Architecture’s Poor: Labour, Proletarianisation and the New Housing Question
A Seminar with Peer Illner

Wednesday May 13th from 17.00 to 19.00
32 Bedford Square, South Jury Room

This seminar addresses a labour crisis in contemporary architecture, centred on the issue of housing. It traces the changes to social housing in the post-war United Kingdom and relates these to the changing class-position of the architect. Arguing that the precariousness of architectural labour ‘proletarianises’ young architects to an unseen degree, the seminar reconsiders the home as a place where production, reproduction, labour and conflict collide.

Peer Illner is a PhD fellow at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research and the University of Copenhagen. His PhD project undertakes an archaeology of disaster relief from the standpoint of political economy. Peer has worked and published widely on issues concerning labour and social reproduction, precarity, scarcity, education and architecture in EduFactory, Culture Unbound and Fulcrum.

Reading

Peer Illner ‘For me, myself and I: Architecture in the age of self-reflexivity’, in J. Self & S. Bose (eds.), Real Estates: Life without Debt (London: Bedford Press, 2014)