of Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Império, and Rodrigo Lefèvre—is often associated with the coeval film movement Cinema Novo, particularly in its radical call for a “poetics of economy” and a “new language fully rooted in the material supports of Brazilian historical reality.” Though the 1964 military coup would foreclose any sustained collaborations bridging experimental cinema and architecture in Brazil, this paper argues for a mutual and ongoing debt between the two fields. I read Arquitetura Nova’s theoretical postulates—specifically Ferro’s ideas on intellectual and manual labor and Lefèvre’s ideas on peripheral urbanization—along with a series of films shot and produced in São Paulo in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Ozualdo Candeias. Associated with Cinema Novo’s polemical successor movement, known as Cinema Marginal, these films turned away from political cinema’s prevailing focus on rural worlds to capture the brutal material realities of São Paulo’s rapid urbanization, placing particular emphasis on the myriad forms of labor undergirding major construction projects. The Tietê River, the site of a key arterial highway and a main source of raw material for concrete, constitutes a central motif in the films, which draw attention to the concatenations of construction work, management, and proliferating forms of informal labor such as sex work. Attending closely to mise-en-scène and editing techniques, I contend that more than represent these intersecting forms of labor in realist mode, Candeias’s films establish a formal relationship between the fictive construction of cinematic worlds and the material construction of cities. This self-reflexive form of mediation, I further, elucidates the specific problem of representation raised by Ferro and Lefèvre, for whom the creative capacities of workers always exceed the representational techniques of designers and artists.

Bio:

Ian Erickson-Kery is a Ph.D Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Duke University. His dissertation, "Contested Territories: The Aesthetics and Politics of Urban Design in Mexico and Brazil, 1963-88," studies experimental art, architecture, film, and writing produced in the aftermath of two paradigmatic modernist urban planning programs.

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12 Filling in Silence: Archiving architecture as narratives

Parul Kiri Roy School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India

pk.roy@spa.ac.in

Abstract:

There are several human and nonhuman forces that contribute to making a building and its habitat. The act of design operates in the realm of imagination and involves mostly labour of the mind (of clients, architects, technical consultants) and the act of building, however, involves mostly labour of the hand and body (of construction and service workers). The complex interplay within and between these acts results in a binary division of labour and labour relations in architecture. The labour of architects and other specialists become evident through self-archiving processes in architectural practice in the form of drawings, images and documents. But this archive is silent when it comes to recording the manner in which ethical or material choices are made, attitudes towards nonhuman entities, the agency of actors or the labour relations between actors. Using the existing records as a starting point and reading them along the grain, a process of enquiry is devised to fill in this silence. This paper argues for a method of archiving architecture as speech acts in the form of stories, anecdotes, episodes, parables and reflections in the process of its making; from the intention of building, to designing, crafting the building to its inhabitance. This method allows for the multiple forces that give form to the building to come to the fore and become part of not only the history of its making but also to become tangible. It takes the example of a small school building to demonstrate the method to reveal the messiness of the architectural process. Making the idea of understanding ‘architecture as a process’ as key to learning to ‘do’ architecture, it also investigates the ways to take such concepts into the classroom to form a pedagogy of ‘architectural totality’.

Bio:

Parul Kiri Roy, is an architect-educator, architectural historian and social practitioner. Her current research is finding links between everyday language, building taxonomy and architecture focusing on the affective dimensions of materiality. She uses interdisciplinary methods in her work drawing from art history, social history, anthropology and ethnography.

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12 The role of architectural drawing in separated design: rethinking architecture from its beginnings

Joana Vieira Portucalense University

jovieirasilva@gmail.com

Abstract:

Being an art of making, architecture involves collaboration of both designing and building. However, the discipline is traditionally a mental activity: architects design, they don't build. Therefore the discussions within the field are frequently distant from real contexts of building sites, leading to frustrations and contradictions both in professional and educational practices.

Through a panoramic historiographic analysis, based on Sérgio Ferro’s theoretical approach, it becomes clear that, following the establishment of the discipline in the Renaissance era, there was an artificial separation of the material and intellectual dimensions of architectural practice.

In that regard, the craftsmanship value of the construction work was progressively transferred to the activity of drawing (Loos). The development of this tendency reached a climax after modernism, when architects’ drawings surpassed its functions as instruments for building, becoming autonomous aesthetic objects to be sold in art galleries (Kauffman). Accordingly, architectural design and its debates continued to move forward, steadily apart from the process of construction.

In more recent years, BIM softwares, being collaborative models of building, are regarded as a possible answer to reconnect material and immaterial labour within architectural practice (Deamer).

However, the concern for the production of architecture tends to continue in abeyance in a world conceived as digital, where the reality is perceived as a immaterial domain.

Indeed, the building activity has a concrete and direct impact on the ecological crisis, both in the context of the depletion of resources or because its debris are a big climate offender across the globe. For architecture to be an agent for transformation, it is crucial to recognize the force and influence of its material dimension, reconnecting architectural design with the corresponding reality of the building site.

Bio:

Joana Vieira da Silva is an architect, urban designer and researcher based in Porto, Portugal.

Her PhD examines the functions of architectural drawing and it was drawn on Sérgio Ferro’s theory of separated design. At the moment, she is Assistant Professor at Portucalense University and works as a local government public servant.

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12 Verified in Field: Drawings of Builders

Kristin Washco Virginia Tech, Carleton University

kwashco@vt.edu

Marisa Ferrara, Metier Projects

marisa@metierprojects.com

Abstract:

Since Robin Evans proclaimed the importance of considering the translation that occurs from drawing to building , much has been written on the role that architectural drawings play in the construction of buildings. While it is true that architects’ drawings can and should be considered for their productive qualities in relation to building, present scholarship does little to address the role that non-architects’ drawings play in the construction of buildings. The incorrect yet overwhelming assumption is that architects draw, while builders build. Yet, builders also draw, and their drawings fulfill an essential role in the translation that Evans references.

This paper will investigate drawings and sketches by builders: the often-nameless contributors to a project. Artisans, project managers, carpenters, and laborers of differing skillsets, backgrounds, and spoken languages are responsible for “verifying in field,” or reconciling the drawings of the architect with site conditions. This is often done through the common language of drawing, and site sketches are vital in calibrating and harmonizing the constructed space with the design intent. Produced with spray paint, carpenters’ crayons, and unsharpened pencils, found on scraps of loose material, or drawn directly on walls, these informal drawings are the least precious and most undervalued drawings in the materialization of architectural ideas. Why then, are they thrown away, painted over, and ultimately omitted from the collective archive of built spaces?

We argue that unearthing and preserving these drawings is vital in filling a crucial gap in architectural history and recognizing the complex role that builders play in the completion of architectural projects. Architects and builders draw. Builders and their drawings translate drawings into buildings.

Bio:

Kristin Washco is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech and a Ph.D Candidate at Carleton University. She received her Master’s in Architectural History + Theory from McGill University. She has practiced professionally across the United States and Canada, and co-coordinates CR|PT|C (Carleton Research Practice of Teaching Collaborative).

Marisa Ferrara is co-Founder of Metier Projects, a research-based design practice. As a Registered Architect with projects across the United States and Canada, she has experience in a range of practice settings, most recently as a General Contractor in New York. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech.

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12 Stage Directions: Interpreting A Written Instruction

Andjeas Ejiksson Gothenburg University andjeas.ejiksson@gmail.com

Joanna Zawieja joanna@joannazawieja.com

Abstract:

The project Stage Directions explores the written instructions as an architectural tool. The starting point is the orthographic drawing, which plays a double role in architecture: in part it represents an ideal reality, in part it functions as a guide through the process of construction. Portraying architecture as a series of completed autonomous objects frozen in time, the drawing most often emits the physical work, the conflicts, the life, and the decay that surround a construction.

Though a written instruction dictates and establishes conditions, can it also open up for unforeseeable situations and solutions? There is a temporal aspect of text that makes process central, that creates a redistribution of auteurship, and a continuous attentiveness to usage and the passage of time.

Stage Directions centres on a written manual that describes the construction and demolition of a waiting room in which the principle unit of measurement is time. That is, time defines the function and extension of the construction both temporally and spatially. The manual describes the construction and demolition of the structure at a particular location, within a set period of time and within a particular economic framework. There are no restrictions or qualifications other than those specified in the manual or determined by time, space, and budget.

So far, the waiting room has been constructed in five variations by five different builders whose interpretation of the text plays the central role in the project. How does stage directions function as building instructions? And to what extent do they convey desires and needs that drawings leave out? Sharing the experiences from and the results of these processes, our presentation will reflect upon the relationship between architectural tools, text, and the act of building.

Bio:

Andjeas Ejiksson is an artist, writer, and researcher. His artistic practice explores how ideologies and cultural imaginaries are established. Ejiksson is currently a researcher at the Gothenburg University.

Joanna Zawieja is an architect, critic and curator, working in between public art, architecture, and urban planning. Since 2014 she’s also Head of Urban Development at the Public Art Agency Sweden.

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13 The Urban Space and the Labour Construction Radical Criticism and Emancipation in Sérgio Ferro and David Harvey

Pedro Fiori Arantes Universidade Federal de São Paulo

pedro.arantes@unifesp.br

Mariana Fix, Universidade de São Paulo

Abstract:

Sérgio Ferro's work presents a novelty to the Anglophone and global audience from multiple perspectives. When critical theory, or 'Western Marxism', began focusing on cities as a key study theme from the 1960s, curiously, none of the more prominent authors ventured into the perspective proposed by Sérgio Ferro. Tracking the authoritarian modernisation of Brazil in the 1960s and later in post-1968 France, Ferro developed numerous empirical, historical, and theoretical researches with a consistent formulation from an angle scarcely explored in the critique of urbanisation. Educated in South America and involved in projects like the colossal construction of the new capital, Brasília, Ferro recognised the importance of meticulous study of space production directly on the construction sites, from the angle of the capital-labour conflict, technique, and built form.

Our aim in this talk is to propose a combined reading of Sérgio Ferro and David Harvey, highlighting possible convergences for a complementary critical theory between construction and urbanisation, between the building site and the city, from a plural Marxist perspective, open to diverse references and influences. Ferro and Harvey, moreover, are contemporaries, born in the latter half of the 1930s. They analyse crucial aspects of the modes of production and circulation of capital in the production, transformation, and appropriation of space, and consider the built environment as a significant front for investment and accumulation. However, they propose approaches from different viewpoints and illuminate complementary focuses on the phenomenon. Ferro, by placing centrality on labour, class struggle, and the production of value in construction, and Harvey, by addressing the relationship between land rent, real estate credit, and accumulation through dispossession, scrutinise critical aspects of the forms of reproduction and circulation of capital in the production, transformation, and appropriation of space.

Bio:

Pedro Fiori Arantes is a professor of Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo and an associate of the USINA group. He edited the book "Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre" by Sérgio Ferro (2016) and is the author of, among others, "The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age" (Minnesota Press, 2019).

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13 Arquitetura Nova, half a century later

Carlos Ferreira Martins São Paulo University at São Carlos

cmartins@sc.usp.br

Abstract:

This communication aims to highlight the theoretical, political and cultural circumstances that help to understand the motivations, reception and subsequent developments of the text Arquitetura Nova, published by Sérgio Ferro in 1967.

As Ferro himself recently warned, at that time, between the military coup of 64 and its resurgence as Institutional Act no. 5, fear prevailed in academic relationships and both the speeches and the texts have a strongly allusive character, which makes it difficult to fully understand them more than half a century later.

Originally published in the Journal Theory and Practice, no. 1, which collected contributions from important Marxist intellectuals committed to overcoming the orthodoxy of the Brazilian Communist Party, the manifesto article reflects the update of Marxist theorization in Brazil, which took place at the famous Capital Seminar, coordinated by philosopher José Arthur Giannotti and literary critic Roberto Schwarz.

In the architecture debate after 1964 “military curfew”, the text gains enormous impact by opposing itself to O Desenho, the famous inaugural class by Vilanova Artigas, as well as to Flavio Motta's article, O Desenho como Emancipação, both by 1967.

Placed in the context of criticism of the political strategy of communist parties marked by the radicalization proposed by OLAS – Latin American Solidarity Organization, held in Havana, Arquitetura Nova also marks the internal rupture in the architecture debate that would be expressed in the rupture of Sergio Ferro and his group with the hegemony of Vilanova Artigas during the 1968 Teaching Forum.

The compulsory retirement of Artigas and Mendes da Rocha shortly after AI5 and the arrest and subsequent exile of Ferro made Arquitetura Nova, distributed and discussed clandestinely, a milestone in political resistance to the military dictatorship.

Bio:

Full Professor, former Dean of IAU-USP São Carlos. Architect (FAUUSP, 1974), Master in History (FFLCH USP, 1988) and Doctor (U.P. Madrid, 1992). Former Chairman of ANPARQ _National Association of Research and Postgraduate Studies in A&U (2007-10). He teaches and researches modern architecture and urbanism in Brazil and Latin America.

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13 Free architecture in the metropolis of São Paulo

Claudio Amaral Unesp - Universidade Estadual Paulista claudio.amaral@unesp.br

Francisco Barros: Universidade São Judas Tadeu, Universidade de São Paulo and Movimento Sem Terra

chicobarros@alumni.usp.br

Claudio Amaral: Universidade Estadual Paulista

Luis Octávio de Farias e Silva: Escola da Cidade and Universidade São Judas Tadeu

lifariaesilva@gmail.com

Laura Peres: Universidade São Judas Tadeu

laurambaperes@gmail.com

Miryan Benedito: Universidade São Judas Tadeu

beneditocris01@gmail.com

Abstract:

This Paper is a part of. Dr Francisco Barros Post Phd with the participation of Laura Peres and Miryan Benedito.The orientation started with Dr. Claudio Amaral, and now it is with Dr.Luis Octávio de Faria e Silva.

The research focuses on the diversity of debates about self-management and prioritizes two hypotheses – “Free Work”, by brazilian architect Sergio Ferro in the XX century, based on Karl Marx´s work and “Work Made With Pleasure”, by english art critic John Ruskin in the XIX century, based on a philosophy of Nature.

Free Work is about the organization of work done in a cooperative way without command hierarchy. A democratic organization with participation of everyone during the process. Different from the labor alienated from the market of civil construction, here the work is reflective and participative.

Work done with pleasure from Ruskin comes from a philosophy of Nature, defined by a policy of Mutual Help. Nature works in a cooperative way and everyone collaborates for the existence of all. Exemplified with a tree that needs the ground in order to be stand upright, extract nutrients and water, from the sun to produce photosynthesis. The Mutual Help policy in the context of the world of labor shows a structure where everyone thinks and acts without a command hierarchy.

Discussing Free Architecture from lectures of Ferro and Ruskin enriches the concept of self management of the art of housing production and urbanism in the São Paulo metropolis.

We analyzed 13 examples asking - who designed it? Who build it? How was it built? What was the goal of it? What was the building process? What was the method of building? What was the result? Who will use it? The answers compose a theoreotical framework of ”freedom” as possible works of art like Ferro and Ruskin would like.

Bio:

Francisco Barros, LCC USP; Post-Phd Researcher USJT; MST.

