Every profession seems to be having a reckoning. For doctors, the concentration into hospitals is squeezing the altruism of their work to serve all. In tech, the guzzling up of code by AI is shrinking the sector as fast as it exploded. And in education at all levels, cost-cutting and budget squeezing have bled teachers dry.

In architecture, we’ve been having our own reckoning, agonizing over the future of the profession. The difference between us and these other professions? While we host panels and pontificate in our magazines that largely exist to sell building products, other professions continue to use the most effective tool for addressing their problems: organizing. Instead of doing, we’re thinking.

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One of the questions that is tied to the existential dilemma of architecture is: what do
you wish architects learned in school? Overwhelmingly the answer is taking more business classes. I understand the impulse. Architects don’t make a lot of money, so naturally taking a course in business would teach us to make more money, right? But simple answers to complex problems, while alluring, never actually address their roots.

I’d argue this is a bad idea for a few reasons. First, all architects are already educated in a business-forward mindset. Students are required to take “professional practice” classes that, along with the rest of the education, are overwhelmingly dominated by what I call the “ideology of ownership.” In these courses, architects are taught to think and act like future firm owners. This involves content that covers staff management, fee proposals, and contracts, more component is of running an architectural office.

So, it seems the problem isn’t business management education per se (although I do agree that many firm owners are still bad at this, especially from a personnel level), but
something else: a lack of money. Architects make little of it and want to know how to get more of it.

One solution is to ask for more, i.e. to be better at negotiating. Some call this “knowing your value.” But do you really need to take a business class to do learn how to do this? While time and time again we hear the desire to take more business classes on the part of firm owners, we rarely hear exactly what it is they are looking to gain from them.

When looking around to their professional peers, architects often complain that doctors make more money than them. But doctors aren’t taking any more business classes than architects. And while lawyers do, it has more to do with the fact that as a lawyer it’s important to know about how businesses work seeing as future clients might be one.

Regardless, let’s assume firm owners begin taking business classes and begin to improve their negotiating skills. They show up en masse at the negotiating table with clients and all start asking for more money. Will this really move the needle? My guess is while it might help an individual firm here and there, there is still a real and imagined ceiling that clients have in terms of what they are willing to pay. For individuals, it’s as much wealth as they have access to. For developers, it’s about maintaining a bottom line. And for governments, it’s about what is written into law.

In the end, this all points to the fact that the reason architects don’t make a lot of money isn’t because they aren’t savvy enough, but because the economy is structurally rigged against them. In an economic system where value is determined by market transactions, the motivations for clients and developers is to make more money by paying less for services, starting with architects, because they can. For government work, the place where architects have the best chance to leverage more money, we still haven’t learned the lessons of the construction industry which, through decades of sustained struggle and organizing, have advocated for laws that protect safety and pay for its workers.

It doesn’t help that the architectural education primes future architects for exploitation. But this isn’t just making architects bad negotiators, it’s keeping them locked in a structurally weak position because they refuse to do the only thing that can
actually tip the scale towards their favor: organize.

When I was on the bargaining committee at Bernheimer Architecture, we had one day of training for negotiations. It certainly helped, along with the guidance and prep from our lead organizer. But the most effective thing about this was the fact that we were engaged in a process that afforded us legal protections and maximized our
strength through collective bargaining. In other words, the relationship had changed structurally. Without this, the training would be useless.

If I could change one thing about education, I would ask that architects be educated as much as future workers as they are future owners. Then we might finally see architects who not only know their value but are willing to organize to make sure it’s fairly recognized.

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For those entering the job market this summer, the prospects are bleak. Some even think it’s worse than the 2008 recession, the market I entered when I graduated. Today it’s harder to get that entry level job that establishes a good career, and many are looking for any role they can get. But I’ve also been seeing more and more ads for design jobs with the title “AI Trainer”. As alluring as these might sound, designers would be wise to remember the Turkish proverb that goes “the forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe.”

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On the surface these gigs sound exciting, being a part of the frontier of the “next Industrial Revolution”, a recent comparison that was not exactly well-received. They also are paid well (up to $125 a hour in this case) and promise flexible work, the kind you can “take on alongside anything else you have going on.” Sounds perfect for the hustler. But seller (of labor) beware; these jobs aren’t the on ramp to a long career, but rather the bulldozers set to demolish it.

Hidden not-so-well beneath the language of opportunity is the darker reality of roles like these. Instead of designing a building, or even the AI, the job is to train it:

You’ll draw on your experience developing design concepts through to construction documentation — coordinating drawings, managing design data, and working across disciplines — to evaluate AI-generated content and help improve how AI understands real-world design and documentation workflows.

The first sentence is the most important. It’s more than ironic that the word “draw” is being used here, as it actually used to mean something in architecture. But instead of creating plans to be used to build a building, you’ll be using your own experience to help a computer do it for you. In other words, you’re the one being used.

Design work has been degrading to the point it appears more and more like the exploited factory workers of the 19th century, but this might be the closest we’ve come yet. Much like a worker on an Amazon assembly line, the job here is to “evaluate”, not make. This isn’t to speak ill of Amazon workers but instead show how far the discipline will fall from its origins if AI takes hold of it. If the goal is for the AI to do the “real-world design and documentation workflows”, there isn’t much left for the designer.

When I see jobs like this, I ask myself: what is the point of AI? And more broadly technology? The ship has sailed on craft in design, but if we’re no longer doing the work of design, we can hardly call it architecture anymore. Instead of automating the drudgery of door schedules, for example, we’ve arrived at the point that companies are making clear their goal is to eliminate you, the worker.

Even stranger, or maybe more disturbing, is the company who posted this job. Handshake AI, the self-professed “career network for the AI economy”, appears to be some sort of AI-training leviathan bent on taking over the job-placement industry. Naturally it touts all the altruistic goals of the tech industry, founded in 2014 to “help fix a broken and selective recruiting system.” Today, Handshake claims to “power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling.” The upskilling assertion is the most audacious, as we’ve seen time and time again that while technology might upskill a select few, it’s always at the expense of deskilling others.

I’m once again reminded of the passages from The Grundrisse where Marx’s words ring truer every day. In the chapter called “Fragmented on Machines”, Marx calls attention to the existential change in relationship between man and machine. Today it’s easier than ever to substitute the factory machine with AI:

In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material - supervises it and guards against interruptions.

In other words, the worker has been relegated to supervisor, or in the words of the job ad, to “evaluate content.” But the real insight is the complete replacement of the worker themselves:

Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal or oil just as the worker consumes food to keep up its perpetual motion.

Instead of only consuming oil, the machine now even consumes water just like humans. It might have been possible to debate this with CAD or even Revit, but with AI, the companies are saying the quiet part out loud. Although Handshake might claim to have “started by giving students a better way in”, in reality they’re only accelerating the way out.

I understand the temptation to take a job like this. It pays well in a tough economic time. But the proverb continues: “the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.” If you care about it, this sugar rush of AI money will do nothing to benefit the profession. Don’t feed the machine and instead go work in retail or service - you’ll be doing honest work and staying in touch with other humans.

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It’s officially camping season. The days are warmer and longer, and for the nature-curious the weekends offer a reprieve from the grind of a long winter. For many, camping serves as an escape from the routine of everyday life, whether the long commute to the office or the unrelenting daily shift. The structures and objects that shape our routines melt away into a new set of simpler ways of doing life.

I’m an avid camper, and for most of my adult life this is how I’ve thought about it- as freedom from the built environment, especially the technology, that seems to dominate our lives more each year. But lately I’ve begun to think about it all differently. For me camping is no longer only a “negative” experience in the sense that it removes these things temporarily from our lives, but a positive one as it demonstrates an alternative form of daily life.

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The book that changed my thinking on this was G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism. In it, the philosopher argues for the politics of socialism through the analogy of the camping trip:

And, as is usual on camping trips, we avail ourselves of those facilities collectively: even if they are privately owned things, they are under collective control for the duration of the trip, and we have shared understandings about who is going to use them when, and under what circumstances, and why... There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are in inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.

Previously I would have argued that what makes camping so powerful is for two main reasons: 1) The immersion into nature and away from the built environment and 2) the simplification of the tools (what Cohen refers to as “facilities”) being used. The first point is obvious: instead of walking around the city of driving around the suburbs, we become embedded in the natural world for a significant period of time, unless you’re in one of those abominations erroneously called “campers”.

The second point is a more subtle but equally important one. The tools that we use while camping are primitive compared to those that make up a part of our daily lives. Fabric tents, campfire cooking, pocketknives, and foldable chairs all make up the gear that facilitate our simple camping lives. It’s not just that internet is gone, but these are some of our oldest tools, ones that require time and effort to use. In other words, we temporarily remove all the stuff that makes our lives comfortable and efficient.

Sounds unappealing. And many parts of camping are incredibly uncomfortable: the hard ground, the annoying bugs, the cold nights. So why do we do it? Because it taps into something deep within us, and it feels right.

But these changes aren’t only about the things that are in front of us. The important part of Cohen’s argument is that our social relations are also transformed during this experience. Yes, we’re in a different setting, and yes, the tools are also different, but our fundamental social relationship with each other is also transformed, and this is what precedes the change in use of “facilities”. I think this is the best part of camping.

As Cohen notes, gone is the individualistic mindset that drives so much of our “real” lives, replaced with an unspoken but complete willingness for communal living. In the exchanges that make the campsite function, “you cooperate with other people not because you believe that cooperating with other people is a good thing in itself... but because you seek to gain and you know that you can do so only if you cooperate with others.” Even the most die-hard conservatives and libertarians begin to look a lot more like communists at the campsite.

These days, this sentiment feels nothing less than revolutionary. While we hardly have time to see our family and friends during the week thanks to the ever-increasing number of tasks and responsibilities, while we camp, we are only with each other in nature.

For Cohen, the question is why we don’t change society when we have such a powerful model in front of us. His answer is less our nature, the thing we tap into when we camp, but the organization of all the stuff around us the runs our daily lives:

In my view, the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run. Our problem is not, primarily, human selfishness, but our lack of a suitable organizational technology: our problem is a problem of design. It may be an insoluble design problem, and it is a design problem that is undoubtedly exacerbated by our selfish propensities, but a design problem, so I think, is what we’ve got.

While he’s speaking about society more broadly, as a designer I love the thought. But I’m also skeptical that design itself will be able to free itself from the selfishness Cohen describes. It would require an abandonment of the obsession with object aesthetics and a reorientation to normal, banal, everyday problems.

The problems we collectively face feel larger and more untenable. And I suspect this is a large part of the reason I return to camping year after year: to live life, albeit for a short time, in a deeply connective and meaningful way.

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If you’ve been designing anything as long as I have, you’ve noticed a steady decline of quality in digital software. The pattern follows the general explosion and slow degradation of the tech boom of the early aughts. Spaces like the internet were bastions of freedom and expression only to be slowly infiltrated by monied interests, dark actors, and unuseful idiots.

The most visceral example of this in my own experience is the arc of Adobe. What started as a revolutionary piece of software has come to exemplify all the issues of our overly digitized society.

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Founded in 1982, the company was one of those scrappy garage-based groups to come out of Silicon Valley in the digital gold rush. It was built on all the values you’ve come to know and love: innovation, positive change, and above all freedom. As American as Apple (pie).

For a time, it lived up to these values. When I went to undergraduate school for architecture, we were required to procure what is called the Creative Suite. Somehow, we all found plentiful cheap and/or free copies, software that originated on an actual Compact Disc. This wasn’t even the craziest part; believe it or not, once installed on your computer, you had access to the software… forever. Sure, some of us wanted to the latest features of CS6 etc., but it was entirely possible to get through all our educations on one installation.

This all changed in 2013. By the time I returned to grad school, I was confronted by the horror of a new subscription model. Rather than installing the software and owning it once, I was now forced to make monthly payments, i.e. rent, to Adobe. To justify such a predatory model, Adobe started introducing updates in a feckless fashion, and by the time I was graduating it was impossible to keep up with all the sneaky changes that appeared overnight, even while working in studio.

Most of the software and tech platforms have followed this trajectory, what some refer to as the “enshittification” of everything. All of the platforms we once found fun or useful are now prisons we are struggling to escape. Others even argue that we’ve entered a whole new form of economy built on digital peonage. But one bit of software stands out from the rest: Robert McNeel’s Rhinoceros3D.

Rhino is as integral to many design practices as Adobe, but it has one key difference: it hasn’t converted to a subscription model. But why the difference from other predatory companies? In many ways the origin story is the same: founded in 1980 on the west coast, the company sought to bring physical modeling and form generation into the computer. It was equally as revolutionary as anything Adobe has done, and it eventually became one of the primary pieces of software in design education and practice.

The difference then is in something that is hidden behind many of the usual facts and stories about such companies: its ownership structure. Publicly traded companies such as Adobe will do anything to hide the fact that its outgoing CEO is one of the highest paid in the entire country, necessary for the low-paid designers and artists who are squeezed to generate such eye-popping numbers. In contrast, the “about” page on Rhino’s website leads with important information about its structure. Not only is Rhino private, but it is an employee-owned company. While it’s not cheap per se - $995 for a single license, $195 for students and faculty - one year of AutoCAD is twice the cost at $2,095 without any form of ownership.

I’m filling in some gaps here, but I have a strong hunch that the fact the Rhino is an employee-owned company has a lot to do with this. While it is most likely an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan), meaning workers have less say then in cooperative or union models, it does mean at the very least the profits aren’t being distributed to shareholders who have little more interested than turning a profit. Instead, the employees are incentivized to see that the company is successful because it directly benefits them, a form of self-interest I’m ok with. There’s also a sense of pride that can come out of this model because of a pseudo form of company ownership.

