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Asymmetric Labors:
The Economy of Architecture
in Theory and Practice
Edited by Aaron Cayer, Peggy Deamer,
Sben Korsh, Eric Peterson, and Manuel Shvartzberg
Introduction...................................................9
Aaron Cayer, Peggy Deamer, Sben Korsh,
Eric Peterson, and Manuel Shvartzberg
Intellectual Labor
53
LMAO
Eva Hagberg Fisher
61
At the Intersection of Policy
and Design
Susanne Schindler
Capital A
Tahl Kaminer
65
Why Write
Gary Fox
Letter from London to São Paulo
Nick Beech
71
Matters of Life and Death
Anne Kockelkorn
79
The Politics of Publication
James Graham
83
The Value of Immaterial Labor
Jack Self
87
A Wo_Man’s Work is Never Done
Andreas Rumpfhuber
Disciplinary Negligence
17
23
29
Not an Essay about Architectural
Autonomy
Eric Peterson
33
Architecture
History/Criticism/Theory
Peggy Deamer
37
Who Builds Your Architecture?
Laura Diamond Dixit,
Kadambari Baxi, Jordan Carver,
and Mabel O. Wilson
43
Images Want to Be Free!
Joan Ockman
The Neoliberal Academy
93
The Dust of Adorno
Meredith TenHoor
103
Work Time
Mark Jarzombek
The Neoliberal Academy (cont.)
Bridges to Practice
109
“Profesor Taxi”
Fabrizio Gallanti
157
History, Architecture, and Labour:
A Program for Research
Pier Vittorio Aureli
113
Humane and Inhumane Ratios
Peg Rawes
163
Centering Organization
Aaron Cayer
167
DON’T ACT. JUST THINK.
Anna Goodman
171
Performing Theory:
From Commercial Catharsis
to Social Critique
Joe Crowdy, Kirti Durelle,
Hanan Kataw, Christos Kritkos,
Joanne Preston
177
Meeting in the Field
Curt Gambetta
183
No Is More
Jacob Moore
187
Deprofessionalizing
Architecture(al Theory):
The Case for Anti-Work Politics
Eric Wycoff Rogers
195
Back to Work!
Gevork Hartoonian
121
Architecture, Environment,
and Critical Labor
Daniel A. Barber
125
Self & Funding
Sben Korsh
131
“Back to School”
Christopher Barker
137
Commodifying Architectural
Education
Felipe Aravena, Joaquin Díez
Canedo, Alessandro Toti
141
The Service Industry
Tijana Vujosevic
145
Dispatches from MIT:
Becoming Political
Dariel Cobb
149
The Academy and
Theory Production
Nadir Lahiji
Instrumentalizing Research
Values of History and Theory
203
Design Research or Research
Design? The Value of History
and Theory in Architecture
Brent Sturlaugson
229
How to Redefine Architectural
Value
Manuel Shvartzberg
235
207
An Uncertain Limit Between
History and Theory
Stefano Tornieri
Time After Time
Norihiko Tsuneishi
241
Nationalism as Price Tag?
The Chronic History
of Chinese Architecture
Yang Yang
247
Histories of Architecture
for Whom or What?
Andrew Herscher
211
Coffee Table Artefacts
Tobias Danielmeier
215
Ambiguous Lands,
Profitable Margins
Daniel Fernández Pascual
221
The Pleasure’s All Ours:
Productive Trades Between
Practice and Research
Adam Sharr, James Longfield,
Yasser Megahed, and
Kieran Connolly
Contributor Biographies...................................252
Imprint......................................................256
Matters of Life and Death
Anne Kockelkorn
ETH Zurich
Opportunities to think simultaneously about the
conditions of production and the value and the effectiveness of intellectual labour within the realm of
architecture are rare. To fulfill this broad and risky
task in two pages, I will draw on the advice of the
serial killer and pigeon breeder in Jim Jarmusch’s
film “Ghost Dog”: to take abundant time to reflect
on small and negligible problems, but not to hesitate
at all upon matters of life and death.
Content-wise, this booklet seems to be a good
occasion to recall that “architecture“ in the western
world was initially defined by intellectual practice.
Architecture understood as an intellectual discipline was born with trade capitalism at the dawn of
modern times around 1500 in the cities of northern
Italy where it acquired the role of a catalyst and cultural power factor. If “architecture,” then, is what
renders political power and virtue intelligible and
effective by administrating its relevant affects, this
type of architecture cannot occur without an intellectual practice that defines its codes and protocols.
Manfredo Tafuri described this aptly in Architecture
and Utopia in 1973: according to him, architecture in
a capitalist society performs the integrative capacity
to synthesize the fear generated by the dichotomy
between the realities of the condition of production and moral values of the enlightenment through
design.1 Synthesizing morals and affects—there is no
reason to expect that this foundational principle on
the function of architecture’s symbolic capital in a
1
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 1-2.
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capitalist society should change anytime soon.
What changes, however, are the variants of capitalism and morals specific to historical, geographical,
and cultural settings, their modes of regulation as
well as the techniques and technologies that intellectual labour and capital can dispose of to exercise
their leverage.
Taking this premise of the specificity of capitalism, morals, and technology as a starting point,
I will take up two aspects to argue my viewpoint of
the role and the mode of architecture’s intellectual
labour in the present: first the effects of the mechanisms of financialisation for intellectual labour—
the mechanisms of neoliberalism and information
technology in tandem—namely the devaluation of
content generation in favor of content management
and trade; second, the foundational misogyny and
devaluation of social reproduction inherited from
the double genealogy of classical philosophy and
capitalism, e.g. the realms of the ideal and the necessary combined.
