The Architect As Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design

Directly confronting the nature of contemporary architectural work, this book is the first to address a void at the heart of architectural discourse and thinking. For too long, architects have avoided questioning how the central aspects of architectural “practice” (professionalism, profit, technology, design, craft, and building) combine to characterize the work performed in the architectural office. Nor has there been a deeper evaluation of the unspoken and historically-determined myths that assign cultural, symbolic, and economic value to architectural labor.

The Architect as Worker presents a range of essays exploring the issues central to architectural labor. These include questions about the nature of design work; immaterial and creative labor and how it gets categorized, spatialized, and monetized within architecture; the connection between parametrics and BIM and labor; theories of architectural work; architectural design as a cultural and economic condition; entrepreneurialism; and the possibility of ethical and rewarding architectural practice.

The book is a call-to-arms, and its ultimate goal is to change the practice of architecture. It will strike a chord with architects, who will recognize the struggle of their profession; with students trying to understand the connections between work, value, and creative pleasure; and with academics and cultural theorists seeking to understand what grounds the discipline.

Peggy Deamer is Professor of Architecture and Assistant Dean at Yale University, USA, and a visiting scholar at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. She has also taught at Parsons, Barnard, Columbia, and Princeton, and at The University of Auckland, Unitec, and Victoria University. A principal in the design firm Deamer, Studio, she is editor of the books Millennium House and Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, co-editor of Rereading Perspecta with Alan Plattus and Robert A. M. Stern, and co-editor, with Phil Bernstein, of Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural Labor and BIM in Academia.