Today Rhino is such an effective piece of software, and continues to improve so much, that I’m currently working on an architecture project using it alone. I’d like to think that a lot of that is because the employees actually care about the product they are making and have pride in it. I would have traditionally used AutoCAD or Revit from Autodesk, but the subscription models have become so costly that I can’t afford to do the work with them. But Bob McNeel & Associates have got my back.

Sadly, Rhino appears to be more of a vestige of the past than a harbinger of the future. But at the very least it’s a reminder that we can still have good, affordable software, if we can just get rid of the greed.

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Gari Melchers, Woman Reading By A Window, 1895

As the semester winds down, this week I wanted to write a reflection on one of the central readings from my labor course: Making Space by Matrix. Although it’s about architecture, the critique comes from a perspective outside of the discipline through theories we don’t always read as designers. But it also speaks to those outside of design, which is what makes it such a powerful book.

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A Different View

Written by a group of architects, teachers, researches, mothers, builders, journalists, and house managers, Matrix was a British feminist design collective that formed in the late 1970s. Largely the collective was concerned "about the way buildings and cities work for women." This simple statement found in the Preface gives us an immediate clue as to why this book stands out so much amongst other ones written by architects, but the first obvious fact is that the group included other kinds of practitioners, preconditioning the work with a broader scope.

To return to those early words of the book, yes, the content is the built environment, but seen through the lens of how it performs for women. For me, this is what makes theory theory. The word comes from the Greek theōria, meaning "contemplation, speculation; a looking at, viewing; a sight, show, spectacle, things looked at" and from thea "a view". It shares the same origin as the word "theater," which is how I explain theory to my students. It's a new or alternative way of seeing something. If history is a record of events, and then theory is a particular way of interpreting past events, or developing new approaches to understanding current problems.

Design & Theory

Design, and especially architecture, is full of great historical writing. It's important to document what past designers have done, and the ongoing record informs current students and practitioners of directions they can take with their own work. For most of the history of professionalized architecture in the United States, obtaining a doctorate in the field meant a PhD in Art History with a focus on architecture. This began to change in the 1970s as programs dedicated to architecture alone began to emerge with the intent of creating independent streams of research.

This trend tracks with other disciplines, but what came after was something different. With dedicated PhD programs in places, schools began reacting to the emergence of theoretical practitioners like Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and the generation of "paper architects" by establishing Masters program dedicated solely to architectural theory. Intended for those who already have professional degrees, these programs supposedly helped students "advance and expand their theoretical and analytical skills and strengthen disciplinary knowledge." Interestingly this coincided with the rise of the “architectural critic” at many newspapers in the U.S., particularly The New York Times.

For design, this evolution of theory in education and practice (the two in constant conversation despite the bickering) has been limited to seeing the things we design, and the way that we design them, in a new way, primarily as objects in need of formal critique. This slippery slope has led to a whole series of programs and learning practices that have become a self-referential loop, and not just in architecture. Designers in various disciplines go about theorizing new novel forms and styles, academics and students study and reference it in school, and the outputs on the wall are then judged during critiques by those very same practitioners. Take your pick for which comes first, but like the Ouroboros, where the cycle begins and ends has become indistinguishable.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this; in fact it can be quite fun to dream of new forms in a world of increasing banality. It begs the question though: what is theory for? As a writer trying to understand the relationship between class and design, it has been invaluable. But I had to look elsewhere to find answers. I think in its current capacity, architecture and design theory isn't so much problematic as it is neglecting the original point of architecture: to service the need of shelter for people. This is the problem with loops, as they exclude other productive things that exist outside of them from becoming part of the process.

Towards a New (Old) Theory

Which brings us back to what makes Making Space such an original work of theory. Matrix emerged around the same time as degrees in architecture were becoming more specialized both in the US and UK, but took a different direction by broadening their knowledge. Most importantly the authors of this collective project do not start their book with a declaration on forms that can address the problems they identify, but with a critique of relations. In one of the strongest passage of the book, Matrix summarize the standard practices of the built environment that led to such glaring inequities for women:

Gradually it became apparent that architects' grandiose theories did not fit the way of life that people wanted to follow. The forms of buildings were influenced by economic and political pressures rather than social needs. In pursuit of profit, speculators tore down urban landmarks that local people held in affection. Councillors were easily persuaded that their city needed a more modern image. Politicians believed that the massive housing problem would be solved by the use of new materials, factory-made components and mass construction of standardized units. The results were... disastrous.

This is the central part of Matrix's theory of the built environment: that while forms might have been conceived of as isolated ideas, they were both influenced by and changed through economic and political forces. What makes this such a strong critique of modernism is that its origins are in social theory outside of the discipline of architecture. By studying and developing their own theories of feminism, Matrix were able to develop a new view, or theory, of architecture. It's just a sample of a brilliant introduction that holds no punches. With this manifesto in place, the rest of the book demonstrates evidence of the efficacy of the ideas through actual case studies (praxis) from the group.

The unique critique developed by Matrix is dormant today, which is why I try to teach it whenever possible. As the broader political climate changed with Thatcher in the UK and Regan in the US, critiques like this retreated from society into the university, keeping them contained to hypothetical rather than actual projects. Individualism took hold, and pursuing a degree became the best avenue for advancing ideas. Collectives like Matrix disappeared, and individual theorizing became the norm. Even the university, once a bastion of radical thought, lost its edge.

Our current climate is undergoing equally profound transformations though, and with it an opportunity to rethink the way we've been practicing and theorizing. Design thinking won't tell you much about why the price of oil is spiking right now, or why working conditions have been declining for decades, but problems like these are integral to the process of getting things built. At the same time when designers focus on inward facing theories, they limit the potential of their work to serve a broader population.

So, for a minute, put down that book written by a designer, and pick up something from a sociologist, feminist, or economist; you might be surprised at what you learn about design.

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Here are a few suggestions for a place to start in order of least to most accessible:

• Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones

• Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism

• William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil

• Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of the Smart Machine

• C Wright Mills, White Collar

• Michael Polanyi, The Great Transformation

• Hannah Arednt, The Human Condition

• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital

• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

In a piece I wrote last month for ’s substack, I got a lot of great feedback about the relationship between creativity and labor. My overall argument was that while it’s common to name certain kinds of labor “creative,” doing so both masks the fact that all labor is creative in some sense, and further masks a kind of class consciousness that could help build a broader working-class solidarity.

Though there were many thoughtful replies, one stuck out to me regarding this messy relationship between the two, and the broader relationship with class. , a bike-frame builder, had some really insightful comments from the perspective of a crafts-person:

saying all labour is creative might be true in a broad sense, but if flattens something important. There’s a real difference between work that’s fully specified in advance and repeated, like an assembly line, and work that’s worked out through doing, where judgement develops in the process.

Paul brings up an important point here: the division of labor had degraded many forms of labor to the point where much of it feels meaningless from the perspective of the worker, with broader political implications ( recently wrote about this - I highly recommend reading it).

Here I don’t disagree at all. Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was a central text for my own book The Labor of Architecture, and his analysis proves more useful every day when it comes to describing the degradation of labor through the process of scientific management. Noting the various machines the owners of capital had introduced into the production process, he emphasized that it was the process that affected the most change, not the machinery itself:

Despite the variety of means used in all the innovations we have been describing, their unifying feature is the same as that which we noted at the outset of this discussion: the progressive elimination of the control functions of the worker, insofar as possible, and their transfer to a device which is controlled, again insofar as possible, by management from outside the direct process. It is this which dominates the new place of the worker in production processes, and it is this above all which is slighted or entirely neglected in conventional assessments.

But Braverman also alludes to something else though that I think is crucial: we should be careful about conflating ideas like “creativity” with “meaning.” Let me explain through the example of the building industry.

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In his comments, Paul described my analysis as “abstract” and “from the outside,” but it comes very much from personal experience. My first job after graduating with my undergraduate degree in architecture was not in an office but on a construction site. Working with AmeriCorps for a several years in New Orleans, I helped direct other volunteers as we rebuilt homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. And here I’d agree with Paul: looking back, this work was the most meaningful work I’ve done. Yes, the service was a big part of that, but so was the autonomy of the work. My boss (still the best one I’ve ever had) taught me what I needed to know and then largely left me alone to manage a construction site with volunteers. Her management was anything but “scientific;” it was intuitive and liberating.

In this sense my working day was almost fully in my own control, both from the perspective of overseeing the work of others but also the work itself. Especially in the older homes we were working on, our judgement was constantly used to determine the best course of action, both from the materials we needed to use and the best techniques for their use. There was never a correct solution, only many possible ones. From straightening wobbly walls to raising 150-year-old foundations one jack pump at a time, we encountered every possible quandary of the residential construction process. I was exhausted every day from using every part of my body and mind.

But was it creative work? To return to the point of my original post, many would not describe construction work as creative. Most of the discourse around the idea centers on designers, tech workers, artists, and others in the “knowledge sector.” Obviously, I’d disagree, not only for the sake of an interesting thought exercise, but for the sake of galvanizing worker-based action between related but also arbitrarily separated disciplines towards a productive solidarity.

On the other hand, for the work that would define the rest of my career, architecture, I’ve never met someone who wouldn’t describe it as creative work. There’s lots of intellectual judgement involved in the design process, from the determination of space usage to the interpretation of building codes to the selection of materials. In that sense it fits the description. But a broader look at historical trends reveals a general degradation much more in line with what Braverman warned about over 50 years ago.

The same process described in Labor and Monopoly Capital is now happening to architects. As most of their material - that is craft - production has been replaced by the computer, the knowledge and skills embedded in the labor process have been ceded to the tools of scientific management and machinery. One only need to look at renderings that used to be illustrated by hand in the form of watercolors or pen and ink. These were standalone works of art. Now, designers can produce photo-realistic images at the click of a button (only after paying the subscription fee, of course). It’s not hard to see the end game, but will we stop describing architectural work as creative?

This is why I caution again equating creativity with meaning. Much of the way we use these words comes from cultural constructs, which does not make it untrue, but limits the potential of their understanding in certain ways. And here is the crucial point from Braverman: what makes work meaningful or degraded has less to do with creativity (or lack thereof) and more to do with whether the labor in question has been subjected to a kind of scientific division via the capitalist process.

To use Adam Smith’s famous example of the production of a pin, both the act of making an individual pin and only attending to one part of it on an assembly line are both creative acts because a pin is still being made. Just because workers are doing less of the full process doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing any less to the production of the pin; in fact, they are helping to produce many more of them. In other words, they are technically (and socially) creating more. But what makes these two examples different is who owns, and hence dictates, the process of production.

For me this is the essential point, and another reason why I think it’s important to understand most work as creative. There are of course exceptions, like those jobs that extract profit without producing anything. But our ability to interact with nature and transform it into products and services that fit our needs is at the core of the definition of creativity. And this work can be meaningful, but it depends on who controls the process. If we’re working for ourselves, or oversee much of the process, then we will find more meaning. But if we are alienated from the holistic picture of the labor process, we will only find drudgery.

This also helps us understand where we should target our frustrations, and where our struggle should be centered. Not in the culture wars of labeling certain work more creative than others, but in the struggle to make our workplaces more democratic so we can all participate in meaningful work.

And while we might find comfort in our work being “creative,” we are all subject to the forces of capital that continue to degrade the work and world around us. I’ve seen this process first-hand steal the best parts of a profession that was thought to be insulated from it. However, only when we take back control of the whole of our working lives will we all feel the creativity in the work we collectively do, and the work yet to be done.

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This week a few of us from Architectural Workers United spoke at the AIA Center for Architecture’s emerging architects committee. The topic of conversation was on “unions in architecture,” a timely as celebrated International Workers’ Day. For the discussion, each of us had a different perspective to share from our own experience organizing.

Lee Kuhn showed the various ways unions have been a part of his life since childhood, Danielle Tellez shared her powerful story regarding the effort at SHoP architects, and I focused on the broader economic challenges and opportunities of the profession.

During the Q&A portion though Lee mentioned an idea we’ve been thinking about, which is a desire for those workers with good working conditions to lead the way in our young but growing movement. It might sound counterintuitive, but in this profession, it makes a lot of sense.

In a recent organizing campaign, we were reminded of why this is a good strategy. Though the workers extended every opportunity for their boss to voluntarily recognize the union, and verify the cards through a card check neutrality agreement, all in the name of bettering the profession, he wasn’t having any of it. Taking the unionization effort as a personal affront to his business and livelihood, he pulled all the usual union busting tactics.

In the end the workers decided to suspend their petition. Though I believe they can win, right now the task of fighting their boss feels too daunting. In a field where firms are built as personal extension of design philosophies, owners at smaller offices like this who already demonstrate bad behavior will only grow more combative when their workers start to organize. Without many other offices joining the effort, sadly bad bosses feel they have more leeway to threaten and intimate their workers.

Most people think that this is where unionization efforts should put their focus: towards the bad workplaces. While we of course would love to see the come to fruition, the barriers are higher, especially in unorganized industries with smaller workplaces.

However, if more good workplaces were unionized, public pressure could go a long way to nudge recalcitrant owners in the right direction. Market forces would come into play too, with workers naturally preferring those firms where they are well-treated and have better benefits. In this way, a “low hanging fruit” strategy of organizing offices with already good working conditions could get the ball rolling for the more difficult workplaces.

So, for those workers who currently like their job, here are 10 reasons why you should unionize.

Protect the things you like

You might love everything about your workplace, but just like the weather, it can change without notice. Maybe the boss that you like will take a leave of absence or wake up one day and decide the current model doesn’t work. If you have things you like about your workplace, you should codify them in a contract.