Claudio Amaral; Retired Prof. - UNESP; Post-Phd - THE RUSKIN - Lancaster University and Post- Phd- Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.

Luis Octávio de Farias e Silva; Supervisor Post-Graduation - Escola da Cidade; Prof. Post-Graduation - USJT

Laura Peres; Scientific Initiation student - USJT

Miryan Benedito; Scientific Iniciation student - USJT

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14 Dessin/Chantier/Produit: Forced Labour’s Victims and Victors in Building Material Supply Chains

Franca Trubiano University of Pennsylvania trubiano@design.upenn.edu

Abstract:
Both the production and consumption of contemporary building materials are predicated on the persistence of forced labor in the global supply chain of raw materials, manufactured products, building sites, and demolition waste. All phases of the life cycle of a building are more than tainted with material processes that harm those who are enslaved, detained, or forced to labor against their will. Architects have acknowledged the very real costs of climate change (no longer denying the role building plays in the destruction of material and energy resources), so too must they address the risks and harms of coercive building labor in service to the production of building materials.

The paper addresses the abundant evidence of forced labor in the supply chain of polymers and cementitious raw materials found in contemporary building materials. It recognizes that notwithstanding our access to data-based sources that include the Walk Free Global Slavery Index, the Global Rights Index (International Trade Union Confederation), and the inclusion of forced labor in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, architects and builders remain poorly informed of the risk of forced labor on building sites and in building products. All aspects of the highly complex production of industrialized are at risk, be they retaining walls and formwork, precast concrete, steel, or mass timber structures, building envelopes engineered and fabricated off-site, interior finishes, or highly technological building systems.

In a review of texts by Jean Baptiste Rondelet (1743-1829) and Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières (1721-1789), this paper addresses disciplinary reasons why architects have historically denied this issue, returning to the French debate on architectural professionalization that exposed the very first traces of a premeditated dissociation of the architect from the chantier. Doing so, sets the context for understanding the high level of concealment and obfuscation that exists in contemporary supply chains. In addition, by communicating the results of a research project that set out to analyze the procurement of building materials originating from the Xinjiang region of China, this paper discusses the institutionalized and globalized mechanisms that have enabled the lack of transparency and the corruption of the delivery process. The paper discusses the details of a case study that sought the origin of imported products into the United States and the various investigative sources (governmental, para-governmental, non-governmental, and commercial) that are available to architects and builders who refuse to remain in denial.

The art of building should never have victims or victors. Yet in the twenty-first century, the chantier is less a constellation of local laborers and materials, and more a place of market-like exchanges of produits conceived, produced, and distributed by unfettered, profit-driven multinationals. Understanding how architects might re-engage the power of the dessin in service to the production of force-labour-free products, is one path to re-empowering the architectural chantier.

Bio:

FRANCA TRUBIANO is Graduate Group Chair of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture and Associate Professor at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from UPenn and is a Registered Architect in Québec, Canada. Since 2021, she has been co-director of Penn’s Mellon-funded, Humanities + Urban + Design Initiative. Trubiano is the author of Building Theories, Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge 2023), and co-editor of the forthcoming BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS, Design Futures for the More than Human (ACTAR, 2024) and Women [Re]Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO, 2019). Her edited book Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies, and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press 2012), was translated into Korean and awarded the 2015 Sejong Outstanding Scholarly Book Award. Trubiano conducts funded research on ‘Forced Labor in the Building Industry,’ as well as on ‘Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health.

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14 The Militarization of Construction

Michael Osman UCLA

mosman@g.ucla.edu

Abstract:

At the end of the War of 1812, US President James Madison directed the newly formed Board of Engineers to develop a plan for national defense. The group defined an eastern border with 42 costal forts, known as the Third System. These projects were designed to secure the republic’s newly settled territories from invading navies.

Neither national borders nor monumental fortress design, however, are the focus of this paper. Rather, methods for keeping accounts, paying for materials, and particularly the military organization of the forts’ construction serve as the grounds for historical analysis. Specifically, the paper takes Fortress Monroe as a case study, as it was the largest and first in the system. The military bureaucracy surrounding its construction is instructive because the techniques for producing the remaining forts followed its pattern and trained nineteenth-century contractors in the practices they applied to private jobs as well.

In the 1820s, at least 800,000 bricks per month were delivered to the construction site at Hampton Roads—also known as Old Point Comfort, on the Virginia coast. We know this because the Board meticulously registered material purchases, deliveries, and the names of enslaved people who worked on the construction site. Tallying the labor hours of these men was necessary to calculate the compensation tendered to their owners. Such acts of numeracy were fundamental for a nation permanently at war. In the service of defense, the Board equated different forms of labor: free and unfree; skilled and unskilled; military and civilian. Narratives of the “heroic” effort to build the fort do not account for the homogenizing techniques of organization that replaced workers with numbers, masking the brutal conditions on the site. The Board’s abstraction of labor and materials as “costs”—commodities—undergirded a system for exploitation endemic to the construction industry in the US.

Bio:

Michael Osman works on 19th and 20th century architecture, with a particular emphasis on the United States. He seeks connections between the infrastructure that undergirds the processes of modernization and the historiography of modernist architecture. He currently directs the MA and PhD programs in architectural history at UCLA.

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14 A Tragedy Under the Capitalist Mechanism of Architectural Production

Nihal Evirgen Middle East Technical University (METU) / Chamber of Architects Ankara Branch
niyalevirgen@gmail.com

Abstract:

In the wake of a tragic fatal occupational incident that claimed the lives of two civil engineering student interns and injured an architecture student, this study delves into the systemic issues plaguing the construction sector and architectural production. Turkey consistently ranks among the countries with high work-related fatality rates globally, with the construction industry being particularly on top. Drawing on a class perspective, this research underscores the dominance of capitalist imperatives in shaping architectural practices, leading to the absence of essential health and safety measures and conducive working conditions for all workers in the production process. A central focus of the analysis is the ongoing "Central Ankara" mixed-use project, which is living the tragic incident, situated in the heart of Turkey's capital. Despite numerous challenges arising during planning, project development, tendering, and construction phases, this project, spanning over a decade, is emblematic of what can be described as a "crime against the city." Privatizing publicly-owned land and demolishing a building with industrial heritage value for the construction site, in conjunction with the project's collaboration with international and national large-scale architecture firms and a construction company associated with government affiliations, offer critical insights into the roles played by various stakeholders. This study dissects the mechanism by which architectural production, entangled in capitalist urbanization practices, corrodes ethical considerations, fosters neoliberal values, and subsequently contributes to workplace tragedies, injuries, and ethical lapses. Emphasizing the roles of architects and the inherent contradictions between public interests, professional bodies, and power dynamics at different project stages, it unravels the complexity of these issues. By shedding light on these multifaceted challenges, this study examines the intricate interplay between capitalism, urbanization, and working conditions in the construction industry context.

Bio:

Nihal Evirgen has served as a board member of the Chamber of Architects Ankara Branch since 2018. Currently pursuing her Phd in architecture at Middle East Technical University, and research is centered on class perspective of the architectural production mechanism. She also teaches Basic Design course as a parttime instructor at Bilkent University.

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14 Cartographies of Cleansing: Exploring the Material Contradictions of Johannesburg's Post-Apartheid Museums

Simphiwe Mlambo University of Johannesburg

simphmla@gmail.com

Abstract:

The archival history of Johannesburg reveals itself as a precarious mixture of heterotopic influences, forming constructed spaces. The study identifies Johannesburg's post-apartheid museums as one of these spaces and argues that these architectures are complex networks of mass black death-related landscapes.

This perspective uncovers the parasitic relationship between Johannesburg's apartheid urban production, and the migration of the Black labour force to the manifestation of Johannesburg's post-apartheid museum architecture, where the death of black bodies serves as capital, fueling its ambitions. Rooted in historical materialism, this study asserts that Johannesburg's post-apartheid museum architecture evolves through material contradictions.

The study unpacks the phenomenon of Dark tourism as a material contradiction through Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics by investigating how the exercising of colonial power determines who lives and dies, solidifying the economic infrastructure of urban production, relating this to the production of post-apartheid museums that necessitate its ongoing maintenance.

The study conducts the architectural reading of Dark tourism as "Cartographies of Cleansing," which depicts the deliberate action to sanitize and transform spaces that subjugated black bodies during apartheid times into the post-apartheid museums we encounter today, encompassing material representations of the haunting entities of white lamenting, manifesting methods of "Death-Writing in Museums," shaped by historical and contemporary traumas inflicted by colonial forces onto black bodies and indigenous landscapes.

Drawing comparisons between the works of Sergio Ferro's "Method Issues," which explores how the material takes on various representations based on modes of conception, and Achille Mbembe's "The Power of Archive and its Limits," which emphasizes the significance of architectural dimensions of archives in languaging the material contradictions, the study proposes spectral geographies as a methodology to examine the metaphorical and material manifestations of these haunting in post-apartheid museums that fuel Dark tourism.

Bio:

Simphiwe Mlambo is an Afrocentric Architectural researcher, educator, and interdisciplinary practitioner. She lectures at the University of Johannesburg's Department of Architecture and is a postgraduate tutor at the Graduate School of Architecture.

With a M.Arch in Architecture (with distinction), her research focuses on Colonial cartographic productions, African mythology, and black spatial identity-making.

Using immersive environments, she explores alternative black spatial imaginaries that bridge past and present. Her work blends speculation with practicality to create spatial geographies that challenge conventional acts of spatial production.

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14 Interwoven: Neoclassical–Plantation Production in 1840s Havana

Dante Furioso Princeton University
dante.furioso@princeton.edu

Abstract:

Neoclassical architecture and plantation slavery drove Havana’s nineteenth-century urbanization. Drawing on theories of dual modes of production developed by Manfredo Tafuri and Sérgio Ferro, this paper examines the construction of the 1840s Palacio de Aldama to theorize the neoclassical–plantation framework for urban construction. During the heydays of the sugar industry and Spanish control of Cuba, engineers and architects incorporated academic principles into the design of the city and its buildings. In concert with the application of these ideals, builders disciplined their workforce by enacting techniques honed on the island’s swelling rural plantations. In Cuba, a superficial reading of rational, Renaissance-inspired forms obscures the degradation of labour that produced them; proportion and taste were the product of the ordering and control of workers. The palace in question was commissioned by the wealthy, Basque-born sugar baron, Don Domingo de Aldama, designed by a Venezuelan-born military engineer, and built by enslaved Yoruba masons. As the site of an 1841 uprising recorded in a deposition, details of the mansion’s production reveal the quotidian conflicts that defined construction labour. Testimonies in the resulting legal document sketch a scene in which those forced to build negotiated the violence of slavery while syncretizing their own craft traditions in a new land. Thus, nineteenth-century neoclassicism subsumed the interweaving of colonization, racialized slavery, and a dispersed form of discipline that entwined rural sugar mills and urban construction sites—this is the essence of neoclassical–plantation production.

Bio:

Dante Furioso is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton. His research examines Havana’s nineteenth-century urbanization, the role of labour, technological change, and race. Having studied Latin American history (B.A.) and architectural design (M. Arch.), he has professional experience in architectural practice, fabrication, and publications.

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15 Building other tales: heterodox historiographic practices of construction workers

Eric Ferreira Crevels Delft University of Technology
E.FerreiraCrevels@tudelft.nl

Débora Andrade Gomes Moura, Universidade do Minho

debora.agm@gmail.com

Abstract:

Medieval builders, working in the construction of Gothic cathedrals, would sometimes trace the outlines of the stonework on the site’s floors. In parallel to their productive purpose, these traces create an archive of techniques and production processes. Similarly, historians can read the tool marks in the beans, trusses and stones as indexes of labour, peering into the skills of carpenters and masons. Despite being made without historiographical purpose, such traces act as surrogates of the builder’s voices in architectural history, whispering of construction processes, material transformation and labour - but they can only tell so much. Understanding that the historical value of the act of building goes beyond its instrumentalisation, where can these other histories of builders be found? What stories do construction workers tell when speaking with their own voices?

This paper explores three instances in which the traces left by construction workers are not indirect marks or indexes of labour, but intentional expressions that build an expanded history surrounding the crafts and sites of construction. Firstly, we explore the maker marks carved in the wall stones of Castelo de Lanhoso, in Portugal, a common historical practice relating to the social recognition of skill, competition and labour organisation. In contrast to this exposition of authorship, our second case study draws on the history of Joachin Martin, a French carpenter who maintained an account of everyday affairs in the village of Les Cottres, written on the undersides of the floorboards of the Chateau de Picomtal - composing a hidden journal where the banal truth of feudal life could be told. Finally, we delve into the diary of Thomas Parson, whose entries present descriptions of the work-life of a stonemason in the eighteenth century, portraying the role material and social skills played in the relationship between artisans and society.

Bio:

Eric is a Brazilian architect, craftsman and a PhD candidate. His research focuses on material culture, investigating the built environment from the perspective of labour, between craft and architecture. His work connects architectural, anthropological, and philosophical studies to understand the social and epistemic dynamics between design and construction.

Débora is an Architect and Urbanist with Master's degree at the School of Architecture of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (NPGAU-EA/UFMG). Guest assistant professor of Universidade do Minho in Urbanistics Laboratory (2020-2021). She was teacher of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP) and researcher in LAGEAR Group at UFMG.

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15 Elemental aid: the production of African roofs, 1940s-1970s

Hannah le Roux University of Sheffield

hannah.leroux@icloud.com

Abstract:

The grey literature of development aid, building manuals and technical studies for African housing reflect how Western consultants modernised roof construction. As colonial corrugated iron became scarce following wartime rationing, they drew out other options. In the 1940s, Ernst May in Kenya, for example, designed roof tiles of leaf fibres set in clay; two decades later, Koenigsberger and Lynn’s study “Roofs in the warm humid tropics” would pit aluminium and asbestos-cement sheets against each other in an exhaustive quantitative study of their respective thermal performance. Many other approaches competed, and were contrasted at times with indigenous technologies. Read through and beyond their section as full systems, these designs produced not just cover, but generated new regimes of production.

These design exercises - apparently urgent, given the vast numbers of vulnerable house dwellers - embraced economic dimensions with a view to their mass production. Their consequence might also produce varied hinterland ecologies: May’s study connected material harvesting with everyday fieldwork in farms, while Koenigsberger and Lynn’s reflected hard choices between two materials each with damaging footprints. Further, new roof forms displaced seasonal labour regimes of maintenance with those of paid labour within nascent cash or debt economies. Never neutral, roofs would inaugurate the regimes of elemental aid that still hang over African lives.

Bio:

Hannah le Roux is an architect, writer and educator re-centring reparative practices within architecture, its histories, and its future praxis. Between Sheffield and the Witwatersrand. Between writing and design. In her own work, and in collaboration.

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15 On Complaint: Architects, Capitalism, and Building Labor in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century US

Bryan E. Norwood The University of Texas at Austin bryan.norwood@utexas.edu

Abstract:

In the 1830s-60s, architects aspiring to professional status in rapidly-growing US cities found two techniques particularly appealing in their pursuit: writing contracts and publicly complaining. At the beginning of the century, Benjamin Henry Latrobe had famously advised his pupils to protect their design documents at all costs, for these were their property. But as US architects began to build more robust professional practices in the following decades, they leaned into a different formulation of the legal status of their drawings and specifications: the design as a contract mediating between client and builder. In this paper, I will describe how architects like Alexander Jackson Davis in New York, Thomas Ustick Walter in Philadelphia, and James Gallier in New Orleans wrote construction contracts, and how they used this contractual form to define their relationship to expanding market capitalism.

