Building Sites: Architecture, Labour, and Production Studies

Building Sites addresses the urgent need to advance the critical understanding of relations between architectural design and the labour of building. While recognising that in many parts of the world building takes place through self-organised processes and traditional skills, the book questions a central and problematic omission in architectural discourse, education and practice – the production of buildings and the erasure of construction labour entailed by that omission. Through its engagement with the groundbreaking work of the architect and theorist Sérgio Ferro, who developed a history of architecture ‘seen from the building site’, the book sets out a programme for a new field of Production Studies for architecture and other disciplines. First, the field requires careful research into the production of the built environment – at the construction site, in the factory, in the design office and beyond. This volume explores historical and contemporary cases from Brazil, the UK, Yugoslavia, Germany, India, Mexico and the USA. Second, the book asks why the disciplinary silencing of production prevails. In Ferro’s view, the tendency of architectural discourse to ignore issues of labour and processes of construction is no mere oversight but rather a structural necessity for maintaining the profession’s capacity to act ‘on’ and ‘over’ the building site, a necessity arising organically from the development of capitalism. Turning also to Morris, Harvey, Chakrabarty and Malm, the collection provides the first sustained English-language engagement with Ferro’s theories and critiques. Chapters on radical pedagogies, unions and political alliances, and alternative forms of building take the third step – to respond to contemporary crises. Production Studies must mobilise its understanding to seek alternatives and work towards change.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION: SETTING AN AGENDA 1. Introduction: Building a Field of Production Studies 2. Translation as Production 3. Challenging Design Ideology: Reframing Architectural Production and the Design-Labour Relation SECTION I: PATHS TO PRODUCTION STUDIES: FERRO AND HIS INTERLOCUTORS 4. The Building Site and the City: Radical Criticism and Emancipation in Sérgio Ferro and David Harvey 5. Sérgio Ferro, William Morris and a New Field: Architecture, cultural studies and production studies SECTION II: TOWARDS EMANCIPATORY PRACTICES 6. Unionization as a Political Issue: The Debate in the Architects' Union of São Paulo (1972-1981) 7. A Work Encampment Project (1981), by Rodrigo Brotero Lefèvre 8. Masters of Detachment: Lingering on the Self-management Building Site 9. The International Workers of the World in the American Building Industry, 1905-1937 SECTION III: FROM THE BUILDING SITE 10. Absent voices, absent lives: articulating building workers in architectural production 11. Timber houses and favela carpenters in Brazilian Nordeste: An architectural history of production 12. The Construction of Alienated Labour and the Alienation of Construction Labour: Mexico, 16TH Century 13. Life-worlds / Death-worlds in the temple building industry of western India SECTION IV: LABOUR, MATERIAL, TECHNOLOGY 14. New Sites of Labour: Women and building products in the interwar period in the UK 15. A feminist reading of the construction site: learning with women builders in Mata dos Crioulos 16. The Material as a Source for the History of Architecture SECTION V: PRODUCTION AND PEDAGOGIES 17. Construction Technology for Building Autonomy 18. Weaving Sérgio Ferro's Web: Production Pedagogies in São Paulo (1963-1972) 19. The Useful Student: Perpetuating ‘Separated Design’ in Handbooks for Architecture Students 20. From artist-architect to salaried architect: The examination of professional practice in West Berlin, 1967-1977 SECTION VI: POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRODUCTION 21. Fire-Regimes of Grenfell: On construction and combustion 22. Remembering Production: Favela Museums, Building, and the Production of Space 23. Considering Art’s ‘Building Site’ for Production Studies: The Case of Art Fabrication Afterword

About the Author :
Matt Davies is Reader in International Political Economy at Newcastle University (UK) and Professor Visitante at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His work has engaged with cultural imperialism, precarity and unprotected workers in the international political economy, and popular culture and world politics. His current research focuses on urbanism and cities as spaces of world politics. Will Thomson is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary researcher at Newcastle University, where he was a postdoctoral researcher for the Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge (TF/TK) project. He received his PhD from New York University in socio-cultural anthropology. His ethnographic fieldwork has focused on Chinese migrant construction labour and the global building industry. Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Newcastle University and a founding member of the feminist collective taking place www.takingplace.org.uk. Her research is concerned with materiality, labour and technology, as in her most recent publication Building Materials: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification (2021). João Marcos de Almeida Lopes is Full Professor and Director of the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism – IAUUSP (2024–2028) of the University of São Paulo. He is a member of the Housing and Sustainability Research Group (HABIS). He was a Principal Investigator of Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge (TF/TK). He is the author of Geodesics and Co., with Vitor Amaral Lotufo (1981) and of Engineering Architectures or Architecture Engineering, with Marta Bogéa and Yopanan C. P. Rebello (2006). He is the author of several articles on popular housing, construction technologies and construction history. He is one of the founders of the USINA – Work Centre for the Inhabited Environment, where he remains as an associate.

Review :
"Architecture, inescapably implicated in the environmental, economic, and political crises of our time, is addressed in this book from an overlooked and urgently necessary perspective. Drawing on the work of the Brazilian-French architect, historian and militant Sérgio Ferro, its contributors initiate a new field — Production Studies — critically engaged with the labour and conditions involved in the material making of architecture." Douglas Spencer "This is an important and original book that introduces and defines the field of Production Studies in relation to architecture. Through a broad range of fascinating examples, architecture is firmly situated in the broader context of its making and production. In so doing, the book makes a critical contribution to architectural discourse, shifting attention away from an obsession with the object and towards taking responsibility for what comes before and after the object." Jeremy Till, Emeritus Professor, Central Saint Martins: UAL "An important volume that expands the disciplinary horizons of architecture, and art and design more broadly. The book engages with Sergio Ferro’s writing on production and extends it to a series of cultural contexts. Through this it brings a much needed focus on labor in studies of design. A compelling read for all those interested in the multiple understandings and manifestations of building and production the world over." Namita Vijay Dharia, Associate Professor of Political Economy, RISD