Building solidarity with your co-workers is fun

So much of our day-to-day work involves sitting next to others but staring at a computer with our headphones on. I don’t blame anyone; I needed the distraction from phone calls that were happening in the office. But organizing gives you an opportunity to get to know your coworkers in a way that’s not only about the work. By creating your own spaces in and outside of the workplaces, you can humanize your job a little more and have fun while you do it.

Organizing is meaningful

I found the organizing work to be the most meaningful work I did as a practicing architect. While I’m extremely proud of the affordable housing project I spent nearly 7 years working on, I’m most proud of the work my colleagues and I did to change our workplace. When I sat at the bargaining table, I feel like I had a way to fully express my voice in the workplace for the first time. And with my colleagues at my side, I felt even more supported.

Growth comes out of conflict

Conflict is uncomfortable, especially for architects. We’re taught to receive criticism, and the values of the “gentleman’s profession” still linger. But real growth comes out of productive conflict. When you negotiate over things you don’t initially agree with, both sides come out better.

We should design our workplaces too

We spend all our time using our design skills working on projects, which is understandable. But what if we devoted those same critical thinking skills to our workplaces? In our first contract at Bernheimer, we did just that and designed a unique contract that met the needs of both our workplace and our industry.

We can always improve

Even the best businesses can become stagnant. A little agitation can go a long way to make space for everyone to look around and identify areas of improvement.

Speak up for others who can’t

Architecture is full of precarious workers. Those who are in abusive workplaces are often afraid to speak up (for good reason), and many are visa workers who fear retaliation against their job and living circumstances. For those workers who have good bosses and aren’t as worried about retaliation, you can stand up now so it’s easier for others down the road.

Normalize the movement

Right now, unionization in architecture isn’t the norm, which makes it easy to dismiss as a “radical” idea. But as Lee mentioned in our conversation, it’s amazing how quickly the idea of a union becomes normal in the workplace, even for those who are initially skeptical. Once the contract is in place, much of the work of maintaining it becomes routine, and it makes a lot of other things easier.

Put the pressure on bad bosses

I mentioned this above, but right now many bad bosses, who I do believe are the minority, know they can get away with abusive behavior because no one is holding them accountable. Forming unions at other workplaces allows those workers to indirectly challenge the things they don’t like within the profession at large.

Advocating for ourselves makes it easier to advocate to others

A question that came up is “how do we say no to exploitative clients?” It’s an important one, but I think the answer starts with us saying no to the things we don’t like in our own workplaces. This is usually the hardest step because of the proximity of our bosses, but when we stand up for our rights in the workplace, we become better at standing up to those outside of it. In other words, right now architects aren’t good at advocating for their industry because they don’t have practice advocating for themselves within it.

The common advice for career advancement in architecture is to hop around and leverage new jobs for higher pay and better opportunities. But what if instead of playing the game of the market, workers stayed and tried to make their current workplace a little better?

Architecture is still largely unorganized, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. At one point in time every industry was unorganized, but eventually workers decided that instead of trying to solve problems on their own, it was more effective to join together and tackle them collectively.

So, if you like your current workplace, why not make it a little better? You just might inspire others to do the same.

As I’ve walked around New York City lately, I’ve noticed something. Or rather, I haven’t noticed as much, at least when it comes to buildings.

Fewer are the objects that try their hardest to stand out from their neighbors. In their place buildings have arrived that are easy to miss, their newness less obvious. While we still see those flagship projects that are desperate to draw attention to themselves, for the everyday buildings, they’ve embraced their plain spirit in appearance too.

I’m not the only one that’s noticed the change. In a Curbed article from last year, New York Magazine’s architectural critic Justin Davidson noted the return of “texture, shadow, and drama” in lieu of the waning “aquarium lifestyle.” I always wondered who wanted to be on display in their apartment; I prefer a raised windowsill when it comes to privacy and functionality. Where else are you going to put all those books so your dog can’t eat them?

Hudson Yards is the last gasp of this era, a sea of soulless glass shards dotting the faux neighborhood. In the middle sits a deadly pine cone that few New Yorkers seem to like. In contrast, the normie buildings of the past year or two have emerged with a sense of weight and tacit acknowledgment to the history around them. I think it’s a good trend and I hope it sticks around. But why is it happening, and why now?

Here are three possible theories that might explain the change.

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1) Styles Just Change

In the Curbed article, Morris Adjmi, a long-time practicing architect in New York City, had a benign explanation: “I don’t know if I was ahead of the times or behind them, but if you do something long enough, it comes back around.” It’s a comforting thought for Adjmi, who well into his career has arrived at a “right place right time” situation.

Maybe Adjmi is right. Davidson observed the correlation between the arrival of Richard Meier to New York and the subsequent explosion of glass towers. Trends do happen, especially in a dense metropolis like New York, whether through intention or subconscious absorption of the built environment.

This explanation is the least satisfying to me though, or at least the shallowest. I was visiting an Interior Design theory class at Parsons recently taught by , and the subject of architectural movements throughout history came up. Claudia is a historian by training, and we were discussing the simultaneous emergence of post-modernism and the computer. The question that came up was: did post-modernist theories lay the ground for the wave of starchitectural design in the 1980s, or was the computer to blame?

I think the answer to this question gives us a more compelling answer to the broader one we’re asking here.

2) Technological Fatigue

The two trends are linked, but teasing out which came first is difficult. The famous architects that emerged during this time became known as “paper architects” because of the speculative nature of the designs they were exploring. When I was at RISD, an incredible show about this period called “Drawing Ambience” arrived at the museum. I spent hours staring at the drawings during my thesis year, trying to get inside the head of the authors who seemed to temporarily live in an alternate reality. You’ll find all the greatest hits in this catalogue: OMA, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Super Studio, among others.

This group of architects were the last vanguard exploring the frontiers of manual craft, representing their designs through graphite, ink, paint and collage. They pushed manual representation as far as it could go. In this sense, it’s easy to make the argument that they were primed for the computer, a machine that would allow them to carry their visions further than they could have ever imagined. The designs that came out of the computer were noticeably different though. Maybe the computer did encourage something new altogether.

Regardless, the designers of today seem worn out by it all. We’ve exhausted the computer’s ability to design in infinite ways through the trend of parametricism, a relative flash in the pan in the long view. New technology will of course continue to be folded into the design process, as it should. But I’ve seen the fatigue in the students who tepidly use AI for collecting information instead of iterating, and some who have rejected the computer and have gone back to old-school drafting. More broadly, everyone everywhere seems to be searching for ways to return craft to their lives.

Luddites are even back; maybe we’re really going post-digital.

3) A Rejection of Globalism

I had an alternative hypothesis to Claudia’s question though, because something else was going on when the “paper-architects” emerged: a massive global recession. Since many of these architects didn’t see a viable career in their futures, they turned to the drawing board, pushing their imaginations far beyond the reality that would typically constrain their designs, for better or worse.

Maybe young designers feel the same, given the current abysmal state of the job market. Not only are we careening towards a similar fiscal cliff, but more people are aware of the failures of Neoliberalism and its global homogenizing forces. The promises of one big, beautiful marketplace turned out to create few winners and wreak havoc wherever it went. Every city looks the same, the Brooklynfication of coffee shops noticeable wherever you go.

I think many are tired of this flattened earth. They want to live in places that feel like they have some unique qualities. Homogenization is comforting for the tourist, but soul-crushing for the local. For New York City, the material that carries the most local identity is the humble brick, and it’s back in full force, with some new twists.

Because we’re witnessing the collapse of the economic world order that dominated the past half century, whatever the reason for its cause, I don’t think this trend is temporary. Modernism ushered in grand theories that took over the built environment, post-modernism shattered them, and something else will come next.

In a time of such uncertainty, a retreat to locally shared values and materials is bringing some comfort. It also happens to be making New York City look like its grand old self.

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For my guest post last week with Grace Blakeley’s substack, “The Myth of the Creative Class,” I wrote about the ways certain identities prevent others from forming that might help join us together. In this case, the focus was on the myth that separates “creative” workers from the struggle of all workers.

However, there’s another relationship that looms large in this conversation: that between workers and owners. It’s an issue I’ve been thinking about as AWU continues to organize workplaces, since many of our biggest challenges revolve around the dynamic between design staff and their bosses. While in traditional labor struggles the two operate in stark opposition, the paradigm doesn’t always fit cleanly for design offices.

I’ll be honest, this one was a challenge to write. I’m reluctant to do the work for owners, and even more so to ask workers to take on more. But based on what I’ve seen in the field, I think it’s worth the thought experiment.

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Framing the Struggle

In most union campaigns, the conflict is between owners and workers. Owners usually include management, which in the US is defined as anyone with the ability to hire and fire. Everyone else technically qualifies as a worker. In the logistics sector, for example, this dichotomy is crystal clear. The people moving around the stuff are workers, and anyone overseeing this labor is included in management. The sheer size and clear division of labor makes the entry point for these campaigns much simpler. Tapping into the frustration is something that instantly unites workers around a common goal. Animus is at an all time high, to the point that warehouses are starting to burn. It appears the class conflict is growing.

In architecture offices, things are a bit different. Much of this has to do with demographics: according to the AIA, 75% of all architecture firms in the US have less than 10 employees. In terms of immediate material realities, for firms this size, the bosses are very involved in the work. While there is a hard distinction between the kinds of labor performed (bosses are rarely drafting or making models), there is a lot of contact between the two throughout the day. If you work for Amazon, you’re never meeting Jeff Bezos. If you work at an architecture firm though, you’ll being seeing your boss regularly in the office, including during those lovely holiday parties.

You might argue that this is true of any workplace of this size, and I’d agree. But what makes smaller architecture and design offices different is the studio education that feeds into it. Bosses are viewed less like owners and more like teachers. The traditions of the “atelier” model hold strong, and both middle management and staff on the bottom collectively view themselves less as workers and more as pupils. This becomes evident in the fact that early in unionization campaigns, a lot of the conflict is about who belongs on what side, because it’s generally unclear.

It’s important to note here that we can’t ignore the traditional definition of class conflict. It very much exists, and design workers become well aware of the fact that their bosses can fire them at a moment’s notice. But the proximity to the owner of the firm, who is often viewed as a mentor, muddies the waters.

A New Vision for Design Labor?

Reinier De Graaf’s book Architecture Against Architecture came out recently and has sparked a similar debate. Railing against an aging population of firm ownership (i.e. himself), the book is apparently a mix of novel critiques on the part of ownership combined with suspiciously anti-establishment take. How do you do fellow workers?

I haven’t read the book, but the debate it is inspiring is noteworthy. What is Verso doing publishing books by the owner of an architecture firm? Aren’t they a ”radical left-wing” press? Where are the workers? If anything it’s just more evidence of the ambiguous definition of class within architecture - I don’t blame Verso for lack of revolutionary voices on the labor side. While my reaction is generally one of suspicion, De Graaf’s position also suggests the potential for an alternative path.

Labor journalist , whose substack is a fantastic resource for those involved with organizing, recently framed the issue in a helpful way. Reporting on the union rally held by Bernie and Zohran this past week in New York, Noah noted that there are two primary motivations in political and organizing campaigns - fear and love - noting that each has consequences:

Starting from a place of love produces one set of politics, and starting from a place of fear produces another. You can recognize the two sets of policies that arise just by looking at the world today.

Love isn’t necessarily the word I would use here, but an analogous one might be respect. The workers we help organize operate from this perspective: they like where they work and want to make it better. They realize that their struggle is one not exclusively against the boss, but against the profession and the forces that are making it weaker. It’s all pretty hard work, but it can also be transformative:

Do you know the most frustrating things I have ever participated in, the things that made me want to scream at people and cuss them out the most? Unions! Because unions force us to deal with other people as equals, and other people have just as many annoying qualities as I do. But when I feel those frustrations, I can step back and remember that all people are the same and it is necessary for us to love one another and to embrace the principle of solidarity and therefore it is necessary to trudge the sometimes excruciating road to build the unions to win the difficult fights to take care of one another.

Obviously Noah has workers in mind here, rightfully so. But should we extend the sentiment to owners?

A Call to Owners

I’ll give it my best shot.

The ask is pretty simple: by voluntarily recognizing unions that are formed in their workplaces, owners could set a different tone in the typical labor struggles. Rather than viewing their employees as threats to their businesses, they could instead recognize them as a much stronger point of leverage. Better yet, owners could actively encourage their workers to form unions, cutting directly through the fear component of organizing.

For many on the left, this is a nonstarter. Ownership is a structural problem, and labor struggles should keep their sights squarely on those who control the means of production. While I agree with them that cooperative ownership of firms is the ideal scenario, the fact is that if unionization is difficult, getting to collective ownership is even harder. In that case unionization can be seen as a stepping stone towards broader democratic control. But for many, working with the boss is working with a persona non grata.

When the bosses are bad, this is definitely the place to start. Architecture certainly has a number of them. But in my experience most owners of small architecture firms are operating from a place of enthusiasm. They are made in the image of the petty bourgeoisie, independent owners of their work who expand this practice to a slightly bigger studio. This situates them in a strange position when it comes to class: they are owners in the traditional sense since they employ workers, but many of the values built into their practice are those of solo practitioners. In this way, they start their businesses from a deeply personal, and individualistic, place. When a union campaign emerges, they see it as an existential threat, not just a business problem.

However, in Noah’s words, this is operating out of a position of fear. They seek to cling onto control of their practice, and extension of their vision. What if instead they chose respect? Could they extend that same opportunity for excitement about the work to their employees, recognizing the dignity they deserve at the workplace? And acknowledging their critical contributions to the work? Doing so would go a long way not only to alleviate the alienation many designers feel, but extend the sense of solidarity throughout the entire workplace.

Workplace Realities

Designers at large corporate firms benefit definitely benefit from the values of traditional class struggle. But for the small shop, at what point does it become unproductive? Is it realistic to ask designers to maintain orthodox antagonisms at all costs?