As historians and critical legal theorists have argued, the modern form of the contract was forged in the fires of Atlantic and global capitalism and was an absolutely central expression of enlightenment liberalism. That architects embraced this legal form to define their profession’s authority and work, situates architecture in relationship to specific conceptions of freedom, of futurity, and of who has security and who takes on risk. At the same time, however, these architects also took up discursive mediums like the public lectures as prime forums for complaining about the results of the system they were embracing. The architectural profession thus is an ideal practice for studying how complaint is an integral affect in the history of capitalism.

Bio:

Bryan E. Norwood, PhD is a historian and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on architecture and building practices in the Atlantic World. He is completing a book entitled Architectural Pursuits: Capitalism, Complaint, and Historical Faith in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States.

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15 Exploring the role of ‘the civil servant architect’ through an examination of the work and legacy of the UK's Property Services Agency (1972-1993)

Emma Rowden Oxford Brookes University

erowden@brookes.ac.uk

Abstract:

Public works in the UK were formerly designed and delivered predominantly by in-house government or council employed multi-disciplinary teams of built environment experts that included architects. These workplaces proliferated after the second world war; by the late 1950s there were some 135 local authority architects' departments designing schools, housing, courthouses, hospitals, embassies, and other forms of public infrastructure. The largest public sector employer was the Property Services Agency (the ‘PSA’) (1972-1993), which, in its 1970s heyday, had 10,000 professional staff scattered internationally and was the UK construction industry’s biggest client. With a history stemming from the King’s Works to the Ministry of Works and later the Department of the Environment, the sale and dismantling of the PSA in 1993 heralded the end of a 600-year legacy of central government designing and building works for the public. Despite its power and reach, as a major former government entity, the PSA has so far elicited very little scholarly attention, and particularly absent are any accounts of its role or position within the architectural profession and its development. The paper builds on the findings of a previous collaborative research project that involved the detailed analysis of over 20,000 pages of archival materials pertaining to a major courthouse building programme overseen by the PSA. Using this programme as a case study within which to view the PSA in operation, the paper explores the work, culture and legacy of the PSA, and speculates what impacts its demise, and that of public sector roles for architects more generally, may have had on the architectural profession.

Bio:

Emma is an internationally recognised expert on courthouse design. Her collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship explores the politics of design and design procurement; the relationship between architecture and ‘the public’; and, the role of public architecture in the development of the architectural profession.

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Mud on the Floor: Pedagogies of the In-Between
Sarah Nichols EPFL
sarah.nichols@epfl.ch

How can mud infiltra ^[z] te a classroom—and if it does, how does it transform? This contribution is a reflection on current systemic challenges in construction pedagogy in architecture. It will characterize and critique the “standard” curriculum of architecture—to the extent that it exists—in relation to construction, looking at how contemporary conventions, such as the primacy of the design studio and the rift between theory and technology courses enfeeble the relation to architecture’s ethics and politics as a constructive and technical discipline. It will discuss the balance between the necessity of denaturalizing business-as-usual production with equipping students with emancipatory alternatives, possibilities and pitfalls in alternate modes of teaching, and structural challenges within the organizational process, the learning institution, and the expectations of the students. Rather than a research paper, this contribution is intended as a first input towards a more collective discussion.

Sarah Nichols is an assistant professor at EPFL and director of the lab THEMA. Her scholarly work examines the environmental and political entanglements of construction, particularly through building materials. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Opération Béton: Constructing Concrete in Switzerland. 

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16 Re-enacting Fisac: a critical reconstruction of his material practice with flexibly formed concrete

Ivan Jose Marquez Munoz Newcastle University ivan.marquez-munoz@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract:

This paper offers an overview on innovative methods for casting concrete using fabric and membranes as formwork, building upon the work with flexibly formed concrete carried out by Spanish architect Miguel Fisac (1913-2006). Having developed a vast portfolio of projects with exposed reinforced concrete throughout the 1960s, since the 1970s Fisac started experimenting with concrete in a different way, patenting a rudimentary formwork system that let concrete naturally find its form with the help of gravity:

"I thought, in the end, after studying it in detail that, perhaps, the most distinctive characteristic, the most exclusive one of concrete is that it is the only material that arrives to site, or to its prior fabrication, in a fluid state, which then solidifies. So, I thought that possibly its most genuine artistic impression might be recording, like a genetic trace, that it had been a soft material, poured into a mould. And as a characteristic of this doughy, soft state, it should not have sharp edges but present a rounded aspect, typical of all soft materials." [Miguel Fisac, in ‘Carta a mis sobrinos (estudiantes de arquitectura)’, Fundación Miguel Fisac, Ciudad Real, 2007]

Casting concrete with flexible formwork constitutes an active learning methodology that proposes a different attitude to architectural design, facilitating a hands-on approach working with materials. This paper aims at opening a discussion about the indivisible relationship between designing and making, arguing for a more holistic pedagogical approach to architectural design, emphasising the importance of understanding architecture and construction as a process, not just a result. This is something particularly inherent to concrete which, “let us be clear, is not a material, it is a process” [Adrian Forty, A material without a history, in: J.L. Cohen, G.M. Moeller (Eds.), Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006]

Bio:

Ivan Jose Marquez Munoz is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and PhD Candidate at Newcastle University. Born in Spain, Ivan has built a multifaceted expertise in practice and academia since 2005, working at different award-winning architecture practices and teaching at several schools of architecture in Portugal, Italy, and the UK.

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16 Bridging the gap between design and construction. Training architects to build

Pascal Rollet, School of Architecture, University of Grenoble

rollet.p@grenoble.archi.fr

Abstract:

In the 1980s, John James, an Australian architect and medieval architecture specialist, published an extensive study of the Chartres cathedral based on a meticulous observation of the building during a five-year stay in France. An examination of each stone, of the way it was carved and laid, and an inquiry into the variations of Chartres Chapter’s cashflow led him to formulate a controversial hypothesis of the building process: it was in complete contradiction with the theories usually defended by the historians of arts who relied on stylistic classification. James deducted that the great cathedral was not built vertically, bay after bay from the eastern apse to the frontal western porch, but rather horizontally, layer after layer, from foundations to the vaults and steeples. He also came to the conclusion that the contractors must have been organized in circus-like nomadic companies of multi-specialized builders who were moving from construction sites to another across the country according to the fluctuations of the local religious authorities’ finances.

In 2013, Massimo Ricci, an Italian professor of architecture at the university of Florence, conducted a constructive experimentation to crack Brunelleschi’s use of geometry and building technique of the Santa Maria dell Fiore dome which were kept secret by the Florentine maestro himself. By building a one to the fifth scaled model of the masterpiece with bricks and mortar mimicking the same masonry layout than the one observed on the actual building, Ricci came up with an interesting and plausible explanation of the floral geometrical pattern and the bricks layout used by the architect.

I suggest that these works are early examples of production studies in the field of architecture. They intertwine the notion of know-how and technical knowledge to the design process. They revisit the social and economic organization of workers who contributed to two major achievements in the history of western architecture. The paper will focus on this potential inspirational power of this historical interpretation that could help us to set a new course for the architectural process. It will also discuss the relationship between architectural design process and construction from a critical point of view inspired by Sergio Ferro’s teaching at the School of Architecture in Grenoble. Learning from the experiential learning training method developed at the Grands Ateliers, we shall outline plausible new organizations for architectural practice creativity in the 21st century.

Bio

Pascal Rollet is an architect and full Professor of architectural and urban design at the School of Architecture of Grenoble Alpes University. He is currently Head of the Habitat du Futur Chair, housed in Les Grands Ateliers, a French research center dedicated to “learning architecture by building”.

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16 Construction Labs Won’t Save Us — unless they get critical

Over the last twenty years, there have been several movements aimed at bringing design education and the building site closer together. Under labels such as designbuild (one word), design-build (hyphenated), learning by building, hands-on learning and others along these lines, teachers, researchers and the construction industry are trying to reconnect the two spheres. Sometimes this involves ‘real’ sites in the communities; other times it takes the form of educational facilities created for that purpose. It is the latter that I am concerned with here and, for lack of a better umbrella term, simply call them ‘construction labs’. While a blanket criticism of these initiatives would be unfair, it is striking that keywords such as capital, workers or value hardly appear in the relevant literature. Although they promise changes in production and even in its social relations, they are in line with the requirements of today’s construction industry: more efficiency; less litigation, rework, inspections and technical absurdities. Drawing on Ferro’s concept of an ‘imaginary construction site’, i.e. a construction logic that exist in the minds of designers but not in reality, this paper aims to highlight some of the pitfalls that lurk in ‘faking’ construction sites to improve architectural education, and what needs to be considered if these sites are to prompt real change. ^[aa]

Silke Kapp is a professor at the School of Architecture at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and a founding member of the group MOM. Her research focuses on critical theory and experimental practices. As part of the TF/TK project, she leads the team translating Sérgio Ferro’s work into English.

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17 Habitats da resistência: estratégias territoriais dos povos tradicionais brasileiros

Cecília Lenzi Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo

cecilialenzi@usp.br

Abstract:

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar as estratégias territoriais cotidianas criadas e recriadas pelos povos tradicionais brasileiros na busca pela permanência nos territórios ancestrais e pela manutenção de sua existência frente ao avanço do capital, em suas mais variadas formas. Partindo do entendimento da ‘floresta como artefato’ (Neves, 2022) – em oposição à interpretação que concebe as áreas não-urbanas como vazios demográficos –, nos debruçamos na caracterização do habitat de seis povos tradicionais brasileiros: seringueiros, faxinalenses, apanhadores de flores sempre-vivas, vazanteiros, veredeiros e ribeirinhos, localizados nos quatro maiores biomas do Brasil. Nosso recorte metodológico se concentrou no conceito de habitat, aqui compreendido como a ‘habitação expandida’, ou seja, a totalidade dos espaços de vida cotidiana dessas populações. Com base na análise qualitativa de dados secundários, essa caracterização nos levou a identificar que as estratégias protagonizadas por estes grupos resultam em configurações territoriais que são dinâmicas e que fogem a estereótipos formais e teóricos. Tais configurações, uma vez que acompanham as transformações sociais, econômicas e ecológicas dos contextos nos quais se inserem, são dinâmicas e reagem às pressões do capital, que pesam, direta e indiretamente, sobre seus territórios. Assim, tanto as colocações produzidas pelos seringueiros, quanto os criadouros comuns mantidos pelos faxinalenses, as moradias sazonais e transitórias recriadas pelos povos norte-mineiros e as casas deslizantes dos ribeirinhos amazonenses são exemplos de rearranjos internos do habitat que contribuem no reposicionamento contínuo dessas populações nas dinâmicas da sociedade – além de confrontarem, etimologicamente, o conceito de “tradicional”. Tal análise também evidencia que as pesquisas conduzidas no âmbito da arquitetura poderiam adotar uma abordagem teórica que privilegia processos sociais no lugar de formas acabadas como, costumeiramente, assim o faz. Tal caminho poderia ampliar o alcance social e político de seus campos de investigação, incorporando em sua teoria crítica parcelas da população historicamente invisibilizadas que, contudo, têm respondido de forma singular aos desafios impostos pelo atual contexto econômico, social e ecológico globais.

Bio:

Arquiteta urbanista, doutoranda no Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (Brasil) e integrante do grupo de pesquisa HABIS (IAU/USP).

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17 This Was All Fields: Using arts approaches to understand the ecological impact of urbanisation

Julia Heslop Newcastle University

julia.heslop@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract:

The acceleration of global urbanisation is having significant detrimental impact on human and non-human species and environments, damaging local biodiversity and the social and nature-based bonds between people and place. This is an intellectual and practical challenge in cities globally as governments struggle to meet the needs of growing populations with increasing demands on natural resources. More recent concepts, like nature-based thinking and degrowth movements (D’Alisa et al., 2014; Randrup et al., 2020) have shifted academic thinking towards more nature-centric approaches. However, the impact on policy and professional practice is limited (Pineda Pinto, 2020). This paper uses early findings from a participatory and arts based project looking at the potential ecological impacts of large scale housing development on greenfield land in North Tyneside, UK, to understand how housing practice may better centre environmental justice and the rights of nature. The presentation will discuss how creative tools and approaches to research can create a holistic understanding of the various physical, psychological and cultural landscape factors at risk due to new housing development.

Bio:

Julia Heslop is an artist and Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) fellow in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. She works interdisciplinarily across the boundaries of art, landscape and planning and her work often takes the form of large scale architectural installations, painting and printmaking and video. The potentials for deep participation in re(creating) environments and landscapes are at the centre of her practice and she often works in participatory, slow ways with groups and communities. She uses her work to ask questions about the ecological impacts of development, land and property ownership, housing precarity, urban planning and local democracy.

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17 Environmental inadequacy of modern architecture: expropriated work and exploited Nature

Rita de Cássia Pereira Saramago Federal University of Uberlândia

saramagorita@ufu.br

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes

jmalopes@sc.usp.br

Abstract:

This work presents some reflections from doctoral research, which has investigated the relationship between Society and Nature, especially conflictual in the field of Civil Construction – the one in which Architecture is practiced. Observing the environmental inadequacy of hegemonic architectural production, this article seeks to understand the reasons that could explain why our category has distanced itself from the accumulated knowledge in ‘sustainable’ construction practices. As a rule, vernacular and traditional constructions are deeply connected to the socio-environmental and cultural context of the territories in which they are built. Then to understand why this long constructive tradition was abandoned in favour of an internationalized production, disconnected from the natural environment, we rely on the arguments of Sérgio Ferro. By reconstructing the historical path that led us to the environmental incompatibility of buildings in the present, we conclude that modern architecture easily conforms to the unsustainable hegemonic mode of production, especially because it favours the logic of expropriation of labour, associated with the overexploitation of natural resources. After all, the definitive rupture of the autonomy of workers on the construction sites – that occurred with the rise of modern architecture – also meant a rupture with the territory, with the natural environment. The production processes of modern materials and components generate countless environmental impacts (including 10% of global GHG emissions), while the 'concrete-steel-glass' buildings that we continue to build make abusive use of artificial conditioning systems to maintain minimum conditions of occupancy (consuming even more fossil fuels in their operation). In other words, based on the critical historiography of Sérgio Ferro, we intend to demonstrate how the need to extract value – that one which only work produces – has determined, in each historical period, the industry that turned the construction site into the synthesis of innumerable processes responsible for exhausting the biophysical world.

Bio:

Rita de Cássia Pereira Saramago - Adjunct professor at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU) since 2011, where she is the coordinator of the Environmental Comfort Laboratory (LCC), as well as a researcher in the [MORA] Housing Research group. At University of São Paulo (IAUUSP), she is part of the Housing and Sustainability Research group (HABIS).

