Production Studies 2024

Panel Convenors: Liam Ross (University of Edinburgh) and Jon Goodbun (Royal College of Art)

Marxist accounts of Political Economy recognised ‘nature’ as a source of use value, but their understanding of multiple metabolisms, both within human production, and between human production and the wider web of life, has been a source of much debate and new research in recent years. In our era of ‘generalised ecology’, one that recognises the mutual imbrication and enfolding of everything technological and natural, how can we ‘ecologise’ the study of Production; how might we recognise Production as both a surrounding in which we live, as well as an actor that impacts its living surroundings through the production of natures? This panel invites original research that studies social relations of production in the construction of environments, built or otherwise ‘produced’. It invites contributions that consider the dependence and impact of production on other living organisms, and wider natural environments. Recognising that our multiple environmental crises are produced, this panel contends that Production Studies must recognise and engage with both the Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies.

Panel Convenors: Mariana Moura (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Mari Borel (Arquitetura na Periferia, UFMG), Carina Guedes (Arquitetura na Periferia), Kaya Lazarini (FAU-USP/Usina) and Katie Lloyd Thomas (Newcastle University).

In Sérgio Ferro’s analysis struggles over know-how are at the heart of the separation of design from the building site under capitalism.[1] To hold on to construction skill is to hold on to power and, increasingly, to face technical, bureaucratic and violent efforts to seize that know-how or render it redundant or impotent. But what about her know-how, when, as Linda Clarke and Christine Wall claim, ‘skilled’ status since the eighteenth century has been preserved as a masculine property’?[2]

This panel recognises that this defence of building as specialized knowledge has worked against women entering the building trades within the capitalist construction industry. We seek to expand the analysis of women’s know-how and skill by looking at diverse sites and contexts where women are taking part in building production - such as the self-building site, site-management activities, or factory production. Papers might respond to the following prompts:

• Where do we find women involved in the production of housing and other forms of building? Are their skills gendered?

• What types of jobs are women assuming in the building industry or in self-building sites? How is their involvement in other activities – particularly in relation to site-management – different from men's involvement?

• What policies and technologies have excluded women from specialist building skills, or conversely what types of work have provided women ‘back door entry’ to the production of building?

• How are women's skills affected by the encounter with aspects of the capitalist building industry?

• How can skilling women in building and decision making about their own space be emancipatory and open ‘non-hegemonic fissures’? What contradictions and difficulties do they face?

Contributions can take two forms - a short intervention describing a practice or project which responds to these questions (5 mins) or a longer research paper (15 mins)

[1] Sérgio Ferro, S, ‘Concrete as Weapon’

[2] Linda Clarke and Christine Wall, ‘Skilled versus qualified labour: the exclusion of women from the construction industry’ In Mary Davis, Class and gender in British labour history: Renewing the debate (or starting it?), London: Merlin Press, 2010.

Panel Convenors: Tilo Amhoff (University of Brighton) and Will Thomson (Newcastle University)

Working conditions on building sites, the labour of building workers, and their relation to architectural work have re-emerged as key concerns in the profession and discipline of architecture. The newfound architectural interest in building labour raises questions—both technical and ethical—about the nature of academic writing about manual work. Taking the building site as an object of research also raises issues of how to represent the complex social world of construction accurately, insightfully, and respectfully. It calls into question the relations between writers and workers, and between the nature of their respective work on the building site and at the writing desk.

• How do we know about the building site and building work?

• What does it mean to write about the building site and building work?

• What do we make of the contradictions of academics writing about the building site, away from the building site?

Architecture’s professional design practices are largely self-archiving processes that produce documents and statements as its direct products. By contrast, the processes of construction largely disappear with only the trace of the finished building left behind.

• What creative media and methods allow engagement with construction?

• What aspect of the building site and building work might be revealed or concealed by specific methods?

• We are inviting contributions from those interested in exploring various methods and media that describe the social, technical, and cultural life in construction and its encounter with architecture.

Approaches may include those from anthropology and ethnography, oral history, alternative archive methods, personal experience, or fictional accounts in literature and film.

Panel Convenors: Will Thomson (Newcastle University), Ana Buim (Universidade São Judas Tadeu) and Megha Chand Inglis (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)

This panel invites papers that consider migration and the migrant experience in the building industry. We aim to take up a social and cultural lens to explore issues around labour and the processes of building and space-making.

Architecture and construction projects provide the resources and opportunities for employment, but migrants bring their own ambitions, life experiences, projects of worldmaking and value commitments into the construction of architecture. Whether internal migration, rural work that builds the urban landscape, or international immigrant experiences, we ask contributors to consider economic, social, cultural, and ideological effects of the borders and border crossings undertaken within the architecture-construction continuum of production. Their contributions extend beyond the normative categories of achievement and value that the discipline typically recognizes as “architectural.”

While workers in construction and designers both contribute to the production of architecture, their labour moves in different circuits, shaped by the interaction of different economic, technical and social determinants. Architectural designers—and academics—enjoy the relative privilege of global mobility afforded to the professional managerial classes. Migrant construction workers are more often subject to the harsher logic of national control and regulation typically applied to the movement of manual and working-class subjects.

Production Studies as a field is committed to recognizing and accounting for the full social world of architectural production along with an expanded inventory of cultural questions that should be properly the concern of the study of architecture.

We ask:

• How does architectural understand the contributions and cultural distinctiveness that workers bring to the construction of the built environment?

• How can we account for the global nature of building construction and communication across the design-construction boundary?

• How do migration patterns shape specific building cultures around the world?

• What can Production Studies add to a vocabulary that describes the distinctive lifeworlds encountered on the construction site?

