“Why did we architects give up on the worker?” tackles the question of responsibility of architects, be it towards construction workers, the environment or society as a whole.
Part of clubexpress is working in the creative sector, and some of us are soon-to-be architects, so we have asked ourselves: why is it that we “fail to conceptualize our work as work”? [1] Why is it that we don’t identify with ‘the worker’ and what does this entail? How does producing immaterial work on one side lead to the detachment of the materiality of our work on the other?
George Caffentzis discusses in ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery?'[2], how ethereal, immaterial “information machines” are replacing industrial production and how this is linked to the worsening of an entirety of locations throughout the planet. In the creative business, be it architecture or other creative sectors, we as immaterial workers have to address the responsibility and the impact we have.
[1] The Architect as Worker – Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Edited by Peggy Deamer, Bloomsbury Publishing: 2015
[2] George Caffentzis, The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri, Common Sense, 1999