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes - Full Professor at IAU-USP, since 1999. He has worked as a supervisor on the IAUUSP Postgraduate Program (2007) and as program coordinator and president of the postgraduate committee (2022). CNPq Research Productivity Fellow, category/level 2 (2018). He is one of coordinators of HABIS and an associate of USINA.

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17 Just Transitions: Climate+Construction+Architecture

Peggy Deamer Yale University
peggy.deamer@yale.edu

Abstract:

Architectural activists advocating for a deeper connection between architecture and construction are making fundamental headway, this paper argues, by foregrounding their common stake in environmental justice. The connection is not primarily ideological – i.e. sharing a common vision of a more sustainable built environment; indeed, the construction trades are notoriously sceptical of climate change discourse for its threat to their jobs. The link instead is made by a shared stake in foregrounding labor within the climate justice movement and the belief that architects and construction workers should take a lead in preparing for future, post-extractive work. This is the work of Just Transitions.

Just Transition, the paper suggests, is different than other climate justice efforts because, in foregrounding the necessary input of those who will be most affected by the systems being put in place by climate mitigation - namely, construction trades whose existing skills, tools, materials, and routines will be made obsolescent – it rallies those trades into action. This has three implications. The first is the necessary and emerging new leadership in some of the construction trade unions that understand their centrality in new systems of production. The second is the necessary and emerging collaboration between construction workers and architectural workers to jointly write the new rules of those new systems. The third is the change in architecture that is required for that collaboration – namely, its own unionization. As a result, unionization movements and climate justice movements begin to merge.

This paper will examine existing movements in both construction and architecture that emphasize Just Transitions as the catalyst for empowered built environment workers.

Bio:

Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale School of Architecture and the founding member of the Architecture Lobby. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design and the author of Architecture and Labor.

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18 Crossed Wires: The production of telephone exchange buildings in the UK (1945-1981)

Lisa Kinch Lancaster University l.kinch@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract:

The telephone exchange building is a visible manifestation of an otherwise largely invisible infrastructure network. Although a familiar sight in most towns and villages in the United Kingdom, the building type now stands on the brink of obsolescence due to the technological developments it has helped facilitate. In the 150 years since the invention of the telephone, the exchange building has gradually evolved from a civic edifice to a more modest and efficient type of building. These changes were primarily driven by rapidly increasing service demand and continuing innovations in both construction- and telecommunication technologies, underpinned by political aims and ideologies. The buildings and the UK's telecommunications network both embody a complex set of relationships between actors including politicians, architects, engineers, labourers and service users.

This paper offers a reflection on how buildings and actors have responded and adapted to change in the production of telephone exchange buildings in the UK between 1945-1981. Uncovering and mapping the developing relationships paints a more complete picture of the design and delivery of this unique building type; not just by drawings, switchboards, bricks and mortar, but also through political power plays, union pressures and organisational hierarchies in Government, the General Post Office and the Ministry of Works.

The paper draws on information found in archives, trade journals, drawings and interviews to compare a series of case studies, including the small ‘standard building types’ designed and constructed by the General Post Office’s own staff, an experimental, optimised building in Altrincham developed by the Post Office and Ministry of Works Joint Research and Development Group and its influence on later ‘standard building types’, and finally the larger buildings often designed by private Architects under direct supervision of the Ministry of Works and constructed by specially appointed contractors.

Bio:

Lisa Kinch is an architect, part-time tutor at Manchester School of Architecture and PhD student at Lancaster University, where she is researching the history of post-war telephone exchange buildings and the relationships between ‘official’ architecture, technology and the state. Her research is funded by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP).

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18 Disposable Energy Landscapes of Corsicana: New Rifts

William Truitt University of Houston wctruitt@central.uh.edu

Abstract:

A direct relationship exists between the development of energy and the built landscape centered around Corsicana Texas. While the concept fulfills the typical narrative of rural and exurban Texas befitting the cowboy-to-oil producer stereotype, there is a particular genealogy from initial English settlement, a deeply felt attitude toward the production of land here, that reveals a unique space and scale of production. The accidental oil discovery, the first west of Pennsylvania, led to boom and bust cycles and financed one of the largest downtowns of the late 19th century Texas. Uneven and expansive, the urban form initially emerges from a relationship to infrastructure instead of the ideal courthouse town. Larger energy infrastructures now repeat the memory of extraction, transforming the landscape and city in fundamental ways little noticed and out of view of typical urban studies. Several thousand acre solar and wind farms connect to existing high capacity power lines parallel to a planned high speed rail. Immune to the crypto crash, the largest data mine in the country is just now complete under the same power lines. These industries, largely invisible to the public and serving other urban centers, contribute to accelerating real estate values outpacing income, reinforcing larger territorial consumption of the land. Marx’s rift in the relationship between the individual and landscape is finally visible in Navarro County. The value of land is tied to production on a scale unsustainable in the local labor market, creating a dependence on mobile, temporary skilled labor. This paper illustrates first a history of intertwined land extraction and urban development, second a contemporary upscaled version of production, and third a proposal to leverage the historical and contemporary energy network to produce new local ecologies possible with investment in the community as traditional agriculture use disappears close to large urban centers.

Bio:

William Truitt is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Houston. His studios and seminars focus on uneven geography of global cities in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Lately, his research focuses on development and inequities of space in smaller cities with complex histories- hence Corsicana.

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18 Illuminating the Enlightened. Maritime Labor, Candles, and the Architecture of the Enlightenment

Jose Monge UCLA jamonge@ucla.edu

Abstract:

In a letter written in 1751, Benjamin Franklin applauded the superior properties of a new type of candle being produced in New England. These candles “afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softening”, and “their Drops do not make Grease Spots like those from common Candles (and) last much longer.” Known as spermaceti candles, Franklin was one of the first men with access to them. As a candlemaker’s son, his enthusiasm came from experience: he envisioned the intellectual possibilities granted by this light source.

As an intellectual project, Enlightenment principles that emanated from Europe spurred the colonists in America toward independence. In material terms, however, it was in the US – first as a collection of colonies and then as an independent country – where light began to be industrially produced. Two architectural inventions related to the whaling industry originated what would become top-of-the-line illumination products. The first, a deck-built brick try work, allowed whaling vessels to travel virtually indefinitely and transformed ships from simple vehicles into floating factories. The second innovation, the technology for separating sperm whale head matter into wax and oil, allowed whalers to transform their catch into candles. Propelled by these innovations, whaling became the first industry to operate in the Americas and the one that created its first monopoly.

This presentation will delve into the production of light in the American context: the “ideal” relationship between the American Enlightenment, the creation of the American identity –Franklin’s hand and eyes–; and the “material” production that it involved –whales, sailors, and workers bodies. As a shaper of space, whale light was created under the same strict class hierarchies that it perpetuated. The labor required for its manufacture made it unaffordable for the laborers that produced it.

Bio:

José Monge is an Architecture PhD candidate in UCLA. His dissertation, titled Maritime Labor, Candles, and the Architecture of the Enlightenment (1750-1872), focuses on the role that whale-originated illuminants, specifically spermaceti candles and oil, played in the American Enlightenment as an intellectual project and the U.S. as a country.

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19 From Gastarbeiter to Contemporary Labor Exploitation: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Labor in Western Europe's Construction Industry

Jakob Draz Independent jakob.draz@gmail.com

Abstract:

Due to one of the greatest waves of European postwar emigration in the period between 1945 and 1965, western economies such as the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Austria experienced great labour shortages mostly in the secondary sector. Following Europe’s economic stabilisation and the Wirtschaftswunder (Economic Miracle) of Germany, the country laid out the legal foundation for the organised recruitment of foreign labour, which officially lasted until November 1973, although similar practices can still be identified nowadays. The expression „Gastarbeiter" or „Guest-Worker“ was used to describe a recruitment on a contract for a period of years. The term is however still used colloquially to refer to migrant workers performing less desired jobs such as those of a construction or a postal worker. In this article, I focus on the labour migration with a thematic focus on former Yugoslav territories and the bilateral agreement between Germany and Yugoslavia (signed on the 12th of October 1968). Moreover, I will analyse both positive and negative outcomes of the Gastarbeiter programme and contrast it with contemporary examples of foreign labour exploitation practices within the construction industry.

Bio:

Jakob Draz is currently finishing his studies at the Institute for Architecture/ Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. His work has a specific focus on architectural research of buildings in late capitalism and visual/digital cultures.

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19 Beyond the construction-site settlement: Architecture's interaction with labour in the construction of Douro’s dams in the mid-twentieth century

Catarina Ruivo Dinâmia'CET, ISCTE-IUL

catarina.pereira@iscte-iul.pt

Ivonne Herrera-Pineda, Dinâmia'CET, ISCTE-IUL
ivonne.pineda@iscte-iul.pt

Abstract:

Mid-twentieth-century dam construction along the Douro River, where it makes the border of Portugal and Spain, gave rise to planned settlements constructed by the electrical company Hidroelétrica do Douro (HED) to accommodate the necessary workforce. However, non-specialized construction workers, who arrived by the hundreds during the 1950s, were not allotted housing by HED, nor were they granted access to complementary amenities such as community centres or schools. Instead, they independently constructed makeshift dwellings from leftover dam materials on nearby slopes, where they remained out of sight from the settlements. As the planned settlements, now largely abandoned, have grown to be considered seminal works of Portuguese modernist architecture and displayed in books, exhibitions and documentaries, construction workers and their spaces have remained hidden from this historiography. Our research focuses on Miranda do Douro, a small city in the Portuguese northeast, which experienced a fourfold population increase due to worker influx. We combine archival documentation with oral testimonies from diverse local residents, collected through semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. From these sources, we investigate the threefold manner in which architecture interacted with labour in the construction of Douro’s dams, beyond, but interconnected with, the process of production: 1. The design planned settlement reproduced and reinforced the hierarchical structures of the construction site. 2. The existence of a nearby urban centre added a layer of complexity to the social relations between the construction-site settlement and unplanned slums. This complexity is also furthered by the development of Miranda do Douro’s architectural structures for health and education. 3. Dominant architectural narratives tend to ignore these complexities and focus on the construction-site settlement as a reality detached from a broader process, namely that of its production, contributing to the erasure of labour in historical narratives, within and outside architecture.

Bio:

Catarina Ruivo is an integrated researcher at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Architecture, Design and Computation (2021) from Lisbon University, with a visiting period at The Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the articulation of spatial analysis with the sociological and historiographic aspects of architectural research.

Ivonne Herrera-Pineda is a post-doctoral researcher at ISCTE-IUL, in the ERC Project “ReARQ.IB”, where she focuses on the activation of participatory processes and the study of collective memory in everyday architecture. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

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19 Temporary forever

Hugo Lindberg Independent hugolindberg94@gmail.com

Abstract:

In my first year at KTH's architectural programme, parallel projection, the architect's main drawing method, was explained to me as a way of 'tracing the shadow of an imagined future'. But the shadow of the built environment is both larger and darker than the lines of the drawing. The architect is only one of several actors in the underlying production chain of our built environment. In fact, production involves some sixty professions and if we look 'behind' the buildings, we meet a group of construction workers. 'Parallel' and 'shadow' are not terms of architectural representation here, but rather describe the shadow society existing in parallel to Swedish welfare.

Despite the pandemic, recent years have seen an upward curve in the utilisation of migrant workers in Sweden. The construction sector employs almost half of those coming to Sweden for posted work, and construction sheds are part of the strategy to house them. Conceived as 'temporary', the barracks are subject to a regulatory framework which allows for lower standards of accommodation. But the construction workers move from one temporary solution to the next. The barracks and its shortcomings thus pose a permanent backdrop to a life in a perpetual state of emergency.

Here, in the shadow of the future, construction workers live in rooms smaller than Sweden’s smallest prison cells, on former industrial sites deemed too contaminated to allow for permanent settlement. As construction comes to an end, the workers move on to new sites to build the homes we live in, the offices we work in and the infrastructure which makes the travel between possible. Travelling with them to the new construction site is a barrack, Sweden’s lowest accepted standard of dwelling. On the dark side of innovation, the solution to house Sweden’s outsourced working class seems to be 'temporary forever'.

Bio:

Hugo Lindberg recently graduated from KTH School of Architecture in Sweden. His diploma project "Construction Site Living - shortcomings and possibilities in 'temporary' barrack dwelling" aims to shed light onto Sweden's outsourced working class and the barracks in which the guest workers dwell.

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19 Masterbuilders of the Gulf OR "the sea of changeable winds"

Suha Hasan ASH / AA Visiting School
[no email]

Abstract:

In the early 1900s, the government in Iran initiated a taxation system that coincided with climate change and droughts in West Iran. These conditions would lead to a mass exodus from the East Coast to the West Coast of the Gulf, from the side in which it is the Persian Gulf, to the side where it became the Arabian Gulf. Merchants would move to seek better conditions for their businesses to thrive. These affluent merchants would bring their financial capital and well-trained construction workers with expertise. These included master builders from Bastak and Bushire. A construction ecology was transferred from the areas they migrated from.

Today, the role of these master builders in introducing new aesthetics to the city is omitted in the name of the nation-state and the purity of national identities. The buildings they produced are attributed to a local or colonial identity, depending on the form of the building. This paper would like to highlight the significance of the contributions of these master builders and showcase them as potentially some of the pioneer architects of the 1900s in the Gulf. The findings are from conversations with their descendants and archival records, specifically newspaper clippings, that highlight their role.

Bio:

Suha Hasan is an architect and founder of ASH, based in Stockholm, Sweden.

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20 Sérgio Ferro and Production Studies: pedagogical approach for a new architecture

Lara Melotti Tonsig Instituo de Arquitetura da Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP

lalitamt@gmail.com

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP

jmalopes@sc.usp.br

Abstract:

This article is part of a series of studies aimed at exploring the proposals, methodologies, experiences, and critical analyses of Sérgio Ferro in the context of teaching and learning for architects. At the core of this research is the critical, unique, and provocative approach that permeates Ferro's work. According to the author, a precise understanding of architectural activity—the act of "designing, planning"—is only achieved when architecture is contextualized within the field of construction, and this is analyzed through the lens of political economy.

Sérgio Ferro's extensive and enriching career in teaching, always marked by a deep engagement with the political, social, and cultural aspects of his time, stands out as one of the main exemplifications of the practical application of his critical theory. However, texts organized by the author himself that systematically present the theoretical development of his proposals and methodological approaches in the context of education are scarce. Faced with this gap, throughout 2023, a series of conversations and interviews were conducted with Sérgio Ferro, aiming to understand the evolution of his theoretical and methodological foundations in the pedagogical field, the conception of his didactic experiments, and how these aimed to transform the students' perception of their own education and the role that architecture plays in the realm of production.

With this article, we seek to contribute to the enrichment of the field of Production Studies, especially in its pedagogical aspect, strengthening its theoretical and practical foundations. By critically understanding architecture as proposed by Ferro, the intention is to propose approaches to the education of future professionals that truly transform the instrumental and complicit role architecture has played in the reproduction of value and accumulation of capital, resulting from the intensive exploitation of labor and the devastating extraction of surplus value.

Bio:

Lara Melotti Tonsig, a doctoral student in Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo, is actively engaged in the "Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges" (TF/TK) project. Collaborating with scholars from different parts of the globe, she explores innovative approaches in Production Studies, labor, and architectural education, reflecting a commitment to advancing critical perspectives in architectural discourse and practice.