Again, we underestimate the challenges of working with your boss closely everyday. Given the day-to-day realities of the small firm, workers will either have to keep antagonisms to themselves, growing increasingly miserable as they wait for their comrades to catch up (if ever), or express hostilities openly, creating a toxic environment and most likely getting fired, advancing the cause nowhere. A solution to this problem has been to dismiss such workers as too “bourgeois,” waiting for the real working class to win the struggle. In my view, for any number of reasons, we’re out of time.

My training as an architect has definitely shaped my thinking here. We start out with what we think are great ideas, but always end up with something different in the end. Some of this is thanks to cost-cutting on the part of clients, and some of it is because of unanticipated challenges. But these changes also come from working with other consultants and stakeholders who have different needs, or point out flaws in our original design. Ideas are clean, but the material world is messy. In other words, if we want to see our designs built, we have to compromise.

Structural Challenges

On the outside, the situation is worse. Firms continue to struggle against developers and clients who are able to leverage more and more wealth against them. New technologies like AI threaten to undercut their unique skills and insights. Workers are following the siren calls to leave the profession. And the public seems to care less and less about what they do.

Given the shear weight of capital-C Capital, which is highly organized and ruthlessly efficient, firms that choose to operate as individual islands will continue to flounder, and larger companies will continue to buy them up. Worsening inequality doesn’t just hurt workers, it hurts small owners too. But can they shed their egos and see that more unionized workplaces will increase their leverage in this fight? They should ask themselves: who’s the bigger threat - workers or capital?

Here again I think of William Morris. Known for his textile designs, he was an equally powerful critic of the ruling class. He spared no words when criticizing the source of oppression for workers: kings, popes, and in his time industrialists. But he was also an owner.

Founding the partnership of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and eventually an independent operation, Morris hired many workers, who he viewed as collaborators, to facilitate the manufacturing process of his designs. But his concern always remained with their wellbeing, and the wellbeing of their collective craft. For Morris the two were interlinked, and he spent much of his time outside of the workplace speaking to labor associations and social clubs about the need for an organized struggle against the ruling class. He was nothing less than a revolutionary leader.

In reality, Morris didn’t transform the discipline of design. Those in control continued to fulfill his predictions by focusing on the needs of the privileged few at the expense of the struggling many. In spite of this, his words continue to inspire many. And I tend to think he was unsuccessful in his efforts not because of his position as an owner, but because not enough others in that same position joined him.

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We absolutely should continue to take the fight to bad bosses. And let’s keep calling out exploitation when we see it, both in the university and the office. But scale also matters, and not all fights are the same. An owner of a small firm might control the lives of workers, but they have no say in the larger flows of capital, and because of their position, they never will. In workplaces like these, there’s an opportunity to rethink what labor struggles mean for everyone.

It might be reformist thinking, but the traditional framing seems to have stagnated, if not gone into complete free-fall. If we want to actually transform the economy, and society, it might be worth expanding the struggle in certain cases to include those who haven’t always been a part of it. Voluntary recognition - and encouragement - of unions would go a long way to start this process.

By taking these first steps, owners could follow the path set by Morris and turn the sights of their struggle to the real source of their problems. Until then, workers will have to continue to lead the way.

At the end of last year I shared a list of all the books I read in 2025. This year, I’m doing the same, but sharing the list quarterly. Part of what I really like about substack is that it’s full of real authors (and readers). For now, it remains a genuine space on the internet. In the same vein I like seeing what other authors are reading, which always comes with some surprises. I know in my case reading a wide range of thinkers and genres influences my writing in unexpected ways. Enjoy, and let me know what you’re reading in the comments!

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Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith

I prefer Smith’s nonfiction. She’s an astute critic of contemporary culture, cutting through a lot of the noise and always challenging her readers with something thought provoking. I particularly enjoy when she writes about her socialist upbringing in immigrant-working-class England, which to me is part of what keeps her writing so grounded. The essays on art didn’t do it as much for me though.

The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye

One of my favorite things about living in New York is the fact that you can not only regularly find books on the street, but they’re usually good books. This book by David Pye had been on my list, and one day I serendipitously found it on the next block. Pye was an expert woodworker and had some seriously strong opinions about craft; for that reason I respect the work, but disagree with many of the conclusions. Specifically his trashing of William Morris, and where he ultimately landed the plane, which was that we simply needed to work with more intention. I think big tech would like a word.

Katabasis, R.F. Kuang

This was a really fun fiction read, especially the first half. Kuang can really write a world, and I loved all the historical and philosophical references around the underworld. If you’re a student or teach at a university, you’ll get a kick out of the not-so-subtle critique of academic culture. I think it dragged a bit as it reached the conclusion, but I’m really looking forward to reading Babel, her first book set around the idea of interpreting languages.

Imperfect Solidarities, Aruba D’Souza

A very short but punchy critique of cultural and political issues surrounding mostly Israel and Palestine. Reads more like a memoir. The central idea is that “empathy” isn’t enough to make a politics of real change. If you’ve been following this issue it might feel a bit taxing, but many of D’Souza’s ideas are on point.

The Engineers and the Price System, Thorstein Veblen

Veblen is better known for writing The Theory of the Leisure Class (still on my to-read list), but this work as more relevant for the research I’m doing around craft. It’s certainly dated, but there’s a good analysis of the market-related issues with the economy, given its tendency towards concentration/monopoly. It’s pretty wild how much more mainstream it was to critique political-economy in relation to Marx. For Veblen engineers held the new keys to the engine, as factory workers were being displaced but professional jobs were increasing. It’s an argument that resonances with my work around organizing architectural workers, but one we have to be careful with as it approaches a reverence for technocratic thinking.

From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, Gene Sharp

I didn’t expect to read this with the United States in mind, but here we are. This is a famous book in other parts of the world that have struggled against dictatorships, with a set of pragmatic solutions based on observed successes. The primary take away is that non-violent struggle has always achieved the most success, and violent revolutions have overwhelming ended in worse conditions. Must read for all Americans in 2026.

On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

This has been hot in the press lately, so I had to read given my recent love for Scandinavian fiction writers. It doesn’t disappoint. The story revolves around someone who is stuck on the same day in an infinite loop, an existential retelling of Groundhog Day. You’ll be bored, but in all the right ways: each day is described in soft detail, a slow agony building in this time-based prison. I’m very excited to read the next books in the series, which apparently expand quite a bit.

Digital Design: A History, Stephen J. Eskilson

Another text for research on craft. It’s good because it’s the first book to try to write a digital design history, covering an impressive amount of ground. The chapters that trace the older digital technology are stronger than the more contemporary ones. As usual architects are the anomaly, and not in a good way. While other disciplines used emerging technology to extend previous ways of working, architects attempted to discover entirely new forms of design, through the like of Peter Eisenman and Greg Lynn. I wrote a little about this in a recent post. One gripe with this book: there are ZERO footnote or end note citations. Problematic!

The School of Night (Morning Star #4), Karl Ove Knausgård

Knausgård does it again. I don’t even want to say much about this book because it’s such a profound read, but a quick glimpse is it’s a modern retelling of Dr Faustus through an aspiring photographer in London (the Morning Star series all revolve around the return of the devil or something like it..). It’s lucid, mundane, infuriating, tragic, and eternal. This is my fourth book Knausgård, and every time I finish one of these I’m floored by the fact that someone can write fiction this well.

Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau

This is a great primer on Marxist economic theory, particularly on the hidden forces that compel people to submit to the vicissitudes of the market, even without the threat of violence (though of course capitalism was born out of violence). Central to this idea is that without working for a salary, that is entering the marketplace, you have no way to provide for your basic necessities like food and shelter, which in a past time was possible. This is a core component of capitalism, because without compelling wage-labor in this way, surplus goods and services can’t be generated. It’s super academic, meaning most of it is cross references and refutations to other Marxist thinkers. Some really insightful original thinking in the intro and conclusion, but most of it is an engagement with a history of thinking.

To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway

My parents live part time in Florida and really wanted to visit the Keys, so we joined them over spring break. And anytime I travel somewhere new I like to read something based in the place, so naturally I chose Hemingway’s only book set in the Keys. It’s a little surprising since he lived there for a decade (I highly recommend visiting his home in Key West, was the highlight of the trip.. 61 cats!). The premise of this one is interesting, as it follows a smuggler who operates between Havana and Key West around the Great Depression. Unfortunately it’s riddled with racist and sexist over-undertones, more so than other things I’ve read by Hemingway.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth

Tons of promise but falls very flat. This is one of those books I force myself to read because it’s good to read things you really disagree with every so often. But it’s never a good sign when you have to insist you’re definitely not an Eco-fascist multiple times. Or you’re not trying to say that “women should go back into the kitchen.” Kingsnorth cut his teeth in the green protest movements of the 90s, but like many has slid towards a kind of nationalistic-christian-paternalistic ideology since things didn’t quite work out. He’s very well read, but the sometimes poignant criticisms don’t really add up to much. His solution to the “machine”, a catch-all term he borrowed from many other writers, most notably Lewis Mumford, is to pray more prayers and plant more plants; to each their own.

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

I’ve been on my own “personal journey” to learn Spanish over the past year plus, and I’ve been eager to break out of graded readers and into more interesting books. I’ve read The Alchemist in English before, and while this still proved a little too difficult, I got through it and am proud of the fact that I can read most of it. (On a side note, if you also want to learn Spanish I highly recommend Dreaming Spanish, which uses “comprehensible input” - i.e. hours of listening - rather than traditional grammar exercises.) Adelante!

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I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of the New Museum. In the ten years that I’ve lived in New York, I’ve gone once and have yet to return. While overall I’m pretty agnostic, it’s hard not to feel that SANAA’s design is bold but ultimately empty. Today the shifting boxes look like a not-so-well-aged gimmick, and the circulation is a mess. Given my more boring aesthetic leanings lately, none of this should be much of a surprise. But to me it’s always felt like a student project. I don’t say this pejoratively towards students; it’s the kind of experimental project that would generate an interesting conversation at a critique, but doesn’t pass many tests in its built form. In other words it’s a risk maybe worth taking in school, but not in a dense, historically rich New York City neighborhood like the Bowery.

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While the usual suspects are gushing over it, OMA’s addition is more of the same. Presenting the “kissing corner” as something radical, it plays the time honored cliche of “respecting the past while looking to the future”. I haven’t visited yet but I have a feeling I’d be just as disappointed. According to critic Christopher Hawthorne, writer of “Punch List,” the in-person experience reveals the lackluster results as all scales, from corners that fail to kiss to loose sheet materials revealing troubling gaps.

Aesthetic critique isn’t my strong suit. I’m less interested in novel visual identities or funky massing and more concerned with quality and performance. Just to prove that I don’t hate all contemporary architecture though, I would offer the new Whitney Museum as an example of a more successful building. Part of this is because it has the benefit of standing as an object in a once industrial part of the city; the New Museum, whether it wants to or not, is forced to reckon more seriously with it’s 19th century neighbors. The designers clearly didn’t care about them, but again actions speak louder than words (or ideas in this case). Even so the execution is a mess. In contrast, the designers of Renzo Piano Building Workshop claim to care a lot about details, and it shows. The materials are elegant, the stairs and railing are crisp, and it’s clear the team worked closely with the builders to pull it all off.

What I really care about though is understanding architecture as not simply an object, but a complex interconnected system of social relations. This means first seeing the design as something conceived of by more than an individual genius, that is through a team who actually made it possible. The same idea extends to the making of the building itself, incorporating the workers who build the things that architects design. I always find it funny when architects are credited with “building” anything, because unless they are a “design-build” office, they aren’t building anything.

Beyond these concerns that are internal to the discipline of architecture are the social relations in and around any given building. In this way some old ideas are useful. Karl Marx has been an important thinker to me, less so for his (scarce) predictions about the future, and more so as a critic of real life conditions. But I think his most valuable contribution was his emphasis on the hidden impact of forces like economics on people, and conversely the impact of people on economics. When looking at large scale things like this, it is common to view “society” abstractly as a singular entity, but this comes at a cost:

This so-called contemplation from the standpoint of society means nothing more than the overlooking of the differences which express the social relation (relation of bourgeois society). Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations within which these individuals stand.

Prior to Marx, the conventional understanding of something like a factory was that it was merely a place where objects were made in order to be sold for a fair price on the market, all neatly wrapped under one roof. Workers were “free” to come and go, another aspect of the market that supposedly provided for a fair exchange between employer and employee. Above all, this whole process was governed by rational set of exchanges.

Marx dug deeper though and exposed many of the hidden realities: that workers were technically free to sell their labor, but also free from farming the land, meaning they had no way to support their livelihoods without seeking employment. And that fair exchange? Ignoring the oppressive conditions that lead to workplace reform, a wage was given for a day’s work, but how did the boss realize profit? According to Marx, the worker was only paid enough to cover their base expense to the employer, that is to be able to live, but everything else was a surplus that the employer was free to take for themselves. In this view, the profit is directly generated by the workers, with the sale of the object only being the realization of this process.

The same can be said for buildings: they are not individual objects, but “the sum of interrelations.” What about the land that any given building is built on? During Marx’s time, this land likely would have previously been held in common, used collectively to graze sheep, farm, or gather wood. With the construction of the factory, the land was forcibly removed from collective use to private ownership, destroying a previous way of life for people while converting them into wage workers. This is just another example of how examining social relations reveals a much more complicated picture than often presented.