The devaluation of content generation concerns especially those parts of intellectual labour
which are more closely related to the provision of
information, since they can more easily be automated and are increasingly performed free of
consumption charge. Two features of this general
tendency are the crash-like decline of architectural
magazines defending their “right to content” against
pecuniary interests of publishers on the one side
and the provision of self-marketing via websites
and monographs by architectural firms on the other
(a phenomenon which has only gained significant
momentum since the 1980s). But in spite of – and
parallel to—the accelerated decline of information
value, the trade and management of architectural
knowledge still remains indispensable for the public
and the private sectors alike: not least because media
technologies increase the need and space for interfaces
which require the performance of moral-affect-synthesis whose credibility is, in turn, based on a skillful
blend of knowledge and information. The exponential growth of international biennales during the
noughties wouldn’t be explicable otherwise, and the
expensive investment in symbolic and cultural capital
that it demands of its participants offers, until today,
the hope of lucrative follow-up orders. The more
closely knowledge and symbolic power become intertwined, the more Machiavellian the strategies to seize
it, and the more evident the necessary survival strategy
for intellectual workers to simultaneously surrender to
the conditions of production (aka neoliberal self-optimisation) whilst performing its sharp-sighted critique.
This paradoxical strategy of simultaneous surrender
to and critique of the conditions of production specific to intellectual labour in a capitalist economy is all
but new: it was cherished in particular by the French
surrealists and pointed out by Manfredo Tafuri as the
foundational narrative of any intellectual avant-garde
in a capitalist society, and particularly valid for the historical architectural avant-gardes of the 1920s (which
according to the self-image of the discipline are so
often transfigured as the blissful phase which rendered
architecture’s potential for emancipation visible).2
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73
2
Architecture and Utopia, 64-65.
At that point the second relevant aspect of
the present conditions of intellectual labour comes
into play, namely its foundational misogyny and
contempt for social reproduction. Unfortunately
it reaches far beyond the practices and self-image
of the surrealists.3 “You have to decide,” a German
architectural theorist explained to me once in a
moment of well-intended fatherly advice, referring
to the choice between family and the aspiration of
an academic career. The thresholds of architectural
initiation rituals are plastered with that phrase,
even if it might take on more amiable formulations.
“Women don’t exist in architecture.” When Beatriz
Colomina inserted that comment in panel discussions a few years ago, I initially thought she meant
it as a metaphor, but as one takes a closer look
the absence of women in architectural discourse,
the evidence is overwhelming—as authors or artists
featured in public archives or canonic anthologies,
as participants in contemporary panel discussions,
studio critiques and award lists or as biennale directors (one out of eighteen regarding the architectural
biennale in Venice during a time span of 36 years).
The othering of the female, including her bodily
capacity of social reproduction, is as deep as her
claim to privilege use value and care over exchange
value seems utopian. The feeling of guilt, shame
and self-devaluation that affects female intellectual
3
On the mysoginy of the surrealist—regarding in particular
André Breton, who, in turn, was cited by Tafuri in the above mentioned passage as the model strategy for the avant gardes—see
Peter Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens (Weilerwist:
Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000), 100-105, 29.
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labourers until today when having to perform in
public the synthesis of career, pregnancy, and motherhood, is possibly the most unfortunate emergence
of that othering; structurally it points to the direct
relation between maternity leave and the gender gap
in paychecks.
If architecture is to be understood as a type of
discourse, its emancipatory potential – if there is
one—still consists of understanding and integrating
what is outside of it. This practice doesn’t consist
in defining essential results or aspirations but draws
its political relevance from the continuous effort
of translating and relating incommensurabilities.
(Despite their seeming irreconcilable ideologies
regarding established functions of gender, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler and Manfredo Tafuri
both agree on that point, even if Tafuri refers to
Marquis de Sade and Piranesi in 1973 whilst Judith
Butler refers in 2000 to the political relevance of
intellectuals).4 So even if the paradoxical position
of simultaneous surrender and revolt of the intellectual cannot be disposed of from one day to the
4
See Judith Butler: “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and
the Limits of Formalism” and “Competing Universalities”, in:
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Savoj Zizek (London: Verso,
2000), 20-21, 36-37, 178-79. Tafuri draws the parallel between
the libertian Marquis de Sade as the wicked man and Piranesi as
the wicked architect: “(…) the ‘wicked architect’ presents himself
as monstrously virtuous; the eruption into writing of that which is
external to it brings into discourse the category of aberration as an
immanent reality.“ Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth:
Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), 47.
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next without threatening one’s own livelihood,
it’s nevertheless time to rethink many of the surrealist premises of intellectual labour: in particular its
Hegelian foundation regarding the battle of prestige,
which is a fight about life and death on the ability to
transcend the realm of the necessary.5 A new perspective to think architecture as an intellectual practice
implies a fundamental ideological shift away from
the aspiration to immaterial life towards a collaborative effort to stay alive, such as Donna Haraway has
claimed it in a recent lecture: “I propose that it has
become literally unthinkable to do good work in any
interesting field with the premises of individualism,
methodological individualism, and human exceptionalism. None of the most generative and creative and
intellectual work being done today any longer spends
much time—except as a kind of footnote—talking,
doing creative work (within these premises) (…).
Simultaneously there has been an explosion within
the biologies of multi-species becoming-with, of an
understanding that to be a one at all, you must be a
many and it’s not a metaphor.”6
5
For an interpretation on the Hegelian battle of prestige, see,
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1969). On its surrealist interpretation see Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens,
28-34.
6
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene:
Staying with the Trouble”, lecture given at the conference ARTS
OF LIVING ON A DAMAGED PLANET at Aarhus University,
May 8th 2014, 1’20’’-2’15’’ online: http://anthropocene.au.dk/
conferences/arts-of-living-on-a-damaged-planet-may-2014/,
transcript http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocenecapitalocene-chthulucene/
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