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20 Repositioning Architectural Education in South African Universities: Fostering an Architecture of Resonance for African Students

Nomalanga Mahlangu University of Johannesburg nomalangam@uj.ac.za

Abstract:

In recent years, the call for a more diverse architectural education, one that places the experiences and perspectives of African students at the forefront, has been growing. This paper advocates for the establishment of an "architecture of resonance" within South African universities, with the aim of tapping into the wisdom inherent in the everyday lives of ordinary African students. By infusing this wisdom into the university, our objective is to invigorate minds and reshape architectural pedagogy and practice.

While Sérgio Ferro's concepts of the 'separated drawing' and 'separated design' have historically influenced the roles of architects, we offer a different perspective by delving into the transformative potential of design education. Our specific focus is on the imperative to reposition the African student at the center of design curricula, recognizing the significance of their lived experiences and wisdom. This research, predominantly carried out within a second-year Design studio, employs a variety of methodologies, including alternative assessments, contextual research, diverse guest lectures, student surveys, peer reviews, and both qualitative and quantitative analyses.

With the aim of repositioning our production of studies, our pedagogical approach utilizes grounded theory as a research methodology for both teaching staff and students. The student's lived experience during their time in primary school serves as the starting point and the foundation for their theoretical framework, which is then translated into the creation of space when on-site. They are tasked with reimagining the future of a school typology in the context of Alexandra, South Africa, working collaboratively in groups to embody their collective experience, and anticipating the live environment of an architectural office.

We argue that such an approach is indispensable in addressing the persistent legacies of colonialism and apartheid, fostering inclusivity, and promoting a design education that reflects the cultural, social, and economic tapestry of South Africa.

Bio:

A young architect and academic from South Africa. She is passionate about exploring alternative ways of thinking and teaching architecture,

with the drive to continue to interrogate the impacts of colonisation, and apartheid to our understanding of space and spatial theories as academics but most importantly the students as well.

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20 Sites of Learning

Scott David Batty University of Westminster
s.batty@westminster.ac.uk

Abstract:

A presentation (from an ongoing research paper) exploring the role of the construction site within architectural education. Primarily using the BArch 'Site Diary Module' (University of Westminster, School of Architecture + Cities) as a case study, the presentation will explore the following questions:

What kind of educational experience (educational theory) do construction sites offer to architecture students - how is this different to ‘Design’ projects?

What is unique about the building site environment, as an educational environment (as opposed to a studio/campus environment)?

How is this type of learning an example of active engagement and equity, diversity and inclusion?

Visits to construction sites and the active monitoring of the project under construction are interactive experiences that develop students’ understanding of real construction practices. Site visits create an interactive learning environment for students and provide exposure to the real-world, spatiotemporal experience of a construction project. This paper explores construction site visits and live project monitoring as an essential component within architectural education. The author, Scott Batty, will draw on unique experience as module leader for the BArch Site Diary Module (University of Westminster, School of Architecture + Cities) over an eight-year period and the work of over 800 students that have taken part in this successful module.

This work represents a cross section through architectural education, architectural practice and the construction industry in the capital.

Bio:

I have 30 years experience making, building, designing and shaping the profession of architecture.

In architectural practice I have worked as an employee, a sole practitioner, a partner, a freelancer and as the director of my own company. During this time I have mentored many young architects in the transition from academia to practice.

I am passionate about architectural education, but am open to the idea that this may not lead to being a practicing chartered architect.

I am passionate about building and architecture, but no longer as a practicing architect myself- in the conventional sense- I now operate in the field that exists between practice and research, designing, building and making.

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20 The Architecture of Architecture Student Debt

Sben Korsh, University of Michigan

sbenk@umich.edu

Abstract:

Over the past 50 years, public architecture education in the United States has undergone neoliberalization, shifting from state subsidies to a reliance on student debt. This transition has significantly impacted how architecture schools operate, particularly those within flagship public research universities. This paper analyzes the University of Michigan’s architecture school as an exemplary case, examining the school’s facilities’ patronage, material culture, and functional uses to highlight how neoliberalization has encouraged a particular institutional emphasis on research. Most of the school’s facilities built in recent years prioritize spaces for research (including faculty offices and exhibition spaces) over those for teaching (such as studio space and seminar rooms.) While this is partly due to a growing number of faculty needed to meet expanding enrollments — the paper argues that the facilities also embody the school’s strategic emphasis on an “excellence” of reputation, which attracts prospective students who seek to minimize the risk of their substantial “investment.” This process reflects a shift in research — from research as a means to an end to a distinctly neoliberalized form of its intrinsic value, where research becomes a process of becoming, epitomized in the title of an internal funding scheme at the school, “Research Through Making.” By examining how this research apparatus relates to the accumulation of student debt, this paper aims to bring the growing calls for debt abolition into the discursive and physical analysis of architectural education.

Bio

Sben Korsh is a PhD Candidate in Architecture at the University of Michigan. He is writing a thesis titled “Indebting Architects: Neoliberalism and Professional Education in America.” He is a member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, a union local within the American Federation of Teachers (AFL-CIO).

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21 An Essay on the Urbanization of the Post-Revolutionary Mexican Ejido

Kaya Lazarini FAUUSP e USINA CTAH

kaya@usp.br

Abstract:

This work delves into the subject of urbanization within ejidos in Mexico, focusing on studies conducted over the past four decades (1983-2023) concerning urban expansion in this form of social property. Through a literature review, the objective is to identify key theoretical and methodological contributions related to the production of urban space in territories extending beyond the hegemonic form represented by private and individual ownership. It encompasses forms of land relationships that entail uses beyond the individual, including familial, public, collective, and communal dimensions. The perspectives of studies on the urbanization of ejidal land in Mexico underscore the importance of land tenure in shaping habitation, production, and life reproduction spaces.

This essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of space production dynamics in contexts not entirely captured by the logic of commodities, where individual private ownership does not play a central role in territorial organization. The importance of approaches incorporating diverse forms of property in space management is emphasized, particularly in times of environmental and economic crises. A brief contextualization of this debate will be provided, followed by a thematic-temporal division of the analyzed studies, and finally, a summary of their contributions. The conclusions point to the existence of heterogeneous and changing forms of land relationships, strongly influenced by external and internal factors within territories. This results in contradictory moments, characterized by ongoing disputes and polarities, where at times the collective needs and uses of the community prevail, and at other times, the logics of exchange value and commodification become imperative, necessitating changes in land use.

Bio:

Kaya Lazarini - Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Architecture and Urbanism (UNICAMP and FAU/USP, Brazil), specialization in Solidarity Economy and Social Technology in Latin America (UNICAMP, Brazil). Currently pursuing a doctoral degree at FAU/USP with a research stay at UNAM, Mexico, and associated architect at USINA – centro de trabalhos para o ambiente habitado.

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21 Remembering Production: Favela Museums, Building, and the Production of Space

Matt Davies Newcastle University and PUC-Rio

Matt.Davies@ncl.ac.uk

Renata Summa, University of Groningen

renatasumma@gmail.com

Abstract:

Rio de Janeiro is home to several different museums preserving the experiences of living in favelas and of the political struggles over safe and secure housing. O Museo da Favela (MUF), O Museu do Horto, O Museu das Remoções: each memorialises histories and practices of struggles for housing in different ways. How do these museums preserve the skills, experiences, and practices of building houses in contested spaces? Different museums prioritise different aspects of production, according to the experiences they seek to preserve; for example, O Museu das Romoções focuses on the political struggles against the removal of residents of Vila Autodromo. Our paper also engages the aesthetic dimension of the museums by considering modes of instituting memory – for example, each of the three museums uses a walking tour organised by residents: how do the forms of representation afford different practices of producing space? The representation of the building of the favelas may be more or less explicit in different museums, inviting a specifically political question about what is revealed and what is set aside in these representations of space, and the difference it might make to acknowledge production relations in the production of space.

Bio:

Matt Davies is a Reader in International Political Economy at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. His research focuses on culture and international political economy, in particular questions concerning work, urbanisation, and popular culture.

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21 The role of migration in the growth of the city of Mauá-SP (1950-1980)

Jayne Nunes Universidade de São Paulo - USP jayne.nunes.santos@usp.br

Abstract:

The city of Mauá, located in the southeast of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region and part of the Greater ABC Region, experienced an explosion of growth between the 1950s and 1970s. As the result of industrial expansion and the process of metropolisation that began in the 1940s, this occupation took shape and was consolidated in the following decades.

From 1950 onwards, with the progressive installation of the industrial park in the Greater ABC region, especially the automobile industry, and the construction of motorways during the government of President Juscelino Kubitscheck (1956-1961), the dynamics of the metropolitan territory changed significantly. While São Paulo's city downtown underwent an intense process of verticalisation, the city's margins were constantly being extended with the installation of popular housing developments. This process took place in combination, reducing the supply of rental housing in the city downtown and making the "option" of owning and self-building a more and more popular housing solution. With the increase in industries in the cities around São Paulo, the low-income population also increased, attracted both by the jobs and the low cost of land. At the same time, the installation of interstate highways (Dutra; Rio-Bahia) facilitated the arrival of a large number of migrants, mainly from the state of Minas Gerais and the north-east of Brazil.

In this context, these migrants played a fundamental role in the growth of the city of Mauá and it is essential to look at the city's development through the eyes of its inhabitants. To trace this trajectory, we collected testimonies from the 1950s onwards in books and newspapers, establishing a narrative through recurring elements in the speeches of the various actors. The intention is to emphasize the importance of these residents who not only saw the city grow but were an active part of this process.

Bio:

Master's student in History and Foundations of Architecture and Urbanism at FAUUSP, with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from FAUUSP (2019). Researches the Greater ABC Region, focusing on the city of Mauá. Her main theme is the expansion and development of the city, proposing reflections on terms and ideas.

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21 The Modeling Game – A New Tool to Produce Space

Maria Julia Rocha Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais majurocha126@gmail.com

Abstract:

Sergio Ferro’s critiques of the mainstream production of space has led to many discussions about alternative practices of space production. The authors Silke Kapp and Ana Paula Baltazar, have explored throughout their work possible loopholes in the mainstream building process and have experimented with one of the possible alternatives: the idea of Interfaces. According to my own understanding, Interfaces are tools of dialogue that incite engagement, autonomy, collaboration and heighten the prospection abilities of those who interact with it. The perception is that the use of these tools could be an emancipatory alternative to the hegemonic production of architecture. The Modeling Game is an interface that came about within a university research group tasked with assisting a community of the Calon ethnicity. The settlement was granted a plot of land by the municipality but was required to build standard homes, an extrinsic concept to their culture. Given the objective of not imposing traditional spatiality concepts the interface was created to enable autonomy to conceptualize spaces. The game consists of a grid base that fits pieces which represent elements of buildings, such as walls, doors and windows, along with furniture models in scale. The object allows the person to create tactile tridimensional models that easily correlate to real spaces. The correlation is established by markings on a tape measure that correspond to the model’s grid size in scale. My current work aims to expand the use of the interface to other contexts by systematizing a method of use arising from the observation and analysis of several experiences with the interface. Secondarily, it aims to explore the possibilities of incorporating builders in the prospecting process of spatial production. The main goal is to investigate how the use of The Modeling Game can be an alternative practice to the mainstream building processes

Bio:

Maria Julia Rocha, Architect and Urban Designer, graduated from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG and is currently pursuing her master’s degree under the guidance of professor Silke Kapp. Her current work aims to experiment with alternative practices to mainstream architecture along with the use of digital manufacturing technology.

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22 Digital Concrete: How Robots Keep Us Dependent on Cement

Kim Förster University of Manchester/MARG

kim.forster@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract:

In the context of the coming change in construction and materials, digitalization next to circularity, or digital manufacturing, is the innovation field par excellence, promoted by research, laboratories and funds. When robots are used at universities to pour concrete in the name of efficiency, the history and theory of building culture is called into question. But digital fabrication is not just about the transformation of labour in the form of technology, know-how and patronage, a little over a hundred years after reinforced concrete construction revolutionised the building site. Rather than the material no longer being an issue, as Adrian Forty has argued, this paper, looking into research clusters internationally, is a critical reexamination of the recent history of shotcreting, as well as alternatives to it. What is at stake, also from a political ecology perspective regarding the disparity of impacts and costs, is the perpetuation even concealment of the material itself, cement, which is highly problematic as there is no real mitigation strategy, neither by industry, nor by the state, nor by architecture and engineering to the extent required.

Bio:

Kim Förster (Dr. sc. ETH) currently researches and teaches at the University of Manchester with a focus on knowledge and cultural production, institutional as well as environmental history of architecture. An architectural historian, he served as Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from 2016 to 2018.

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22 Transparency and the Construction of Modernity: Nature and Labour in the French Glass Industry, 1850-1950

Jean Souviron ENSA Paris-Belleville, IPRAUS/AUSser

souviron.jean@gmail.com

Abstract:

Since the 19th century, the size of glazing in Western architecture has increased steadily for the benefit of brighter interiors, promoted by a vanguard of architects eager to use the latest innovations in the industry. In Europe, this industry has regularly enhanced its production processes to increase yields and keep pace with economic and population growth, while the modern project of the 20th century has made transparency an essential component of its promise to improve comfort.

The historiography of architecture has devoted numerous publications to the political, symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of transparency, while the series of technological innovations that have improved and intensified productivity is also well known. However, the radical changes in the labour and organisation of factory workers have been overlooked, as has the materiality of architectural transparency and its inextricable entanglement with the socio-metabolic trajectory of industrial societies. In this paper, I study the environmental history of architectural glass in France from the 1850s to the 1950s. I focus on the evolution of the conditions of labour in the glass industry in relation to technological improvements, as well as on the material and energy footprint of the production processes. I aim to provide a long-term perspective on the interaction between architecture, labour and the environment through a quantitative analysis of the exploitation of natural resources and workers by the glass industry.

I draw on the archives of Saint-Gobain to assess the metabolic trajectory of glazing, the extraction of raw materials and the use of fossil fuels being a precondition for the design of glass architecture. I argue that the growing efficiency of the production processes has contributed to the spread of modern architecture characterised by an increasingly intensive use of glass, while remaining unconcerned about the increasingly damaging exploitation of nature and workers by its industries.

Bio:

Jean Souviron, architect and civil engineer, holds a PhD in architecture. He is a lecturer at the ENSA Paris-Belleville, where his research focuses on constructive systems in their relationship with indoor climates and the environment, crossing architectural history, science and technology studies and material and energy flow analyses.

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22 Entanglements in Transparency: Glass Production in Architecture

Aki Ishida Virginia Tech

aishida@vt.edu

Abstract:

From the Hall Mirrors at the Versailles, Berlin’s Reichstag, to and the pencil skyscrapers on New York’s Billionaire’s Row, glass has served as a symbol of luxury, political transparency, and status. The technical challenges involved in glassmaking, combined with metaphors historically associated with glass—from glass slippers in fairy tales to mirrors in religious buildings, amplify glass’s exquisiteness and complexity. From the 11th to the 16th century, the secrets of glass production were highly coveted by the Venetian Republic—so much so that smuggling of glassmakers was punishable by death. Today, extra-large glass panels are often manufactured in Europe, fabricated at select factories in Asia, then shipped to construction sites across continents, resulting in a massive carbon footprint.