Looking at the New Museum this way, it doesn’t appear to socially pass the test either. In writing about the grand opening, The Architect’s Newspaper covered much of the same territory about the architects and their visions. Towards the end though is an important anecdote about a recent labor struggle at the museum:

In an interview last year, writer, editor, and former New Museum union member Dana Kopel told me that although the museum foregrounded its progressive radical politics, “the harshness with which they fought the union made it overwhelmingly clear that those radical politics were for display only.” She added, “We knew that they had or were prepared to come up with $82 million for a building and couldn’t come up with the fraction of that to ensure all of their staff got paid a living wage in New York City.”

Here, behind the shiny new building, we see more of the same: supposedly progressive organizations showing their true colors when it comes to how they treat their employees.

Ten years ago, this part of the story wouldn’t have been covered. Luckily, consciousness seems to be shifting within the industry, and the reality is that social relations extend well beyond the design of a building and into its full “lifecycle.” While the decision to fund a new addition seems perfectly in step with other similar institutions, it hides the reality that the profit generated by the museum was not only overwhelmingly dedicated to this new venture, but it was taken away from the workers who were struggling for a living wage in New York City. In other words, this was an active decision to not improve (i.e. worsen) the conditions of the daily collective life of the museum and instead gamble on something that would generate hype. It’s reminiscent of Cooper Union’s recent history with its “flagship” building that jeopardized its ability to provide free tuition for its students. Luckily, the school seems to have figured out how to return to its altruistic roots, but the cost was high, and the results lackluster.

A museum is more than a building, and decisions like this speak volumes about organizations. It’s easy to write a story glorifying a flashy design, or even to rip it apart. But for those concerned about the state of our discipline, these stories still operate in the realm of ideas. Until we see all buildings in the light of their full social condition, architects and the intuitions that enable them will continue to create exorbitant designs at the expense of those who make them possible.

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The great AI gold rush continues. While competing for market share, AI companies like Anthropic periodically release labor usage data. Part fact and part fiction (in order to generate real and false hype around the technology), these data sets reveal both actual usage and desired, or what they refer to as “theoretical” usage for the company.

A chart released this week titled “Theoretical capability and observed usage by occupational category” was the most intriguing of the various included. As many pointed out, the use of a circular graph wasn’t the best design decision, but we can still glean some insights about the changes impacting the labor market (beware though: the Fortune bar chart, while easier to read, looks inaccurate compared to the Anthropic report).

For instance, sectors like “Office & admin”, “Business & finance”, and “Computer & math” have both high “Theoretical” and “Observed” AI coverage, while those like “Production” and “Installation & repair” have seen the opposite. This checks: jobs whose labor primarily relies on the computer are seeing an uptick in AI usage, while jobs that are dependent on physical labor haven’t even touched it.

However, one category doesn’t fit this correlation neatly: “Architecture & engineering”. According to Anthropic, there has been less than 5% observed usage in these categories. One might expect an alignment with the high usage categories, as jobs in such disciplines are as every bit dependent on the computer as the ones listed above. Anthropic seems to think so, giving “Architecture & engineering” over 80% potential usage, one of the highest ratings.

There’s definitely potential. As I’ve written, here craft has all but died, with manual drawing long abandoned, and even physical model making has become nothing but a tool for flashy presentations, not actual design. In this sense one would think the “Observed AI coverage” category would align with the other computerized jobs. So why hasn’t it?

Look closer at the “Construction” category: yes, we would expect this to also fall in line with other comparably jobs that are dependent on physical labor. But another factor is at play: a refusal to change. The construction industry is one of the least “progressive” industries in this sense: we’re still utilizing construction methods from the late 1800s. Here in the United States, that means stick frame building, a fast and efficient way of raising structures, especially in areas that have easy access to timber. We’ve all seen it: endless rows of yellow-brown 2x4s hoisted from the ground, with openings for windows and doors already framed. A large suburban American home can appear in as little as a few days.

Many supposed innovations have come around, and none widely adopted. Modular construction, 3D printing, and robotic assembly have all been tried and failed. The vast majority of construction, even if not wood-based, is still dependent on individual humans literally putting together buildings nail by nail and brick by brick. In a city like New York, I’m still amazed anything gets built.

When it comes to buildings, change is hard. While in manufacturing we see the most advanced machines absorbing human labor, a boon for owners at the expense of workers, this phenomenon of capitalistic development is all but absent in building construction. Of course architecture and engineering are intimately connected with the construction industry and in many ways are forced to follow the practices of builders, with designs needing to anticipate how they will be realized on site.

This doesn’t answer the question as to why, but I think some of it comes down to the fact that buildings are large, complicated, and only getting more so every year. You might argue that planes, for example, are as large and complicated to make. But the entire process of getting a building built, from permitting to design to occupation, is equally, if not more, messy. You can’t contain it in one factory or company, and this means the power struggles are equally as dispersed. While developers (capital) and builders (labor) have the most leverage, architects have benefited from being associated with the bumpy process.

I’ve been generally critical of the architecture industry, but this is one of those qualities that gives it a unique strength. Go a day without asking Claude to write your memo, and you might be better off. But go a day without housing, and your life will be a lot harder. In fact, because of this leverage, I think the entire building industry should continue, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, this “great refusal” in the adoption of technology. Writing in his great work One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that although technology has liberatory potential, it’s been used for the opposite, that is suppression:

Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. In this universe, technology also provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom of man and demonstrates the “technical” impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one’s own life.

The result is a flattening out our thought processes, bringing a kind of homogeneous existence to culture in western capitalistic societies.

It couldn’t be a more timely argument, as AI companies try their hardest to gobble up the pie (chart) of every form of labor imaginable and to convince all of us that its both inevitable and in our best interest. Though Marcuse was well ahead of his time, observing that “technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion”, there seems to be an unprecedented push-back against AI. And we’ve seen the lackluster results of the technology with writing that contains countless elementary spelling errors, art that lacks any originality, and arguments that can’t use basic logic (don’t drive to the car wash, it’s only a 5 minute walk!)

We’re at a pivotal moment when we have a choice in relation to this technology, unlike the general use of the computer. At the end of the day, we don’t have to go along with the desires of AI companies. Your boss might be forcing certain metrics on you, but if not, I’d suggest entirely avoiding it lest you want to play a hand in the negation of your own labor (or the training of death drones).

Until I see AI that actually benefits workers, or better yet, is in their control, I’ll follow Marcuse’s call, “the protest against that which is, the refusal to ‘go along’.”

This week, I’m channeling my favorite nihilistic philosophers, Linkin Park.

The web of the Epstein files continues to expand, and to the surprise of no one, some of the biggest names in architecture have been ensnared. With the latest dump of incomplete files, billionaire Thomas J. Pritzker’s name surfaced in connection to Jeffrey Epstein. While some had loose affiliations, Pritzker was one of those who continued to have regular contact even after Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. As a result, the award is in turmoil and the announcement delayed. I’m sure it’s the first domino of many to fall.

About that Pritzker Prize. Known only within our navel-gazing world as the “Nobel Peace Prize” of architecture, let me assure you that the yearly announcement of the winner is a big deal. So much so that online forums dedicate time to speculating and debating who will win architecture’s most prestigious prize (this year’s prognosticating also seems to be delayed). I haven’t seen anything yet, but it’s not long before so-called prediction markets get in on the fun.

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Deep down, though, we all know that the whole business of awards like these doesn’t really matter. In fact, I’d go further: that the apparatus of awards exists as a gate-keeping function to selectively prop-up certain practices and side-line others. Of course the results of such awards are very real, as firms that receive them are catapulted into fame (and more commissions) overnight. But even incredibly successful architects have agonized about never receiving the Oscar - I mean Nobel - of architecture, as if their careers are tarnished by not being named the best architect according to a hotel magnate.

Yes, you read that right: the Pritzker Prize was an award conceived through the Hyatt Hotel Foundation by Jay A. and Cindy Pritzker in 1979. The elder Pritzker founded the Hyatt Corporation in 1957 when he purchased the first Hyatt House motel in LA, creating the behemoth we know today consisting of over 1,450 hotels and resorts in 80 countries and nearly every continent. I don’t know what that has to do with exceptional architecture, but supposedly, the aim of the Pritzker Prize is to

“honor a living architect or architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of talent, vision, and commitment; and has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.”

Sure; subjective to say the least, and a touch melodramatic. But what this really means is that the Pritzker Prize is nothing more than a corporate trophy handed out to attention-seeking architects.

No doubt the younger Pritzker’s Epstein connection is bad. Really bad. So bad he was forced to step down from the Hyatt Corporation. But why do we put so much faith in an award given out by an organization with origins in a chain-hotel foundation? And why does everything seem to always connect back to evil billionaires?

It’s another sign of how much individualized, celebrity, money-obsessed culture has infected every part of our society. The market determines everything, and awards like this are nothing more than signals to buyers and sellers that you should employ - and emulate - a specific architect. Instead of celebrating those who do meaningful, or just plain good work, we all anxiously await to see who gets the top prize and claim of best architect, an award now undoubtedly stained by a billionaire’s bad behavior.

The whole process of awarding also takes up significant bandwidth for any organization participating in the process. Committees have to be formed, meetings attended, entries debated, and winners selected. Not to mention events planned, invitations mailed, announcements made. If we really look under the hood, we see that the whole thing exists not just to make certain architects celebrities, but also for organizations to be relevant and make some money, which at least has some utility. But at the end of the day, we all know the truth: awards don’t even matter.

With awards, there are many successful practices, and without them, there might be even more. Rather than a prize handed-out to “exceptional” architects, I’d rather see one handed out to firms that treat their employees well. Or even better, those practices given important commissions tied to public and civic work to increase their actual impact.

Architecture is a service profession, not a professional sport. We don’t need to win, and we don’t need to continue to reinforce the whimsy of billionaires’ side projects. What we need to do is meet people’s needs for spaces in order to do life in them. Let’s toss out the whole award business and put our energy to the things that really matter.

If you had told me in school that I would eventually, as an architect living in New York City, dislike almost every new building I saw, I would have told you to get behind me. But these days, as I walk around the city, I’m struck at how much I love the plainest of buildings and have a revulsion to most of the new ones.

While in school, I was not-so-subtly trained to admire only contemporary architects. Sure we studied history, but that was the past, and as designers it was our duty to envision new things. If we were to emulate any old school architects, it was the iconoclasts like John Hejduk and modernists like Alvar Aalto. In sum it was essentially forbidden to design anything remotely traditional looking (avoiding symmetry was a must), and you were shunned by your classmates if you looked backwards for inspiration. I even used to say things like “today brick isn’t an honest material.”

In the words of Hemingway, things changed gradually, then suddenly. I’ll never forget the time we were first showing my mother-in-law around NYC and dutifully defended a new building she found suspect. Claiming that more thought had gone into this new building (it hadn’t) then the others around it, I had plenty of talking points to defend my elevated sensibilities. My education had worked - I was protecting our disciplinary vision from the scrutiny of the masses. But what if I was wrong?

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A Change of Scene

The thoughts first started creeping in right before I was laid off from a structural engineering office that worked on many “starchitect’s” projects. It was exciting at first, and I learned a lot, but the world that revolved around these special buildings was simultaneously dull and brutish, with architects, engineers and other consultants burnt out from the relentless grind of fulfilling such grand, ever-changing visions. Overtime I had lost my appetite for it, and I’m sure it was noticeable, hence being shown the door.

I went to another somewhat well known office and was let go from there as well, and eventually ended up at a small firm that worked on incredibly normal projects. It was a refreshing change. The people were nice, the stress was low, and I kept learning valuable things. During this time, I had been applying to other full-time jobs, wrestling with the agonizing decision of whether to continue working for the big names doing the most avant-garde work, or to settle and pursue work that felt ethically more justifiable. Which is how I ended up working at a firm that focused on affordable housing, a surprisingly welcome return to my roots of AmeriCorps. It also didn’t hurt that the new firm offered benefits.

Almost immediately I realized how all the doubts about the lack of flashy work were overblown, and it felt like almost none of it mattered. It turned out squeezing as much good design as possible into places that normal people can actually afford to live in was more rewarding work. It was a puzzle that felt like the result actually contributed to something. But I didn’t realize I was also losing my love for contemporary architecture.

Lost in Space

I recently finished reading Digital Design: a History by Stephen J. Eskilson for some research I’m doing for another project, and the chapters on architects stood out, but not for particularly good reasons. While others like graphic designers seemed to use the tools to further a subtle evolution of their work, namely around more efficient production methods, architects were easily seduced by software. Overnight, they became lost in space. But why the sudden change? It turns out their intellectual vanguard had been primed for this by reading the likes of Deleuze in the preceding decades. Questioning everything around them, their minds were ready but their methods were not. In particular, Peter Eisenman, in an essay called “Visioning Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media,” took the Deleuzean notion of “the fold” and ran with it:

Suppose for a moment that architecture could be conceptualized as a Moebius strip, with an unbroken continuity between interior and exterior. What would this mean for vision? Gilles Deleuze has proposed just such a possible continuity with his idea of the fold. For Deleuze, folded space articulates a new relationship between vertical and horizontal, figure and ground, inside and out — all structures articulated by traditional vision. Unlike the space of classical vision, the idea of folded space denies framing in favor of a temporal modulation. The fold no longer privileges planimetric projection; instead there is a variable curvature. Deleuze’s idea of folding is more radical than origami, because it contains no narrative, linear sequence; rather, in terms of traditional vision it contains a quality of the unseen.

If you’re scratching your head, don’t worry, so am I. Some 30 years later we still haven’t managed to make buildings fold, but Eisenman had all the intellectual justification needed to do whatever he wanted when it came to architectural form.

This isn’t to say that designers didn’t have egos back in the days before modern architecture arrived, but that it was restrained by competing forces, like culture and technology. Though grand buildings like museums and churches stood out, even they seemed to obey the unspoken laws of design, the least being an acknowledgment of the other buildings around them. Continuity appeared valuable, a rhythm of the city an important part of its everyday life. In other words, their worst impulses were held at bay. Until they weren’t.