Panel Convenors: José Lira (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo Universidade de São Paulo FAU-USP) and Danielle Child (Manchester Metropolitan University)

In drawing on Sérgio Ferro’s work, Production Studies opens up historiographical potentials still little explored by the histories of architecture, art and construction. This session aims at bringing together works that have been facing different circumstances and moments in the production of art and architecture from the point of view of a social and cultural history of labour. Papers could include both case studies and methodological and theoretical experiments in, for example, the history and political economy of construction sites; research on the forms, relationships and conditions of labour within them; on the know-how, practices, division of labour and power relations involved in the design and execution of works of art and architecture. Contributions on theoretical traditions (for example, historical materialism, anarchism, labour theory, feminist materialist) and historiographic insights that converge with the field (such as those from the social history of art, design or labour studies); reflections on sources, evidence and traces, or on the relationships and commitments between historians and their objects are also encouraged.

Panel Convenors: João Marcos de Almeida Lopes (Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo)

Addressing the issue of technology in architecture and urbanism is by no means a simple task. Taken only as an unavoidable problem for design and construction, the most common approaches to technology lead only to a rarefied discussion of its underlying complexity - that of technical reason. Technique and technology always figure simply as construction technology; as operative, instrumental, irreducible and indisputably rationality. Nevertheless, it is through such supposed rationality that we extract and consume the entrails of the world to transform them into buildings and cities, deepening the hole into which we throw ourselves. To achieve this, countless means are devised to exploit all human forms of work, innovating increasingly violent and efficient mechanisms to transfer value from the construction site through to the most abstract forms of capital. Without criticising the technical rationality that sustains what we do as architects and urban planners, nothing advances—for example, on issues of sustainability.

This session solicits papers that critically and carefully scrutinize the various dimensions of technology in architecture and urbanism, reaching not only technology’s most evident objects, but also the grounds that support them, such as:

• the violent exploitation of work on the construction site

• the extraction and exacerbated consumption of mineral and energy resources that are necessary for it

• the contested disposal and displacement of waste produced by the sector

• the insatiable greed for real estate based on the consumption of technologically urbanized land.

Papers may take a historiographical approach or adopt political economy as a reference; they may take the form of case studies or theoretical reflections. We welcome contributions that unveil the various aspects of technologies deployed in construction, as understood through Production Studies.

Panel Convenors: Miriam Delaney (TU Dublin), Nick Beech (University of Birmingham) and Liam Ross (University of Edinburgh)

Sérgio Ferro has described how the role of architect emerged in relation to technologies of drawing that allowed the work of design to separate itself from the construction site.[1] He has detailed how, in Classical, Gothic[2] and Modern[3] periods, the architect and design came to assume roles within capitalist modes of production. Almost 50 years on from the first iteration of ‘Design and The Building Site’ we ask if Ferro’s concepts of the ‘separated drawing’ and ‘separated design’ remain valid, and what are the forces that define the architect’s relation to (and separation from) construction today? What are the roles of disciplinary technologies – such as pedagogical practices, professional codes, building information modelling, specifications, modes of procurement – in producing and reproducing that relationship? The panel aims to provoke a critical discussion on how the normative formation of the architect as professional is produced and re-reproduced today.

This panel calls for papers which interrogate the contemporary forces which shape the production of the architect as professional positioning these within wider political and economic structures. Papers are also welcome which describe examples of modes of operation within and outside of the profession (contemporary or historical) which subvert the binary of architect/ builder, or which demonstrate solidarity across trades, disciplines and professions.

• Note: A plenary workshop on Production Pedagogies is planned for the PSIC#2024 - some papers might be moved to this session where relevant.

  [1] In Sérgio Ferro, ‘Design and The Building Site’

  [2] In Sérgio Ferro, The Construction of Classical Design

  [3] In Sérgio Ferro, ‘Concrete as Weapon’

Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Field of Production Studies (TF/TK) is a four year collaborative project between researchers in Brazil and the UK funded by FAPESP and the AHRC with generous support from project partners School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble and Central St Martins, and Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo - IAUUSP and Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo - FAUUSP. The project commenced in October 2020 and is organised around two main research activities.

1. The translation into English and dissemination of three main texts of Sérgio Ferro edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura, and translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa, to be published by MACK between March 2024 and September 2025. Architecture from Below will launch at PSIC#2024.

   • Sérgio Ferro, Architecture from Below: An Anthology (March 2024)

   • Sérgio Ferro, Design and the Building Site: And Complementary Essays (Sept 2024)

   • Sérgio Ferro, Construction of Classical Design (Sept 2025)

   Various talks by Sérgio Ferro are available with subtitles on the TF/TK info-wall and you can listen to a short podcast by Professor Silke Kapp [here]. If you would like access to any of the draft translations or are interested in joining us for our monthly online reading groups please get in touch productionstudies2024@ncl.ac.uk 

2. Developing and consolidating the much-needed field of Production Studies with Ferro’s texts providing a catalyst and common ground for the ongoing work of more than two dozen researchers whose practice and research already explores PS concerns. We meet online regularly and have come together in person for three symposia – once in London and twice in São Paulo. We have hosted many public talks including in 2022 a five-week series of panels ‘Production Studies: Work in Progress’ at Central St Martins, London. PSIC#2024 is the final gathering of the project and the first to make an open call for contributions. Outputs include a Production Studies website, bibliography and archive and publications:

   • Production Studies Series, booklets #1-8 available March 2024; booklets #9-15 available Sept 2024 - lead editor, José Lira with Lara Melotti Tonsig, Will Thomson and Katie Lloyd Thomas.

   • Building Sites: Architecture, labour, and the field of production studies (Routledge, 2024) lead editor, Matt Davies with Will Thomson, João Marcos de Almeida Lopes and Katie Lloyd Thomas.

We are looking at publishing a special issue and second anthology about Production Studies as a result of PSIC#2024.