Furthermore, according to Arup’s 2018 report on glass recycling, only 25% of flat glass are recycled and the rest is sent to landfill where glass takes over a million years to decompose. Glass from building demolition often goes unrecycled due to a number of reasons, including the tedious manual labor necessary to separate the curtainwall components, and the impurities that remain in recycled glass. How do glass’s historic exclusivity and status contribute to the overuse of glass for esteemed brands and locations today, as well as to the exploitative extraction of sand and minerals necessary to produce transparency?

This paper examines the entanglements in glass’s exquisiteness with symbolism for organizational transparency, as well greed for luxury and prestige, which leads to production that often exploits natural materials, energy, and labor. It will explore the metaphorical significance of glass transparency since the medieval times, followed by contemporary case studies of brand-new cities in the Middle East desserts, where glass is specified as a symbol and must be coated with minerals and shaded with louvres, rendering it opaque.

Bio:

Aki Ishida is Associate Professor and Interim Associate Director at Virginia Tech School of Architecture in the US. Aki’s work, in both writing and design, center around aspects of architecture that are temporal, impermanent, and ever-changing. She authored the book Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture: Material, Culture, and Technology.

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22 Political Economies of Norwegian Timbers

Maryia Rusak ETH Zurich

rusakmaria@gmail.com

Abstract:

Nordic architects have monopolised the ideas of sustainability, climate resilience and ecology, often expressed through the abundant use of timber. The idea of “Scandinavian design” instantly evokes images of sleek mid-century minimalist shapes in natural woods. While timber is a material intrinsic to the Nordic context, this paper argues that the idea of timber as a “natural” and “ecological” material was largely produced. In the 20th century, artificial forestry practices imported to Scandinavia from the United States eradicated traditional logging and profoundly transformed vast territories and ecologies. Solid timber construction was substituted with imported framing methods, which required new artificial insulation materials. With scientific advances of the military effort, timber’s natural fibres were infused with a wide range of chemical substances. Plywood, fiberboard, and engineered timbers modified wood’s chemical, material and physical properties. In this context, the return of timber as a “natural” and “ecological” Nordic material was an event staged largely by commercial timber producers. The Norwegian Wood Prize, established by trade associations of wooden producers, was to promote the use of timber in architectural designs. Starring “ecological” designs of Knut Knutsen accompanied by phenomenological essays by Christian Norberg-Schulz, the Prize publications re-framed timber a new national Norwegian material. By zooming into specific material artefacts, their physical properties and international provenance, the paper unwraps the layers of production of Norwegian timber as “natural” and “environmental” material. Engaging with its many systems of production, the paper aims to deconstruct contemporary narratives of timber sustainability. Mediating between different scales, this paper probes a new methodology for architectural history, more attentive to architecture’s global ecologies and environmental effects.

Bio:

Maryia Rusak is an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-24), Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design. Her postdoctoral project investigates the Nordic architecture of foreign aid in postcolonial Africa, focusing on the pragmatic economic rationale behind architectural production. Rusak holds a PhD from the Oslo School of Architecture.

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23 Gestures in Building and Painting – Reversing the Narrative

Junia Penido Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais penidojunia@gmail.com

Abstract:

Since the 18th century, scholars have been attempting to capture the knowledge and know-how underlying manual labor through formalized and permanent records, especially in writing. Crafts whose nature lies in gestures, interaction of body and mind, and learning through practice are increasingly codified into words, drawings, and numbers, and diminished or stunted by such codification. This paper presents an experiment in writing about manual labor based on practice, with the intention of reversing the relationship. While based on references such as Sérgio Ferro, Tim Ingold, and Leroi-Gourhan, it is primarily the result of direct and participatory observation research on a construction site and my own experience as a painter. The result is a paratactic writing complemented by drawings. My aim is to do the opposite of what is common in architectural practice: the art, in fact, lies in the process of the builders. I present some events that depict construction as a universe filled with intricacies that are invisible to the eyes of many, such as how a body position when performing a certain movement, which may seem counterintuitive to any observer, is coherent within that process. Thus, instead of instrumentalizing processes that have escaped codification, I aim to bring visibility and recognition to the art present within them.

Bio:

Junia Penido is a painter and holds a degree in architecture from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, where she is a member of the MOM group. Her research, grounded in the critical theory of architecture, explores the intersection between practices of painting and construction.

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23 'From mud to chaos': three favela carpenters in mid-20th Century urban Brazil ^[ab]

José Tavares Correia de Lira Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo

In many parts of the world - not only in the underdeveloped world - construction has remained a rather peculiar productive sector. Structurally resisting capital's need to permanently reduce distances and shorten the time required for generating profit, it seems that its spatial fix condition has often resulted in rather contradictory forms of development. Attaching and combining industrial or semi-industrial productive forces to different forms of manufacture, skilled and unskilled manual labour and indigenous crafts, building activities pose fantastic challenges to orthodox ways of considering world capitalism in its relations to labour, technology, region and the human and non-human body of nature. Besides remaining everywhere an extraordinary source of surplus value, there are also time/space circumstances in which a certain paradoxical autonomy, even if precarious, might play a conscious or unconscious role in the production of space. Sometimes appearing to be somewhat out of tune with capitalism, or only formally subordinated to it, to its productive logics, to its historicity as well as to its ethical, social and environmental premises.

This is indeed quite a large statement, but in this presentation I would like to address it by reflecting upon a very specific case I had studied from 1987 to 1991 in Recife, Brazil. I was then an architecture student and took part in a collective research project amidst a very poor urban area. At the time, the city had around a million and a half inhabitants and the area we undertook our field work hosted some 60 thousand people.

At the center of the Portuguese sugar cane colonial economy in America, since Brazil’s Independence in the early 19th Century, Recife had become the second or third largest city in the newborn nation. Around the abolition of slavery in 1888 it turned into one of the major destinies to former enslaved men and women, and to dispossessed rural migrants from all North and Northeastern Brazil. Not by chance, its striking demographic growth throughout the first half of the 20th Century was mainly composed of black and mixed race proletarians. Their residential landscapes, made of taipa (rammed earth), straw, wood boards or any sort of construction residues and usable waste materials - at times reached half of the entire number of dwellings in town - in spite of often being seen as belated, primitive, or "shamefully" comparable to those typical in “Africa".

Pina, Encanta Moça and - along the 1950s - Brasília Teimosa composed a continuous stretch of sand, mangroves and water in Recife, that were intensely occupied by the urban poor since the 1930s. These were the areas in which my colleagues and I developed that dense ethnography. Architect Neide Motta de Azevedo had mentioned to us the existence of a few buildings skillfully made of wood in this city which had never developed a tradition of timber construction. She had graduated in Recife in 1957, and in the 1970s and 80s she undertook amazing surveys on traditional construction methods in Brazil’s Northeast region. In spite of being a very reserved woman, she was thus known as an expert on that seemingly eccentric and innocent topic. We decided to follow that unassuming clue, and ended up finding 2 or 3 hundred examples in that area. They were starting to be rebuilt in brick by the owners as the area - one of the first ZEIS in Brazil (a Special Zone of Social Interest, in the urban legislation) - but along the years we could visit and document basically all of them, taking notes on their architecture and on the socio-economic standards of those living in them. We also did long interviews with maybe a dozen insiders, usually old and known to have saved the local collective memory; but also with a few carpenters, three of which recognized as some of their best carpenters ever: Mr. Valdeci, or Valdeci Carpina, Mr. Elcias, and Mr. Josias (in fact with his widow). They told us, in their own way, about their lives, their learning, their work and choices, their tools and professional trades; the techniques and materials they employed, their clients with their own demands and resources, as well as about the social and environmental circumstances they were dealing with. We never published these interviews, nor had the time and expertise to fully interpret what they were telling us. Getting back to them now, in the context of TF/TK, seems to offer a good opportunity to address those issues I mentioned above.

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23 Labour, production and capital in YouTube building explainers

Adam Sharr Newcastle University

adam.sharr@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract:

This paper examines online tutorials about construction and design. Examples are taken from a UK-based English-language YouTube channel named The Gosforth Handyman, presented by builder Andy Mac, with 235,000 subscribers. Video explainers like these simultaneously disrupt, reinforce, and extend labour and design in the production of built space.

The earliest videos on the Gosforth Handyman channel illustrate construction techniques, providing tips for beginners based on long site experience. Explainers show how to diamond drill masonry, fit resin anchors, or connect a pipe to a soil stack. Emerging from D.I.Y traditions, the videos open-up construction to a wider community – beyond those already educated in building and design – potentially across class, genders and ethnicities, and across borders (where language and the global politics of platform capitalism permit). Later videos bridge from practical technique into design. One sequence includes videos on kitchen and bathroom design, for example, and another outlines how to build a single storey house extension through setting-out, foundations, masonry walls, structural openings, and roofing, to liaising with Building Control. A further sequence now concerns property development: how to buy and refurbish properties to sell at a profit. The videos thus dispense both practical wisdom and cultural capital. The same voice – seemingly practical, calm and expert; yet always rooted in capitalist productivity – merges design with production labour, collapsing together building, design and development, re-ordering knowledges and practices conventionally imagined as distinct.

The production of the videos themselves remains important. The Gosforth Handyman channel, like others, is rooted in the attention economy and affective labour of its online platform. It links to an online shop. A webpage invites commercial sponsorship, potentially associated with tool reviews. Views and watching time result in payment for Andy Mac through YouTube’s monetisation structures. The older economy of architecture and construction gets linked here with the newer economy of platform capitalism. Explainers are seemingly offered as learning tools which can democratise construction and design. However, they change structures of financial and cultural capital - and professional expertise - rather than overcome them. Newer modes of production, labour and capital intersect here with older ones.

Bio:

Adam Sharr is Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University, Editor-in-Chief of arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Principal of Design Office, and Series Editor of Thinkers for Architects. He is author or editor of eight books on architecture.

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23 The life and times of a New York carpenter in the 1890s

Alexander Wood Massachusetts College of Art and Design ahw2127@columbia.edu

Abstract:

In the late nineteenth century the rapid growth of New York turned the city into a magnet for skilled building craftsmen looking for steady work and good pay. Using the diary of a young carpenter from the early 1890s, this paper explores the world of construction from the perspective of one of these workers. While living in a boarding house with his family, he moved from job to job, working all over the city on a variety of projects. As his experience suggests, construction workers were not tied to a single employer and some rarely worked on the same project for long. Possessing skills, knowledge, and experience that were in high demand, they thrived in a robust labor market in which opportunities abounded.

Bio:

Alexander Wood is an architectural, urban, and labor historian. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and his B.Arch. from The Cooper Union. His first book, Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880-1935, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in December, 2024.

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24 Architectural Production in the Marxist Frame: Ideology relativity, working class and revolution.

Gregorio Carboni Maestri Université libre de Bruxelles gregorio.carboni.maestri@ulb.be

Abstract:

At the heart of Marxism, organized and revolutionary labor stands as a pivotal point in historical trajectories. Architecture, often aloof from a materialistic viewpoint and the concerns of the working class, now grapples with the contradictions of neoliberalism, challenging its relationship with labor, construction, and inherent materiality. Architects, theorists, and academics frequently fail to recognize the impact of labor on reality and the connection between design and ideology. This raises a question: Is this a limitation intrinsic to architecture, or a reflection of a broader context? Could a transformation in the architect-site relationship herald a new era in the field? Would a harmonization between craftsmanship and its aesthetic representation suffice to pave the way for labor emancipation from capitalist constraints? This essay aims to contribute to the working group around Sérgio Férro - a figure as fundamental as he is unique in today's landscape - highlighting the importance of historiography and pedagogy based on scientific materialism, while also opening points of critique, such as the interpretation of historical phases like the Renaissance and early Modernity. These approaches, in our view, might either clarify or cloud the debate, bringing to light or suffocating the revolutionary question. This contribution introduces the notion of "ideological relativity" that permeates human inquiry, focused on three aspects: the internal nuances of the working class, their consciousness, and situational determinants. The energy of this ideology is, in part, derived from the dominant class's need to either quell or fan the flames of the struggles and revolution of the subjugated class. History, through this lens, is not merely a record of works and happenings, but a succession of forms wherein the ideology of the elite either wanes or manifests itself. Therefore, constructing a historiography that incorporates this ideological relativity is paramount to understanding architecture through a lens of class consciousness, paving the way for revolutionary perspectives. I advocate for an architectural historiography and a theory of architecture that are rooted in the study of this ideological relativity, in reason, and in historical-materialist perspectives, unshackled from the postmodern limitations that hamper progress in class-conscious and progressive studies.

Bio:

Gregorio Carboni Maestri, pesquisador de origem italo-belga-brasileira, reside entre Bruxelas e Turim. Professor de projeto arquitetônico na La Cambre Horta (ULB), formou-se como pintor, cartunista e depois como arquiteto pelo Politecnico di Milano e FAUP. Trabalhou etre a França, Itália e Portugal e é doutor com pesquisa com uma tese sobre a revista "Oppositions". Contribuiu no cinema com o documentário "Palladio".

Gregorio Carboni Maestri, a researcher of Italian-Belgian-Brazilian origin, lives between Brussels and Turin. Professor of architectural design at La Cambre Horta (ULB), he trained as a painter, cartoonist and then as an architect at the Politecnico di Milano and FAUP. He has worked in France, Italy and Portugal and holds a PhD with a thesis on the magazine "Oppositions". He contributed to the cinema with the documentary "Palladio".

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24 Construction without urban: hyper-management in housing production from public companies in Brazil

Lucia Shimbo Universidade de São Paulo

luciashimbo@usp.br

José Eduardo Baravelli

jbaravelli@usp.br

Abstract:

This article seeks to analyze the strategies of large publicly traded construction and real estate development companies in housing production after the 2014 economic recession in Brazil. The results of a multi-method qualitative research reveal that these strategies were based on financial calculations and metrics and contributed to the consolidation of a field of companies that control disparate points of the housing construction sector, ranging from financial services to the manufacture of building components. This expansion of productive control is due to what we call “hyper-management of production”. Transforming the production of housing, it combines the gigantism of these "mega-developers" with standardization of processes, use of managerial technology, transformation of corporate governance, deployment of financial instruments and lobbying in the formulation of technical standards and public investment programs. Far from autonomizing real estate markets, the dependence of mega-developers on public funds remains crucial to the consolidation of such a production structure. One of the immediate results of hyper-management is the exacerbation of the scale of real estate operations, and its role in the mass urbanization of entirely standardized neighborhoods, in agglomerations as different as São Paulo, Latin America's largest megalopolis, and Ribeirão Preto, a regional hub in the state of São Paulo. Hyper-management has become detached not only from qualities of the urban but also from space itself and has been driven by the time value of money.

Bio:

Lucia Shimbo is an architect and urban planner and currently an associate professor at the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and a fellow researcher funded by Brazil's Council for Scientific and Technological Development. Her research is dedicated to the practices and instruments of the actors that produce value in urban space.