Once the computer arrived, the combination of post-modern thinking and digital liberation meant no form was out of reach, both in terms of imagination and construction. Eisenman and his predecessors like Greg Lynn pushed the boundaries of what buildings could be through entirely new forms not possible without the computer. Whereas in other disciplines the computer extended traditional ways of working, these architects used it to entirely break from their past. The possibilities were endless, but the results were unnerving. Architects could now do anything, make buildings that looked more fluid than solid, and structures that didn’t give a damn about their neighbors.

But the Bilbao effect, you say! It’s as if the torch of human progress expunges architects from any other form of social responsibility; as one of the last realms of control, what is a possibility, that is the imagination unleashed, also relegates the architect to a sandbox where they have little to nothing to say about the serious issues swirling around them. Some of you might object that this is only a small percentage of architects, but the cancer has spread: just look at any new school or hospital in any small town and you’ll see traces of this kind of thinking.

Embracing Plainness

Which is how we ended up where we are now: rows of buildings that have something in common, an elegant plainness, abruptly broken up by expressions of ego and inability. Sometimes it works, but here in New York, if you walk around any of the other boroughs, it often fails spectacularly. The old buildings aren’t without their flaws, namely their lack of accessibility and antiquated heating methods, but they do have a normalcy that I have come to love. I don’t mind walking around Brooklyn surrounded by architecture that acts like a backdrop at times. I can pay attention to subtle details when I want, or simply let the city meander by. What I don’t appreciate is a bad new building that screams for me to look at it for no particularly good reason (I’m looking at you, One Grand Army Plaza).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to new things. I still prefer an elegant new building. When executed well, it feels right that our new works should reflect contemporary building practices while having some acknowledgement of their context. I think of architects like Peter Barber in the UK or Mexican architect Frida Escobedo who masterfully blend the old and the new (Escobedo’s office designed a new building on Bergen Street in Brooklyn that I quite like).

What these architects help produce is good, but it’s very rare. Too often we end up with clunky eyesores, buildings that pay little to no thought about the history around it using as many materials as conceivable (I’m convinced there’s a connection to the computer here). Not to mention it can’t hurt sometimes to listen to what folks like about certain buildings. But if architects can get their designs back to reality, maybe they’ll have something worth saying about it.

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I’m often asked what I think about Artificial Intelligence when it comes to creative and design-based work. I answer that honestly, I’m not too worried. Like the Segway before it, the promises of the technology are being quickly outpaced by its flaws. The only convincing arguments I’ve heard are related to medicine for things like cancer screenings. Otherwise, the technology only makes simple tasks a little more convenient, the user a little more lazy.

Everyday we’re hearing more talk of a bubble built on hungry investors sold on the unrealistic hype of profit and productivity, while more cultural commentary is both pushing back and ridiculing the technology. A recent trend on social media involves asking ChatGPT and other LLMs (Large Language Models) a series of questions that results in an embarrassing inability to spell simple words like “Strawberry,” or even darker, psychotic sounding breakdowns. If AI struggles to spell the name of a common fruit after stealing thousands of hours of other people’s writing, I doubt it will be able to approach the complexity of designing a production ready chair or creating DOB approvable plans.

Am I concerned when it comes to my students ability to read and write critically? Absolutely. Over the past few years I’ve seen more dependence on AI with students for not just understanding books, but writing critically about them. I don’t want to downplay the fact that AI is destroying a fundamental part of education as we know it; as an avid reader and writer this deeply worries me. Losing another act of engaged slowness in an increasingly fast world isn’t something we need. Our response requires creative problem solving to reward humanistic work rather than punishing the use of the technology. In my class this means small adjustments like bonus points for handwritten notes. But when it comes to design, the current iteration of AI has inherent structural problems that prevent it from completing the complex tasks associated with the deepest parts of human intelligence.

While workers whose trades are built on digital means, such as programmers and video game designers, are at a high risk of being placed by machines, designers whose trade has a connection with making physical things are more insulated from the effects of AI. This might sound like good news for these designers, but what I’m more worried about has deeper roots. We see it come to light when technology is happily adopted without any push-back, without the outcry we have with AI. More broadly it’s things like social media and ride-sharing apps, technology that has completely reoriented our social space without much thought from the general public. Only when it’s too late do we notice the consequences.

Again, designers might feel insulated because of the complex nature of their history and work, which involves bringing disparate parts together in unimagined ways, all deeply human activities. But what happens when craft no longer exists?

The power of (people’s) history

Historian Mary N. Woods, whose book From Craft to Profession was instrumental in researching my own book, shows us the power of history that shifts its focus away from traditional design discourse and instead towards the social relations that make it possible. Woods is quite candid in the work, telling her readers why she felt it necessary to write a book like this:

This study foregrounds the mise-en-scene of the architectural profession. It is a challenge to what one architectural historian called “Roarkism,” our discipline’s traditional focus on the architect as solitary creator to the exclusion of other narrators and narratives. This work also foregrounds the business aspects of practice that some scholars contend architectural historians routinely ignore or deny. My concern is with multiple participants, overlapping responsibilities, and the settings for design and building. I am interested in architecture as work and business, not in its typical guises as art or problem solving.

I couldn’t agree more with Woods, who was well ahead of her time when she wrote this book over 25 years ago. We have more than enough histories that venerate heroic buildings designed by “singular” men. It’s almost entirely what students are taught about the history of architecture or any design discipline: here is a series of great men that made great works, and you can be great too. While a rare character like William Morris occasionally pushed back, this is the overwhelming ideology of design education.

Underneath this primary critique though is an important observation: over time, what began as a craft in the 18th century slowly morphed into a profession during the 19th century. Most conventional histories would tell you that this was a conscious decision by those in the discipline, that they wanted to be taken more seriously or protect their interests. But Woods reminds us that history rarely works this way, and that rather than people changing the things around them through ideas alone, it is often other forces like technology and economics that have a greater impact on these changes:

My subject is not architecture per se but why and how certain designers and builders chose to practice as professionals at a particular moment in American history. I do not argue, nor do I believe, that professionalization necessarily led to better design and construction. It was, instead, a response to a confluence of economic, social, and ideological issues in nineteenth-century America.

Following Woods’ thinking, it begs the question: what are the forces shaping design most strongly today? I don’t think it is, or will be, AI, but I think it’s already been happening for decades.

The technological revolution, and the revolution yet to come

For design, in recent history the most consequential of these developments was the release of Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Along with its graphic counterparts in the Adobe Creative Suite (e.g. Photoshop), these software programs completely revolutionized the way design was done. While they incorporated the manual tools used by designers, things like pencils and brushes, they utilized this very human labor to remove it from the physical world. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse, these machines didn’t just borrow, but stole this human labor by consuming something that took people thousands of years to develop within the span of a decade:

In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but it rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital.The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.

Because our tools are so integrated into these softwares, we are tempted to feel like we are performing the same kind of labor we always have. Which is why so few have pushed back against these creative digital companies. Things felt the same, but they were cleaner and faster. What’s not to love? But like Marx observed in the 19th century, today software companies like Autodesk and Adobe have followed the very same process of “accumulation of knowledge.” While our skills aren’t embedded in physical machines, they have similarly been “absorbed into capital as opposed to labour.”

The consequences are stark, but technology isn’t the only culprit. What might have started as something arguably altruistic - making more efficient software - can’t be understood without its connection to the economy. Just like developers finance affordable housing because there profit to be made, similarly tech companies make software in order to extract rents. Some economists like Yanis Varoufakis even argue that we’re facing a whole new economic system oriented around this “technofuedalism.” But if we look back, as Woods teaches us to do, we find architecture right behind other professions in terms of a general degradation, with craft at the center:

If physicians can fall so precipitously, a weak profession historically tied to the marketplace like American architecture has little chance. Ever since the decline of the master artisans amid pressures of early nineteenth-century capitalism, American building has been an increasingly competitive and fragmented market… Mastering such a fragmented market seems impossible given architects’ stock-in-trade, whether aesthetics or social engineering, has never been a priority of either capitalism or the state of America.

Brutal. And then the trend has only gotten worse in the past 20 years. But just because our connection to craft has been severed, and our profession degraded, doesn’t mean we can’t borrow the best elements of those skills while abandoning the identity that is holding us back. If we went from craft to profession, what’s next?

This week political writer published another insightful piece of history about the two threads of unionization in the United States: craft-based unionism and class-based unionism (I highly recommend reading the full post for anyone interested in labor history). The essay is a convincing argument that the craft-based form of organizing, that is around particular trades, is outdated and ineffective for the moment we find ourselves in. With an economy owned by a few people with insane amounts of money, only a class-based unionism can challenge such power.

In addition to the obvious technological weakness, such as the fact that almost no designers make anything by hand anymore, the craft-based union movement also had other social weaknesses. Horn writes:

By organizing only particular trades, craft unionism excluded large swaths of workers, especially immigrants, Black laborers, women, and the unskilled or semi-skilled masses who populated the most precarious sectors of industrial capitalism. The labor movement that resulted was fragmented and sectional rather than universal. It resembled a federation of protected guilds more than a unified class organization.

It’s another reminder that now is a good time for designers to face reality and drop identities, or “consciousness,” built on the craft-trade movement, and individual practice professionalism, and instead build new ones based on labor. In other words, designers would be wise to accept that for all the historical trends and current realities, they have become part of the working class. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Hollywood writer’s strike is a great example of the power of labor to push back against technology, but we need more sectors to join the struggle. I’m certainly eager to see what happens to history when the workers who are responsible for imagining future buildings and products join with those who build them.

I wasn’t planning on writing another “topical news story” post this week. There’s a lot I’m eager to write about regarding AI, craft, and a host of other important issues our discipline and society are wrestling with. But once again the architecture establishment has shown us its complete detachment from reality. Or maybe it’s complete acquiescence to it.

On Monday, the Architect’s Newspaper shared news that prominent firms including Zaha Hadid Architects, Adjaye Associates, AECOM, and Grimshaw submitted proposals to a U.S. Department of Transportation RFI (Request for Information Responses) for a new terminal at Dulles Airport that will be named after Donald Trump. (On a side note, Dan Roche and the AN have been doing some excellent reporting lately, including on the Snøhetta story and others related to the work of AWU).

Seemingly unaware that the administration is currently terrorizing immigrants and citizens alike, with at least 32 dying in custody in addition to those recently murdered in broad daylight, these firms have chosen to look the other way and pursue profit over any sense of ethics or morals, designing a building that honors the person behind the chaos. Sleek renderings (soon to be generated by AI) show clueless travelers shopping at Chanel and Ralph Lauren, the most anemic expression of a narrow world-view possible through the architectural imagination.

It’s another blow to those of us who care about what is going on beyond our profession, or even simply improving our own deteriorating conditions. But the trend is clear: as we saw with the tech companies who bent their knees the minute Trump was elected, the kinds of architecture practices that have developed in the post-war period have no ability, ironically, to respond to fascism in any other way than capitulation. While the tide might be changing ever so slightly, their true colors have been on display for the past year. There is only one motivation: profit.

Just like said tech companies, many architecture firms followed the way the wind was blowing during the George Floyd protests and issued tepid statements of support for their employees’ calls of taking serious growing DEI efforts. Four years later, it’s difficult to see any remnants of such progressive thinking, and the facade has dropped. The Dulles Airport competition all but assures us that the book is closed for our supposed leaders. Back to chasing commissions without all the performative displays; I’m sure they’re relieved.

So what is to be done?

Something that happened last week gives us direction in navigating these uncertain times. Uniting its various constituent members, the AFL-CIO joined other community organizations to hold the first general strike in decades. Though it was only one day, it’s a massive development, in two ways: first, that the labor movement is waking from its long slumber to create a massive mobilization of workers, and 2) that the general public is raising its class consciousness through an understanding that one of the most effective ways of undermining authoritarian governments is by withholding from it both labor and capital.

This idea is quickly becoming popular, with actors and other media figures who represent the highest elements of elite circles echoing the call for a national strike. We haven’t seen this level of broad popular support for the idea in at least a generation. In addition to another strike happening today, keep an eye on 2028; the UAW’s Shawn Fain has been coordinating contracts across the country to end on May Day of that year, paving the way for a real general strike.

For architects and designers, we should be ready to also heed the call of the general strike. If it is possible to avoid work, that is the best option. But this is not always possible for workers. Other actions can include a spending freeze on corporations (the surest way to get the current administration to panic is through the stock market), continued mobilization on the streets (something architects are shy to do), and longer scale projects of forming other networks of solidarity (re: unions). As Gene Sharp describes in From Dictatorship to Democracy, a sadly relevant text for the current state of America, “a strategy has been compared to the artist’s concept, while a strategic plan is the architect’s blueprint.”

This latter point is our focus at Architectural Workers United. We’re organizing several offices in order to help these workers not only improve their working conditions, but bring democracy to the workplace and the discipline at large. Admittedly though, designers are often a bit perplexed when we first share this idea with them.

But as they begin the work of organizing, including having discussions with coworkers about what isn’t functioning, they begin to realize that their workplace is anything but democratic. In fact, it appears more like a (sometimes benevolent) dictatorship, with one or a small handful of people making the decisions that affect working conditions for all. It’s especially surprising when they begin to realize that this is how the entire profession is “organized.”

Sound familiar? No doubt there is a connection between the decline of participation in unions and the correlative decline in democracy on a national level. When people are isolated in the workplace, they are in turn isolated from their community and society. In addition to the traditional wage struggles, as political scientist Robert Putnam observed, unions were an integral part of the social fabric that has since frayed; we’re not just bowling alone, but working, and struggling, alone. It’s a reminder that while our immediate problems are indeed pressing, and we should engage them in the ways mentioned above and beyond, we also need to keep the long game in mind.