José Eduardo Baravelli is an assistant professor at University of São Paulo, Brazil, researching on building technology and housing production.

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24 Object-building: the dialectics of non-architectural work on the rise of modern architecture

Felipe Franco UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais felipefranco.au@gmail.com

Abstract:

The turn of the 20th century presented a delicate question to architects: how should architecture reflect the fast-changing and mechanized world that promised to unfold? Among the ideological dispute for the adequate path towards properly modern architecture, the European modernist proposal embodied by Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos that stood out as the appropriate specimen argued that buildings should belong to the aesthetic realm of technical objects. More than drawing the modern form from airplanes, cars, or everyday industrialized objects, this bid for a new architecture for the new century recognized that to succeed, it should take part in the looming mechanized, technocratic superstructures that would regulate production and exchange of objects in the 20th century. As Jean Baudrillard and others have argued, this turning point represented the commodification of everyday objects, the retreat of the symbolic, and the need to accrue value by distinction between objects themselves. Should architects have succeeded in the 20th century, it would have been necessary to emphasize this distinction between architecture and the non-architectural. These dialectics took different forms, such as the contest between civilization and primitivity or the validity of ornament. However, what interests us is the dialectic between architecture and traditional construction work. As to assert its position, modern architecture would play out the essential distinction between the arbitrary category of non-architecture and itself. Supported by formulating modernity as an urgent need, the movement relied on devaluating previous architecture and extraneous construction knowledge. Following Gilbert Simondon’s categorization of technical majority and minority, we aim to demonstrate how the idea of modernity in architecture is attached to restricting building work to the designs of an authorized technocratic class in contrast to newly so-called unqualified workers.

Bio:

Felipe Franco is a practicing architect and a master’s student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. His research aims to understand modern architecture through its interrelations with ornament, semiotics, and technology.

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25 Self-construction and Colonization between 1850 and 1950

Flávio Higuchi Hirao FAU-USP and Usina-CTAH

flavio.higuchi@usp.br

Abstract:

The paper will look at the relationship between self-built housing and internal and external colonization processes, in three main moments.

The first concerns the conception of an internal colonization strategy by Victor Aimeé Huber, in confluence with Ebenezer Howard's conception of the Garden City. This is when the political idea of self-building and self-help emerged, linked to the conflicts inherent in the emergence of urban-industrial society, and the formation of the anti-urban perspective as a way of reducing population growth in cities and, consequently, revolutionary political pressure. At this time, radical ideas of self-government, such as Kropotkin's mutual aid, were absorbed by the Garden City movement.

The second moment deals with the formation of an idea of a “tropical house”, with its center of gravity in the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in London (AA), with emphasis on Otto Koenigsberger and his work in India.

The third moment is the transition from the idea of the “tropical house” to the self-built territories of the developing world, at the end of the Second World War. The English John Turner, who came from the AA, based on his experience in Peru, consolidated the most impactful housing policy proposal of self-construction. Turner principles of mutual aid and self-management were linked to American self-help policy, initially carried out in Puerto Rico, led by a global elite such as the Americans Jacob Crane and Charles Abrams, the Greek Constantino Doxiadis, the English Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and also with the participation of Turner and the Egyptian Hassan Fathy.

Finally, to contribute to the debate on self-construction, we propose an understanding of the idea of self-help as a colonial intellectual device, as opposed to mutual aid

Bio:

Architect, member of Usina-CTAH, and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP)

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25 Design-build Cooperatives under Capitalism: two Brazilian Cases

Milena Torino Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

milenatorino98@gmail.com

Abstract:

Production cooperatives — in which there is no capitalist actor — would, in theory, be open to another relationship between architects and builders. However, in practice, we reproduce our already incorporated role in a capitalist economy, even when no surplus-value is directly extracted. This paper makes a comparative analysis of two currently active Brazilian cooperatives, which both produce designs and constructions, with architects and builders collaborating in the same team. While one of the cooperatives was initiated by building workers and only later came to encompass the design, the other was conceived by architects (somewhat influenced by Sérgio Ferro). The first, called Casa Nova, operates in Chapecó, a city in the south of Brazil. The second, called Braço Forte, is in the city of Americana, in the state of São Paulo. Both show the great difficulty architects have in working against the separation between design and execution. Even in the case of an architect who was originally a builder, his academic training — which is incompatible with his previous know-how — resulted in the same behaviors. These cooperatives have only achieved some degree of collaboration between these types of knowledge thanks to the presence of bridge-people, who simultaneously inhabit the different institutional and makerspaces. It also became clear how macrostructures and the socio-spatial context influence even the smallest daily decisions. Similarly, the ways they have found to challenge these factors have led to transformations in internal procedures. Despite all the difficulties, both external and inherent to the cooperative members themselves, these experiences have significant pedagogical value for the emancipatory advancement of architecture.

Bio:

Milena was a scientific initiation student at MOM from 2019 to 2021. She completed her degree in 2023 with the monograph Cooperativism in Construction: Notes for the Reconnection of Architectural Design and Construction Sites. She is currently a master's student at NPGAU, supervised by Silke Kapp, still focusing on construction sites.

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25 Collective Improvisation: when making becomes a social process

Daniel Mallo Newcastle University

daniel.mallo@newcastle.ac.uk

Abigail Schoneboom, Newcastle University
abigail.schoneboom@newcastle.ac.uk

Armelle Tardiveau, Newcastle University

armelle.tardiveau@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract:

Situated in recent research and practice of socially engaged temporary urbanism (Tardiveau & Mallo, 2014), action research and urban activism (Mallo, D., Tardiveau, A., & Parsons, R., 2020) in a context of austerity in the UK (Webb et al, 2020), we explore making as a form of collective improvisation. We argue that improvised, playful and spontaneous forms of making have the potential to spark bottom-up processes and community-led urban change.

Drawing from Freire’s critical pedagogy and Rancière’s egalitarian principle of emancipation, the paper proposes three analytical frames that underscore the process of making as collective improvisation: making as playful disruption of the seemingly immutable everyday urban environment thus challenging the status quo of normative frameworks; as a prompt for dialogue and social construction of knowledge; and as an enabler of collective discovery/learning and interpretation from which real emancipation emerges.

Based on the authors’ own experience in engagement, involving communities in the north-east of England as well as University students’ live projects, the paper reflects on past performative engagement in the urban realm in the form of ‘actions’ and ‘interventions’ read through the lens of collective improvisation and offer a critical perspective on the potential of making as a vehicle for collective action. The research builds on emergent interdisciplinary research in the field of Improvisation (Laws, D., & Forester, J., 2015; Roe, M., & Scott-Bottoms, S., 2020; Sand, A. L., Førde, A., Pløger, J., & Poulsen, M., 2023), mostly guided by art-based qualitative and interpretative methods and explores the potential of improvised collective making in community-led spatial production and urban change.

Bio:

Daniel Mallo is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK. He is an architect whose research focuses on socially engaged spatial practice and activism. His practice-led research includes participatory projects with institutions including Creative Partnerships (UK), KU Leuven (Belgium) as well as ESRC funded projects (UK).

Abigail Schoneboom is a Lecturer in Urban Planning at Newcastle University, UK. She holds a PhD in sociology from the City University of New York. As an ethnographer, her research focuses on sustainability, technology and cities. She has published in journals such as Work, Employment and Society and Organization.

Armelle Tardiveau is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University, UK. She is a design practitioner, educator and researcher working in multi-disciplinary teams with artists, landscape architects and ethnographers. She specialises in participatory design methods and activists interventions to trigger change and processes of co-production in the public realm.

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25 Assembling the collective worker: the contribution of cooperativism and self-management in contemporary architectural and building practices

Bernardo Amaral Coimbra University - DARQ

bernardo.amaral@sapo.pt

Abstract:

In the essay “O Canteiro e o Desenho” (The Building Site and the Design) first published in 1976, the Brazilian architect Sergio Ferro exposed the gap between the design and building processes in common architectural practices. Founded on the critical analysis of architectural production and it its labour relations, Ferro questioned the role architects play under the capitalist production cycle, where construction workers are subjected to precarious and alienating labour conditions. In further essays and interviews, the critic suggests the need for a complete revision of the production relations, envisioning the egalitarian and democratic cooperation of architects, engineers, construction workers and dwellers as a team, as a collective worker.

This paper looks for traces of such a collective worker in contemporary architecture practices, that work with grassroots social movements and non-profit organizations for right-to-housing. By integrating the democratic participation through assemblies and by promoting non-hierarchical labour relations, such practices establish new modes of production in architecture, that aim at a political and social ideal. It’s the case of the Catalonian architect’s cooperative Lacol in Barcelona and the Brazilian technical advisory association Usina CTAH in São Paulo Through a comparative ethnography, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper will take a closer look at their work routine, with the goal of characterizing how the ideals of self-management and cooperativism are integrated into their work protocols. This research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between political activism and architectural practice in contemporaneity.

Bio:

Architect graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Porto University and a doctoral candidate in the Coimbra University. His research focuses on the critical analysis of architecture within the context of the right to housing activism. He coordinates the architecture studio BAAU and teaches architecture design at the Portucalense University.

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25 From Self-Builders to Industrial Assemblers': On-Site Practices Redefined in Chile's Operación 20.000/70

Felipe Aravena University of Manchester

felipe.aravena@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract:

The paper explores how on-site productivity techniques, initially designed to enhance private construction sector profits, were repurposed to test an alternative interplay between design, capital, and labour during the transitional period between the centre-left Christian Democrat and socialist Unidad Popular governments in Chile (1969-71). It argues that beyond specific building designs or types of technical knowledge, the power dynamics at the construction site mirror broader societal structures.

Operación 20.000/70, a self-help housing programme, sought streamlined versions of semi-industrialised single-family units for cost-effective mass production. Departing from traditional artisanal practices, it embraced techniques such as simple tools, machinery, and on-site production systematisation, control, and programming – methods the International Labour Organisation (ILO) promoted in advisory missions to Chile's private building industry. A key element was the creation of state-controlled Production Centres in each future dwelling, centralising material acquisition, prefabrication, and providing technical training. This aimed to transform workers from 'backward' self-builders into integral components of a fabrication and assembly system, potentially transferring Centres to form community-controlled construction firms, supporting the economic sustainability of lower-income beneficiaries.

The proposal to establish an industrial logic in self-construction programmes, limiting the private sector's role, raises debates on economic structures' influence on building production dynamics. It also explores the potential for techniques designed to extract capital gains to establish alternative practices within the construction sector when the means of production ownership is inverted.

Bio:

Felipe Aravena is currently completing his PhD in architecture at the University of Manchester. His research explores the tensions within the construction sector between discourses of modernisation and development and the actual application of industrialised methods for housing production in Chile before mid-1970s neoliberalism.

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26 The Afterlives of Excavation: Or What to do with Nineteen Million Tons of Rock?

Matthew Ashton RMIT University Melbourne / KTH Stockholm ashton@kth.se

Abstract:

A cluster of new geologic monuments have recently emerged on the urban periphery of Stockholm. Looming piles of broken rock, freshly ejected from the depths of the earth. These vast accumulations of material are the excavated excesses from the construction of the new Stockholm Ring Road — an infrastructural mega project linking the north and south of the city via a six-lane, eighteen kilometre tunnel beneath lake Mälaren. This project alone has produced nineteen million tons of tunnel waste, or entreprenadberg as it is commonly referred to in Swedish. As landscape architect Jane Hutton remarks, the act of building produces "reciprocal landscapes" as design decisions and material choices inevitably cause unintended and unacknowledged large-scale territorial consequences. The promise of smooth traffic flows, reduced travel times, and extensive socio-economic benefits tied to the realisation of this Stockholm motorway is contingent upon the displacement, organisation, and relocation of vast quantities of earth. Blasted rock that must be sorted, transported, stored, crushed, and eventually utilised in other construction projects, as building aggregates, road-base, or fill material.

This paper sets out to "follow the material," tracing the entangled trajectories of extracted rock as it is transformed from a fixed state into something that moves — a commodity that circulates within an ecology of utility. Excavated rock generated through construction processes are simultaneously an excess that must be disposed of, as well as a bi-product that can be sold and utilised. Using Stockholm as a case study, I aim to ask what happens to this material, how does it move, where does it go, and what does it become?

Bio:

Matthew Ashton (1985, Sydney) is an architect and researcher based in Stockholm. He is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University Melbourne, School of Architecture and Urban Design, and guest researcher at the KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm.

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26 Dispositional Productions: Architectural Design beyond the Visible and Tangible

Simone Ferracina The University of Edinburgh
simone.ferracina@ed.ac.uk

Abstract:

Discourses surrounding the design and production of buildings and building materials are finally moving beyond the artificial limits and authorial mythologies of the architectural project, re-coupling its outputs with the wider spatiotemporal ecologies upon which they depend, and with the real-world effects of design decisions (Hutton 2020; Moe 2021; Thomas 2021; Ferracina 2022; Jaque 2022).

However, the paper warns against a simplistic understanding of causality according to which such effects would be assumed to be natural and objective, or solely evidenced by legible causes, actions, and reactions—by what is visibly or tangibly “modified, transformed, perturbed, or created” (Latour 1999, 122). On one side, I consider how to approach the production of what philosopher Gilbert Ryle calls dispositional properties—not a “particular state,” but the fact of being “bound or liable” to be in that state “when a particular condition is realised” (Ryle 2009, 31). On the other, I argue that regimes of visibility and causality, and the associated horizons of responsibility, are themselves constructed by architectural projects, and therefore in need of examination.

Bio:

Dr Simone Ferracina is a Senior Lecturer in Architectural Ecologies at the University of Edinburgh. His research and teaching investigate the technical infrastructures, theories, and methodological approaches required to move architectural discourse and practice beyond extraction, ecocide, and environmental injustice, with a particular focus on reuse and repurposing.

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26 (Im)material production: investigating the spatial-ecologies born out of new bio-based architectures

Charlotte Taylor University of Bath

ct985@bath.ac.uk

George Ridgway Royal College of Art

george.ridgway@rca.ac.uk

Abstract:

In the context of escalating global environmental pressures and ecological breakdown, current trajectories of material resource use in the construction sector are overwhelming the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, causing severe repercussions to the interdependencies of humans and ecosystems across different scales. Research into bio-based building materials such as hemp, straw, stone, and earth has received widespread attention as a holistic tool for envisioning human development on a stable and resilient planet. However, the supply of these materials at scale remains dependent upon the continuation (and expansion, in some cases) of an economic and political model that is based on large-scale extraction and dependent upon an infinite resource pool. We argue that materials are not fixed commodities but are continuous with the landscapes they come from; co-constituted by people’s livelihoods, land ownership and cultivation models, and more-than-human inhabitants, and should not be separated from these entangled relations. Therefore, this research critically examines what the shift to a bio-based construction material palette truly means for current material-ecological systems, and what new ‘natures’ are born from these interspecies socio-material relations.

Focusing on bats (a high mobility, keystone species in the UK) to re-evaluate how the production and use of bio-based materials is an interspecies endeavour, the first part of the project maps out the systemic cracks in land use, ecology and conservation planning, created by capitalist structures. The second part of the project brings together case studies across the UK, to explore how the cracks within these systems of material production can create spaces for alternative forms of cohabitation and non-extractive production. This critical study helps to reveal excluded relations from the current model of material production and invites a broader discussion of the interspecies spatial-ecologies born out of new bio-based landscape architectures.

Bio:

Charlotte Taylor is a structural engineer and PhD researcher at the University of Bath where she is part of the Systems and Sustainability Research Group and UKFIRES research team. Her research project titled “Ecologically constrained structural design: what can we build from the zero-carbon resource pool?” is an industry-academia collaboration with structural engineers Whitby Wood. Her interests lie in understanding the land and energy systems which support UK construction, and in questioning the material practices which promote ecological justice and building material sovereignty. She is passionate about accessible research and co-runs community workshops in practicing systems change by building from a constrained material, land, and energy resource pool.

George Ridgway is an artist and ecological surveyor working across critical spatial practice. He currently teaches in the Alentejo Research Unit in Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, which examines the socio-ecological impacts of intensive agriculture in Alentejo, Portugal. His interests lie at the intersections of ecological justice and stewardship, practices of commoning and expanded architectures of listening. He maintains a studio practice and is passionate about radical pedagogies and community engagement.

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26 Soil as Resource, Not Waste: A Trans-material Approach to Architectural Production

Zümrüt Şahin Özyeğin University zumrut.sahin@ozyegin.edu.tr

Nilsu Altunok, Yıldız Technical University

Nehir Özdemir, Politecnico di Milano naltunok@yildiz.edu.tr

nehir.ozdemir@mail.polimi.it

Abstract:

From antiquity to the Anthropocene, soil has played an essential role in the definition of matter and has been the source of almost everything. Today, due to increasing construction activities in metropolises, cities are facing the catastrophe of losing their land every day. This research initiates a vibrant question about soil that cannot be produced but can be an acting agent in production studies. It is necessary to discuss the current mainstream modes of production in architecture and the building site and their impact on the living environment. Especially, the rapid changes in the Anthropocene have affected architecture and as a result, the soil is covered with concrete. With intense urbanization and industrialization, soil that has been displaced in the city is described as ‘lost’ in this research. The problem of the city losing its soil and its effects on other living organisms requires a comprehensive solution. Therefore, the research focuses on a new materialistic perspective that aims to examine the topic from a broader context and prioritizes the collaboration of different disciplines. It aims to design a trans-material and transdisciplinary approach to building sites that reveals the importance of reusing the excavation soil on-site, which is considered waste, and to discuss future potentials. A critical inquiry into the relationship between architectural design and conventional production has shown that taking action on-site and generating alternative tools is necessary. We propose a system including a group of actors active in different stages. In the process, data mining systems are used to make projections for the future and an archive is created with the prototypes by adding different materials to excavated soil. Consequently, it is envisaged to reuse waste excavation soil and to adopt innovative ideas on sustainable production studies.

Bio:

Zümrüt Şahin completed her B.Arch. from Istanbul Technical University as salutatorian. She received her M.Sc. from Istanbul Technical University Architectural Design Program and studied at Vienna Technical University. She is a research assistant at Özyeğin University. As a PhD student, her research interests include space-time-body relations in architectural theory.

Nilsu Altunok received B.Arch. from Yıldız Technical University as valedictorian. She has completed her M.Sc. at Istanbul Technical University Architectural Design Program and is a research assistant at Yıldız Technical University. She works with critical, spatially situated tools, trying to reflect them to architectural design studios.

Nehir Özdemir graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Middle East Technical University. She is the co-founder of Studio V, which is an architecture and student society. She is a master's student in Architecture & Urban Design Program at Politecnico di Milano.

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27 Drawing a plan like an architect (Trase yon plan kòm yon achitek)

Irene E. Brisson Louisiana State University

ibrisson@lsu.edu

Abstract:

A complex ecosystem of design labor is found in Haiti’s creolized building culture. Contemporary builders—bòsmason (head mason/builder), architects, and engineers—in western Haiti use building programs, materials, and fees to accompany or supersede drawings to define and confirm the scope and quality of projects.

This system echoes historical assemblages of architects, builders, carpenters, and laborers including white, Black, and mixed-race people, free and enslaved designing colonial Saint-Domingue. In notarized documents, Gauvin Bailey uncovered notable differences between the contractual arrangements of white builders versus free people of color who were often engaged by oral agreements and paid in installments or exchange foreshadowing persistent differences in labor relations with architects and builders today marked by color, class, and education.

In my ethnographic study of builders in Leyogàn between 2016-18, an architect, architect-engineer, and bòsmason discussed their engagement with plan drawings as tools of communication. In each case, they prepared plans that served as the basis of agreements with owners, design tools, and guides for construction, but significant disambiguation occurred on site. They self-consciously modulated the resolution of drawings to reflect the level of knowledge shared between them and their collaborators. Nonetheless, deviations in execution belie the fluid boundary between design work and construction work.

One architect-engineer commented while leafing through project drawings, if he was working with a kontremèt (master builder) he would not waste time drawing details whereas if he were drawing for a foreign architect or new bòsmason, he would provide more detail to compensate for a lack of shared knowledge. This paper will examine three drawings and how their resolution is contingent on relationships as part of my larger project to reconsider boundaries between the design practices of builders—including architects.

Bio:

Irene Brisson is a built environment scholar who researches historically marginalized building cultures and designers in Haiti and African diasporas in the Americas. They are an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Louisiana State University and 2023-24 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History completing a manuscript, Kreyòl Architecture: Designing Haitian Dwellings.

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27 Building scaffolds: the bricklayer as an architect

Helena Marques Universidade de São Paulo

helenamarmadu@gmail.com

Abstract:

Scaffolds are temporary constructions with a wide range of formats and are widely used in civil construction processes. The assembly of scaffolding is not commonly addressed in architectural projects, as they are part of the construction process, and their function concludes with the construction itself. Despite being temporary, the assembly of scaffolding represents an important part of the craft of construction workers or the responsible technician, as it enables access to different levels of the building. Scaffolding also highlights the worker's knowledge of structures and stability, as there are various formats and interests depending on the assembly. It is worth noting that the construction worker is responsible for the structuring and planning of the scaffolding, representing an architectural aspect that is not apparent in the final result of the work due to the dismantling of the structure at the end of building process. This research aims to present testimonials collected in interviews directly with construction workers regarding the design and elaboration of scaffold structures, paying attention to the process of creating the project for this temporary building, one of the few structural works exclusively designed, assembled, and used by workers in the field of civil construction. Thus, we intend to dedicate the study to the scaffold design processes by builders, as one of the few structures whose complete project responsibility lies with the construction workers themselves. To achieve this, we bring testimonials from two workers about the assembly of such structures and visual analyses of scaffolds assembled in the context of civil construction in the city of São Paulo.

Bio:

Helena de Madureira Marques is a Languages&Literature graduate from the University of São Paulo, currently doing a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism (FAUUSP). Her research focuses on the nexus between museum spaces and aesthetic reception. She contributes to Lisbeth Rebollo’s study group Aesthetics Reception and Art Criticism (CNPq/USP).

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27 The meanings of Technique in architecture: between domination and appropriation, praxis and poiesis

Carolina Akemi Morita Nakahara University of São Paulo cake.nakahara@usp.br

Abstract:

This work seeks to problematize and reflect on the meanings of technique and production in architecture to understand how we have carried out architectural production today. Firstly, this will involve calling into question the current concept of production – linked to the capitalist mode of production – by contrasting it with the notion of work based on an eminently Lefebvrian approach. Consequently, we also problematize the idea of modern technique based on a possible double determination, namely, from the perspective of domination and that of appropriation. For the philosopher Henri Lefebvre (2003 [1966]), the first implies a material production, which replaces nature with products, while the second is a spiritual production, which does not obliterate but transforms nature into human goods. In essence, we intend to show how techné, when articulated with poiesis, implies primarily knowing and not merely doing. This means it is not just an instrumental, functionalist, and productivity-centered apparatus in the service of a specific architectural merchandise. In effect, this interpretation refers to the dominating character of modern technology, which derives from a particular praxis and a human attitude. “Without appropriation, technical domination over nature tends towards absurdity as it increases. Without appropriation, there can be economic and technical growth, but social development, properly speaking, remains nil” (LEFEBVRE, 2001, p. 173). Conversely, since it implies appropriation, techné is surtout a way of knowing and positioning yourself in the world above all. That is why, according to Heidegger, one of Lefebvre’s influences, technique opens possibilities (1989, p. 45). Therefore, technique is not merely applied science; it is a way of being. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s work and by bringing techné and poiesis together, we seek to recover the senses of appropriation and work in architectural technique to the detriment of a finalist and instrumental approach that aims at the product.

Bio:

Architect and Philosopher, Assistant Professor at the University of São Paulo (IAU-USP). Member of the Contemporary Spatial Studies Center (NEC-IAU-USP) and Critical Thinking and Contemporary City (PC3-FAUUSP). Her research focuses on the meanings of “inhabiting”, participation and appropriation in A&U, dialectics between praxis and poiesis in the production of space.

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27 Valuing labour as the dynamic change in the process of producing the built environment

Linda Clarke Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), University of Westminsterclarkel@wmin.ac.uk

Fernando Duran-Palma, University of Westminster

Joern Janssen, Fachhochschule Dortmund

F.Duranpalma@westminster.ac.uk

joern.janssen@btinternet.com

Abstract:

This article contributes to the development of production studies by ‘putting labour in its place.’ In contrast to mainstream understandings of the production of the built environment, production is viewed as primarily a social rather than a technical process and labour as its main agent and fundamental dynamic, as subject rather than object. From this perspective, historically, the division of building labour becomes ever more consolidated rather than fragmented, the development of the labour process ever more complex and abstract rather than just controlled by technology, labour ever more educated, qualified and deploying both mental and physical abilities rather than deskilled, ‘disqualified’ and ‘manual’, and the reproduction of labour through vocational education and training programmes ever more classroom and workshop based rather than purely work-based. Drawing on more than four decades of research on and theoretical understanding of the ‘study of the production of the built environment’ (e.g. Bartlett International Summer Schools - BISS; European Centre for Construction Labour Research - CLR; Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment - ProBE), the article provides an account of key areas of debate and concludes with observations regarding future research and conceptual development. In addressing climate change, labour and nature can no longer be regarded as objects of exploitation in production studies, but in a new and inseparable relation, with enhanced labour power and subject to public accountability rather than driven by private profit and growth.

Bio:

Linda Clarke is Emeritus Professor, University of Westminster, and a founding member of ProBE (Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment). She has extensive experience of research across Europe on vocational education, employment and working conditions, equality, zero carbon building, labour history and labour in construction.

Fernando Duran-Palma is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment at the University of Westminster. His research interests include atypical and precarious workers' collective action and organisation, particularly in Latin America, and labour and capital relations in the production of the built environment.

Joern Janssen is Emeritus Professor, Fachhochschule Dortmund, Germany and was involved from 1981 in developing the Bartlett International Summer School on the Production of the Built Environment and ever since researching the history of the transformation of wage-labour relations from the Black Death up to the present day.

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Production Studies International Conference 25-28 March 2024 Revised Program with abstracts (v 3 -21 Feb 2024 ) PANEL S AND TIMES MAY CHANGE!

KEYNOTE speakers

Sérgio Ferro (France/Brazil) ↩

From production studies to emancipatory practices

Usina [c] CTAH (Brazil)

Christine Wall (UK) ↩

Absent voices: working lives

EXHIBITION opening

Building: An Exhibition Under Construction

@ The Farrell Centre [d]

PLENARY sessions [e]

Production Pedagogies

Translating Acros s Spaces

LAUNCHES

Sérgio Ferro, Architecture from Below: An Anthology (MACK, 2024)

Production Studies Series Booklets/Set 1

Book launch of “O Canteiro e o Desenho," Portugal [g]

Production Studies Audio Episodes - TF/TK with Cap-a-Pie [h]

PANELS AND SESSIONS

1 - Technology, Labour and Construction Workers ↩ (Convened Panel)

2 + 6 - Her Know-how: Gendered struggles over skill in the production of space ↩ (Convened Panel)

Convenors’ Biographies:

The Struggle of Piquiá: Habitat Self-Management in a Mining Hub of the Brazilian Amazon Kaya Lazarini University of São Paulo and Usina CTAH

3 - Migration and Mobilities in Production ↩ (Convened Panel)

4 - The Production of the Architect ↩ (Convened Panel)

5 - Sérgio Ferro and Arquitetura Nova (with simultaneous interpretation) ↩

7 Methods for Studying the Building Site 1 ↩ (Convened Panel)

8 - The Architect On/Off Site

Architects ↩

9 - Production Histories I & II: (Convened Panel with Simultaneous Translation) ↩

10 - Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies ↩ (Convened Panel)

11 - Methods for Studying the Building Site 2 ↩ (Convened Panel)

12 - Challenging Separated Design ↩

13 - Ferro - History and Theory ↩

14 - Violence and Production ↩

15 - Production History and Historians as Producers 2: Building Capitalism And the Other ↩ (Convened Panel)

16 - Production Pedagogies: Architectural Education in Construction ↩

Constructing an Alternative Vision for Material Production [p]

17 - Ecologies of Production II ↩ (with simultaneous interpretation)

18 - Production beyond Architecture ↩

Illuminating Production Network: Labour and Materiality in the Development of Lighthouse Network in Treaty Port China

19 - "Guest" Workers and Labour Mobility ↩

Suha Hasan ASH / AA Visiting School

20 - Building Alternative Pedagogies ↩

Lara Melotti Tonsig Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP) João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP

21 - Production and Communities ↩ (with simultaneous interpretation)

Production Studies International Conference 25-28 March 2024
Revised Program with abstracts (v 3 -21 Feb 2024 ) PANEL S AND TIMES MAY CHANGE!

Usina ^[c] CTAH (Brazil)

@ The Farrell Centre ^[d]

PLENARY sessions ^[e]

Book launch of “O Canteiro e o Desenho," Portugal ^[g]

Production Studies Audio Episodes - TF/TK with Cap-a-Pie ^[h]

2 + 6 - Her Know-how: Gendered struggles over skill in the production of space ↩
(Convened Panel)

The Struggle of Piquiá: Habitat Self-Management in a Mining Hub of the Brazilian Amazon
Kaya Lazarini University of São Paulo and Usina CTAH

3 - Migration and Mobilities in Production ↩
(Convened Panel)

4 - The Production of the Architect ↩
(Convened Panel)

7 Methods for Studying the Building Site 1 ↩
(Convened Panel)

9 - Production Histories I & II:
(Convened Panel with Simultaneous Translation) ↩

10 - Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies ↩
(Convened Panel)

11 - Methods for Studying the Building Site 2 ↩
(Convened Panel)

15 - Production History and Historians as Producers 2:
Building Capitalism And the Other ↩
(Convened Panel)

Constructing an Alternative Vision for Material Production ^[p]

17 - Ecologies of Production II ↩
(with simultaneous interpretation)

Lara Melotti Tonsig Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Universidade de São Paulo (IAU-USP)
João Marcos de Almeida Lopes Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - IAU-USP

21 - Production and Communities ↩
(with simultaneous interpretation)