The erosion of labor unions in the United States was no accident. As the late Jane MacAlevey argues, this has been a designed, systemic attack on workers rights orchestrated by a small group of corporate actors and conservative activists. If we want to address the deepest illnesses within our democracy, it starts by building alternative spaces of expression like unions.

The road is long, but by building a workers movement within not just architecture, but all sectors, we will set ourselves up well to create local and national organizations and governments that reflect the will of everyday people. Though not perfect, labor friendly states like New York, Massachusetts and Hawaii are a testament to the power of labor to shape better societies in contrast to their “right-to-work” counterparts.

Getting architectural workers to see this is challenging. They’ve been trained in ways to focus on issues only related immediately to design, with courses and professional organizations that do their hardest to keep the blinders on while they toil away in studios run by the narrowest of interest. Which is exactly how we get to the point that some of the most prominent architectural firms in the world gladly respond to requests to design an airport named for the least democratic president in our lifetime.

I wish I could write about something else this week. But the reality is we live in a moment of profound change, and while things feel precarious, with that uncertainty brings the reality that the future is up for grabs. I know myself and the majority of architectural workers, the folks I talk to every week, want nothing other than to make the world around them a little better. But we should also continue to pressure those in power, both nationally and within all of our individual disciplines.

If anything, the past decade has taught us that the establishment isn’t going to save us. This is especially true in a discipline built on myths like the “creative genius.” Even when those who promise change come to power, when their work is built on the cult of individualism and personality they tend to fall into the same rhythms of stagnation and corruption. On the rare occasion that a real public servant like Zohran Mamdani arises, it is still on us to answer his call to continue the work of politics by attending rallies and pressuring elected officials and others in power to answer to us, the people.

In this moment, we have the opportunity to build powerful alternative democratic structures. With it we can elevate those to leadership who represent the interests of workers in architecture and beyond, for the betterment of our profession and the society it serves. While what I write here is my own opinion, I know from the work that I do that a large number of workers are exasperated by the direction of their profession, a direction undetermined by them - for now. Talking to workers who are organizing, I have a feeling many are done waiting for change; whether they know it or not, their actions today are shaping a more democratic future for everyone.

Last week, the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) issued a complaint against Snøhetta, a prominent international architecture firm based in New York City. To my knowledge, this is the first time an architecture firm has ever received a complaint from the NLRB for evidence of violating the NLRA (National Labor Relations Act).

This is not to say that an architecture firm has never violated the act; there’s more than enough anecdotal evidence from the SHoP campaign (the first unionization campaign), and no doubt there are firms working now to quash any organizing that is happening. Generally wherever there is a union campaign, it’s not uncommon to find tactics that management uses to put an end to things before they go too far for their liking.

What makes the complaint filed by the NLRB so damning though is that it is notoriously difficult to provide evidence of union-busting, or any form of retaliation against employees. Much of it happens behind closed doors or through implicit pressures and scare tactics in the day-to-day operations of the office. However, if a case reaches the level that the one with Snøhetta has, the implication is that there is enough evidence to prove a violation of the act.

The evidence will come to light as the case proceeds to a trial, but indications are it is historically bad. According to New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber:

William Haller, a lawyer for the union, said in an email that the union did not yet have evidence of misconduct before the July 2023 deadline to file an election challenge. But he wrote in an October 2023 letter to the labor board that, in 32 years as a labor lawyer, he had “never seen such glaring evidence of blatant antiunion animus.”

As architects aren’t known for being good at business, I’m not entirely surprised.

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What is particularly egregious of the allegations is where they happened: New York City. Not only is New York State the most labor-friendly state in the country, with a union-density rate of 20% in a country that averages 10%, but New York City is the so-called capital of it. In the Big Apple, the AFL-CIO alone represents over 1 million workers. Here politicians are required to show their labor bona-fides, and a lack of support from unions can be a death sentence to many campaigns. However, when it comes to private business, many NYC companies, not just Snøhetta, claim a progressive image when it comes to social issues, but quickly abandon it when it comes to labor rights. For a firm with an office in heavily-unionized Norway, it’s especially disingenuous. But it’s a pattern we see time and time again in liberal institutions more broadly.

In a country that is notorious for its anti-labor ideologies, it’s a tough competition to win the best union-buster. But if the allegations in the complaint prove true, Snøhetta might eventually take the award. In a cartoonish email exchanged, one of the partners noted: “Now it’s up to me to design some prophylaxis against any such future efforts.” The anti-labor stance amongst partners and managers in the architecture industry stands in stark contrast to the appetite for new forms of practice in younger generations of workers, and for the rest of the country for that matter. Once again, the architecture establishment has proved itself well behind its base, one that is looking for the industry to be more progressive when it comes to both its projects and people.

Not surprisingly, these high-profile firms continue to win accolades from prominent industry groups. Will the AIA rescind its recent award to Snøhetta? Unlikely. Groups like the AIA have done the bare minimum to engage in the conversation around unionization, and everything to prop up the status quo of starchitecture and individual genius. Much of their credibility is built on a form of gate-keeping through doling out awards to glamorous firms. To their credit, AIANY awarded Andy Bernheimer the merit award after his workers voted to unionize (disclaimer: I was one of them). But it took Bernheimer’s own advocating of pro-labor sympathies to underscore that his success was built by all of his employees; in other words, the award was not possible without them. It was a striking example of labor solidarity on the part of a firm owner (the whole speech is worth a watch). Now would be a good moment for a pivot by the AIA in a similar direction.

When reflecting on all of this, I’m reminded of the words of Antonio Gramsci: “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” Entrenched institutions in architecture, just like any industry, have been built up through decades of ideological backing from corporate media, universities, owners, and yes, even workers. These structures of power will cling to the comforts of norms for as long as they can, and the struggle to subvert them is a daunting one.

Cracks continue to emerge in the facade though. In addition to the tumult of the #metoo movement, the reaction to Frank Ghery’s passing has been noticeably different than of past “starchitects.” As I wrote recently, while there was much to celebrate, an integral part of Ghery’s legacy was its dependence on the culture of celebrity, in his case built through a dominance of technology. It seems we’re facing far too many polycrises to continue to maintain a status quo holding up a privileged few while so many are left behind. Architectural workers are no exception.

In light of the news this week, workers that are currently or thinking about organizing should feel confident that even with the current federal administration, those who violate the NLRA will be held accountable. As I told Dezeen magazine, “In a labor town like NYC, elected officials in the city council and the mayor’s administration should be working with architecture firms that support their own workers.” Amidst a surge of labor organizing across other industries, now is the time for architectural workers to take advantage of the unprecedented support, especially in cities like New York with the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. While they face many headwinds as an industry that has never been organized, our current climate presents a unique opportunity to permanently change the industry from one that favors owners to one that unabashedly supports workers.

The fired workers who courageously filed their unfair labor practice claims should be recognized as such; in a culture like the one architecture thrives in, it was no easy task to stand alone amidst the intense pressure. Our work is one step further because of them. But it would be foolish to let their good deeds go to waste.

This spring, I’ll be teaching a graduate seminar at Parsons that is structured around my book The Labor of Architecture called “Labor and Design.” Before we begin the semester, I wanted to expand on an article I wrote last week for Democracy at Work called “The Path to Socialized Design Runs through the University.”

My work for Architectural Workers United and D@W is mostly focused on results around organizing architectural workers. The only way we can say we’re having a measurable impact isn’t through engagement on Instagram, but with the meetings we’re having with workers as they strategize and organize their workplaces. The good news is there are some exciting development we’re hoping to announce soon. But at the same time, it’s easy to feel discouraged for everyone involved, as the work is challenging and slow, especially for a discipline with almost no history of organizing. But while those of us with progressive politics are constantly thinking about the future, it’s equally important to reflect on deep and recent history as we try to understand why it’s so hard to change certain things.

In design, this means a sober assessment of education. As I wrote last week, more so than other industries, the ideologies that carry architecture and design forward are baked in the university. While workplaces are happy to use these ideologies to their advantage, most of the work instilling them is completed long before new employees arrive at the office.

In the most stark example of this, teachers tap former students for employment, with a strong sense of loyalty and patronage not found in a “cold” hire. Design isn’t alone in this phenomenon, but rarely are principals at schools teaching at universities as well, for example. In design fields, a large percentage of faculty members are those of practice, meaning they both own firms and teach at the same time. While this is important for educating future professionals, especially from a technical-knowledge standpoint, it also creates unique barriers towards ideas like class consciousness.

This is all context for the profession, which is important because it creates a very unique education model that both centers students while alienating them from other important forms of learning. This is why I chose to model the labor and design seminar I’m teaching not off of traditional design education, but instead a traditional liberal arts education. In 2022 I started taking graduate courses at the New School for Social Research, and the experience completely changed the way I viewed design.

The strength in design education is that the work, or labor, is centered on the student. In studios, students are given prompts by their professors, but each week is centered around what are called “desk-crits”, which is really just a colloquial term for a one-on-one meeting between teacher and student. Because design labor (in education) is so involved, the easiest way to progress is by collectively looking at the work the student has produced at their desk. It seems simple, but this alone subverts traditional learning models where the teacher stands in front of the class via lecture, a symbolic and real form of authority. The same thing happens even at formal “pin-ups” or reviews. Although guests might come, each conversation is directly centered on the student’s work. For many students, the process is one of deep self-discovery and meaning.

When I was a student, I saw it as an exhilarating form of self-discovery revolving around developing my own creative process. But what allowed me to really understand the power, and peril, of this educational model was by reading The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian educator, philosopher and activist Paulo Freire. To use his phrase, design education is “dialogical,” meaning it is not done through “banking,” or depositing information into student’s brains, but through their own voice. It also produces truly critical thinkers; because of the slowness of designing something over an entire semester, along with the ample criticism received, students are taught to think deeply about problems they encounter. In a world of universities that increasingly focus on grants and research over student learning, it is a powerful model that we should fight to keep relevant.

But here also lies the inherent weakness in design education: a lack of critical thinking and reflecting through other disciplines. The two biggest weakness with this are that A) students miss out on the depth that the liberal arts (and philosophy, economics, sociology, etc) have to offer them, and B) they become accustomed to a very individualized form of learning. This produces designers who see the objects they are designing as isolated things, not elements embedded in a broader social and economic context. Conversations revolve around aesthetics and form, with ideology in both education and practice obsessed with an individual’s ability to deliver exceptional products, but not much more. As I wrote last week, this is also one of the primary ways that workers remain resistant to collective action. Why do unions matter if the your sole purpose is to design beautiful things?

My “re”education at the NSSR filled these gaps in a way that my two degrees in architecture never could. When I started taking courses at the NSSR, most were in Philosophy, reading the usual suspects like Plato and Descartes. But the course that changed everything for me was one called “Rethinking Class” by Nancy Fraser. A political philosopher, Fraser taught in a way that balanced close reading of texts with discussions around broader concepts and current political events. For me, that meant bringing the organizing work I was doing into the classroom, creating an invaluable space to dig deeper into long-held ideas that were keeping architects from discussing ideas related to “class.” Without this deep time engaging with thinkers from the past and present, I wouldn’t have had a chance to bring together theory and praxis in a way that challenged each. It’s the kind of learning that, given the downward trajectory of universities in the United States right now, might continue in the revitalization of worker education programs. But for now, I hope to continue the spirit with my students in our seminar.

So for “Labor and Design,” we’ll be following the footsteps of a traditional liberal arts education. There will be no drawings, models, or other visual arts. We will simply read texts from other disciplines and discuss what these ideas might have to say about design, not the other way around. The only thing students will have to turn in is a paper. It might sound banal, but for those with the blinders of design education on, it will hopefully be eye-opening.

Both kinds of education, examined together, are what made writing The Labor of Architecture possible, and it’s what I’ll focus on for the next few months. But this is why it’s so troubling with what’s happening to the NSSR right now. I wouldn’t have been able to critically examine the fundamental changes happening within architecture without learning from critical theory, philosophy, and the liberal arts. I hope to keep the spirit of the NSSR alive in my course; it’s the least I can do for the doors it opened up for me.

Every year I make a goal of reading 50 books. Surprisingly, people are genuinely interested in what I’m reading. So, for my last post of the year, I decided to share a list of my favorite books in addition to a comprehensive list (I track all my books past, present and future on StoryGraph). You’ll find mostly nonfiction (economics, politics, sociology etc), some new and old fiction, and, because I’m not a very good architect, little architecture.

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Top 5 non-fiction books of 2025

America, Ameríca, Greg Grandin

If you’ve been around me for more than five minutes this year, chances are you’re tired of hearing me talk about this book. In addition to being one of the most digestible and comprehensive works of history I’ve ever read, it sheds a new light on the complicated and interdependent relationship between the United States/North America and South America, beginning with the dual Spanish and English colonizations of the two continents. It’s also incredibly timely given the troubling developments in Venezuela in the latter half of 2025. Looking forward to reading more Grandin in 2026.

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevey

Such an important book in the times we find ourselves in. McAlevey was a legendary labor organizer who tragically passed away in 2024. This is her second book I’ve read, but is the more important one because it’s full of data, case studies, and potent suggestions for organizers. It’s an expansion of her dissertation at CUNY, and the research extends McAlevey’s writing in a powerful direction.

Sticks and Stones, Lewis Mumford

Mumford’s magnum opus is Technics and Civilization, but Sticks and Stones is a fun journey through architectural development in the United States from the beginning to roughly the mid-20th century, or modernism. Not trained as an architect, Mumford has a sharp eye for not just analyzing styles, the realm most architects are stuck in, but the social and economic relations that influenced the production of such styles. For me, it’s a much more powerful way of understanding the built environment.

The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois

I’ll admit I’ve started and not finished Black Reconstruction, parts of which were important to the research in The Labor of Architecture. I’ll finish it one day, but in the meantime I read The Souls of Black Folk for another class I was taking this semester and was reminded of how wonderful a writer Du Bois was. It’s of course of a very particular time, but the breadth and depth of the essays makes for a read anyone will enjoy. I particularly liked On the Dawn of Freedom, a shorter history on the Freeman’s Bureau, one of the most radical and short-lived experiments in the United States.

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,

Critical look from the eyes of a reporter at the powerful but ultimately ineffective mass movements of the 2010s. At the heart of Bevins thesis is that the movements were all built on horizontalism, and the lack of leaders who could succinctly and potently convey a broader message was their ultimate demise. Essential reading for anyone organizing or participating in social movements.

Honorable Mentions:

Why Not Socialism? G.A. Cohen

A short and sweet treatise on the idea of socialism, the argument revolves around the emancipatory conditions of the camping trip, a scenario in which all our competitive capitalistic tendencies are briefly suspended for a short, beautiful moment of solidarity and cooperation. It’s two of my favorite subjects in one book, you can finish it in an afternoon.

The Labor of Architecture, C.G. Beck

An incredible, timely work… kidding. But please buy it! I won’t be offended if you never read it.

Top 5 fiction books of 2025

The Third Realm (Morningstar #3), Karl Ove Knausgård

These have been the books I’ve started out the past few years with. They’re incredibly dark, the story revolving around a demonic star and resurfacing of Satan himself, though these provocative plot points only surface rarely between hundreds of pages of Nordic life. But if you’re familiar with Knausgård’s writing, you know it’s addicting. I’m still waiting for number 4 to show up at the library.

Kudos (Outline #3), Rachel Cusk

I’ve been obsessed with this trilogy too over the last couple of years. Rachel Cusk writes in a strange prose and with minimal subject matter; the books are essentially philosophical ideas expressed through characters in everyday situations. I can’t get enough. Be warned - my wife and I are a house divided on this one.

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño

When I travel to a new country, I like to read some history and fiction to ground me in the spirit of the place. For Chile, Bolaño is a great place to start. He might be better known for his tome 2666, but By Night in Chile (Nocturno de Chile) is a short story following the reflections of a priest on his deathbed. You’ll encounter the complex history of faith in the country, as well as its darker moments around the coup and Pinochet.

Amity, Nathan Harris

Picked up this one from the library late this year with no prior knowledge (love when that happens). It’s a harrowing journey of a former Slave that begins in New Orleans and takes him, the daughter of the family he serves, and his loyal dog Oliver across the border to Mexico. It’s interspersed with the story of his sister who makes the journey ahead of him, though I won’t reveal much more. It’s a fast-paced “western” with a spin, and it’s obvious Harris did his research into the interesting history.

The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov

I can’t say I loved this one, but I have to include it because it’s one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. Platonov, a witness to the Russian Revolution, allegorizes a major historical event through the metaphor of a building foundation that, as it is dug by workers, turns into a grave for them. Buried in the turbulence of history, its resurfacing leads to a wild ride.

Full List

(in chronological order, bold are my favorites)

January

1. The Third Realm, Karl Over Knausgård

2. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf

3. One-dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse (re-read)

4. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

February

5. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher

6. Kudos, Rachel Cusk

7. Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Finally Make Time for What Counts, Oliver Burkeman

8. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi (started in 2023, finally finished)

March

9. New Islands: And Other Stories, María Luisa Bombal

10. The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson

11. By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño

12. Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kōhei Saitō

13. Love Poems, Pablo Neruda

14. A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, Pamela Constable, Arturo Valenzuela

15. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett

April

16. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins

17. Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar

18. Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat, Victor Figueroa Clark

May

19. The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov

20. Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, Stephen a. Resnick, Richard D. Wolff

21. Beartooth, Callan Wink

22. Still Another Day, Pablo Neruda

23. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vara

June

24. The Jobless Future, Stanley Aronowitz, William Difazio

25. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

26. Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle, Jamie Woodcock

27. On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti

July

28. Abundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

29. The Bee Sting, Paul Murray

30. First Spanish Reader: A Beginner’s Dual-Language Book (Beginners’ Guides), Ángel Flores

31. Material and Mind, Christopher Bardt

August

32. So Far Gone, Jess Walter

33. America, América: A New History of the New World, Greg Grandin

September

34. Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI, Madhumita Murgia

35. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

36. Introducing Marxism: A Graphic Guide, Rupert Woodfin

37. The Physics. Writings on Natural Philosophy (Concise Edition), Aristotle

38. Sticks and Stones, Lewis Mumford

October

39. Design After Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow, Matthew Wizinsky

40. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois

41. Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen

42. One hundred years of solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

43. Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners, Olly Richards

44. Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

November

45. The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman

46. Exile and the Kingdom, Albert Camus

47. The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing, Francis Flaherty

48. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane McAlevey

December

49. Some Personal Observations on the Ancestry, Birth & Life of the Republic of Vermont, Vrest Orton

50. Amity, Nathan Harris

51. A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty

On deck for 2026 (tbd)

• Digital Design: A History, Stephen J Eskilson

• Capital Volume II, Karl Marx

• The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgård

• El Alquimista: Una Fabula Para Seguir Tus Suenos, Paulo Coehlo

• We Are the Union, Eric Blanc

• On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

• The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, Rosa Luxemburg

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

• The End of the Myth, Greg Grandin

• To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, Huey P. Newton

• Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, Tenth Anniversary Edition, John Mason Hart

• After Capitalism, David Schweickart

We’ve made incredible gains in our organizing work this year, with many active campaigns and several new inquiries. But there’s still a persistent challenge that we confront when working with architects, and it has us returning to the same question: why is it so hard for architects to see themselves as working class? The very idea is still so contested within the discipline that forming any union has workers doing the double work of not only organizing, but shifting their identities, or what is often called consciousness; it’s no small task. I’m confident architects will outgrow their old identities (there’s plenty of evidence that they already are), but there is still a long way to go before we’ve reached a substantial bloc who have a different understanding of class.

At the core of The Labor of Architecture is a question related to the challenges above, which is: why did it take so long for architects to organize into a union? Of course the idea of class consciousness is directly tied to this question, a concept that is entirely new to the discipline besides a small blip during WWII (If you’ve seen the movie Oppenheimer, you’ll recognize the acronym FAECT). For our union effort to accelerate, we have to fully understand the unique challenges that prevent a particular kind of class consciousness within architecture.

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The first barrier for a new class consciousness, which is fairly common today worldwide but especially acute in the United States, is the economic theory of class. If you’re like me, this is how you understood the word class, a three-part categorization based solely on money. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that this theory shaped every bit of my reality prior to forming our union.

In this theory, we find the Upper, Middle, and Lower categories. According to the Pew Research Center, about 30% of Americans fall into the first category, 50% into the second, and 20% into the third. Even here we can point out the flaws associated with this on economic terms, like the fact that the “Upper” category obscures a class within the class that has an outsized role in shaping society through an absurd amount of wealth. Put another way, there’s a big difference between the top 1% and the remaining 10%, let alone the top .01%

So why am I using the term theory? Because that’s what it is, nothing more than one way of seeing something (the Greek root of the word theory is theōria, shared with theater, meaning a particular view of something.) If it was easier to see it like this, then the term would suffice. Unfortunately, every part of our capital-dominated society fights tooth and nail to ensure that this is presented as a fact, the singular way of viewing class. Which is why a better term might be ideology. Once you realize this, you see it everywhere: from our earliest social circles in school, to our predetermined career paths, to our communities in adult hood, the pressures of society do everything they can to sort us into these three categories. And it largely works. Based on the numbers, it’s no wonder politicians spend a lot of time appealing to the Middle Class, while selling the idea that anyone can make it there and beyond.

The second “barrier” theory, one popularized by sociologist Richard Florida, is that of a “Creative Class.” For Florida this was a catchy label to put on some research based mostly around millennials re-occupying cities hollowed out by their parents and grandparents, and in the process discovering that the city had better vibes for a certain kind of life. According to Florida, this shift was so strong and so permanent that this “creative class” emerged as a new socio-economic group that would rewrite the future of the United States. This didn’t quite pan out; creating a new class out of character traits that are arguably real is largely an identity game. But there are some clues that help us understand how professionals like architects see themselves.

If our first theory prompts an “economic” consciousness, then our second one presents a “creative” consciousness, an idea I devote an entire chapter to in my book. In addition to the way I described theory above, I also tend to think of the term consciousness in this regard as an identity-based “pull” towards something. For the economic case, it is a pull towards seeing the world, and making decisions about it, through money. The same is true for the creative case. So how is our perception of the world shifted when we remain there?

For architects, creativity is king: it’s the trait that we’re first taught, and it’s the primary identity we carry through our careers. From the first minutes in studio, architects are educated to be problem solvers not through traditional means found in science or math, but through something more esoteric and closer to the arts. It is a process of “self-discovery” that has them finding their own unique ways of approaching problems, through a particular creative process. Spending a whole semester designing a project, they became intimately acquainted with their creative strengths and weaknesses, supposedly unique to them.

This education, and the identity it initially shapes for young designers heading into the workforce, is so strong that it even takes precedence over the economic theory of class. Who cares how much money I’m making if I get to do a job that I love, shaping the world around me? But if you don’t care about money, you certainly won’t value your labor, or yourself. In other words, you become easily exploitable.

When I first started the organizing process at BA, a new seed was planted that would eventually become a new understanding of class. I wasn’t necessarily aware, or conscious, of it at the time, but with the formation of our new union my working conditions changed in a way that reality would begin to appear a little differently. No longer an “at will” employee, meaning I could be fired on the spot, the protections afforded to me and my coworkers strengthened our position in the office. Overnight, my material conditions had changed.

Once we sat down at the bargaining table across from management, things immediately felt different. If we had issues that were important to us, our bosses were obligated to bargain over them in good faith. In the past we would offer suggestions and receive an earnest response, but little would happen. At the bargaining table, now we could actually get things done. Instead of various job titles, or project managers and teammates, or even the office as a “family,” all things that strongly stratified us, there were two groups: Employers and Employees. And with it, an alternative theory of class based not on economics, but labor.

In this theory, there are only two classes, with Employers representing 10% of the workforce and Employees representing 90% (this number includes the “self-employed” category, which is important in architecture). Per these categories, an Employer is defined as someone who owns a business, or means of production, and an Employee is someone who is paid a wage to perform specific tasks but has no ownership of anything other than their labor. In terms of union negotiations, the Employer is defined as someone who has the ability to hire or fire Employees.

Because of this, it asks us very different questions: who owns the ideas produced in the office? Who is more dependent on who? How is pay structured for each? And most importantly, which group has more power? The answer to the last question is obvious, but with this new class distinction, our union shifted some of the power our way. Not all of it of course, but enough to change our conditions around us. Traditional haggling, neatly fitting within the economic theory of class, couldn’t get us there. Neither could sympathetic appeals to our common passions of good design. What it took was a little bit of friendly class conflict between management and workers.

It wasn’t until I began taking courses at the New School, what would turn into the early research for The Labor of Architecture, that I discovered the many writers and thinkers outside of my discipline who already developed many answers to these questions. With the help of classics like Marx and Weber, along with more recent writing by Nancy Fraser and Michael Yates, among others, I was able to dive deeper into the labor theory of class, translating universal concepts into the unique language of architecture.

This kind of work, organizing a specific industry, is a paradox since ideas like this have to be articulated in unique terms so that individuals can see themselves as the broadest classification possible: that of workers, or the 90%. But once this kind of consciousness sets in, one built on new ideas of class and solidarity, a new world of possibilities opens up not just for individual disciplines, but workers across all industries.

In architecture, it begins with shifting our identification away from owners and instead towards the other labor in our industry, construction. This not only makes sense because these are the folks who make our designs physically possible, but because they have, through their own understanding of class, leveraged huge gains for their working conditions. Through concepts like prevailing wage, design labor could ally itself with construction labor and shift money, i.e. power, away from the capitalist class that currently controls much of the built environment.

Outside of the building industry, architects could intersect with community groups and political stakeholders to shift policy towards a democratically designed built environment. Without this, their identification with owners, while maybe more comfortable, is the biggest risk towards keeping them in a position of weakness. For architects, and those in design professions, unlearning class isn’t just a matter or theory, but one of survival. Without entering this struggle, the accumulation of wealth and emerging technology like AI will only further erode design.

It’s difficult work to confront the realities of ideology, especially related to money. In the United States, from the day we are born, our identities are shaped so strongly by the economic theory of class that many of the paths ahead of us feel predetermined. While we like to think that what makes Americans special is our shedding of the staunch class identities that we emerged from in Great Britain, reality is quite different. Socially this might be the case, but research shows that children born into lower socio-economic positions face incredible odds at attaining societal mobility. In other words, if you’re born Lower class in economic terms, odds are you’ll stay there. Same for the other groups.

While challenging orthodoxy is hard work, it can be done. My colleagues and I found a new way of seeing ourselves that set a precedent for other architects. And in reality we were doing nothing more than following the footsteps of not just the other professionals that came before us, but the countless workers who organized to make their lives and society more equitable for all. The United States’ unionization rate peaked in the 1950s, and has been on the decline ever since. But before this peak there was a rise, one that came from a place just as low as today. I like to think that we’re about to ascend to a new one, but first we need to see ourselves, and the path ahead, a little differently.

References

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm#:~:text=Table_title:%20Employment%20by%20major%20industry%20sector%20Table_content:,21%20%7C%20Percent%20distribution%2C%202024:%200.3%20%7C

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47596