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Architecture and Labour: Books Launch

Architectural Association, London
AA Bookshop

Books Launch:

Peggy Deamer (ed) Architect as Worker and
Andreas Rumpfhuber, Michael Klein (eds) Modelling Vienna: Real Fictions in Social Housing

Hosted by the PhD program ‘City/Architecture’

Thursday 12th of November
6.30 PM

As teaser for the ‘Architecture and labor’ Symposium we will host a book launch of two recently published books:

Peggy Deamer, The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, The Creative Class and the Politics of Design (Bloomsbury: London, 2015).

Andreas Rumpfhuber, Michael Klein (Eds), Modelling Vienna, Real Fictions in Social Housing (Turia Kant: Vienna 2015).

The book launch will consist of short presentations followed by discussion by the authors and guests including: Peggy Deamer, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Tilo Amhof, Katie Lloyd Thomas and Pier Vittorio Aureli

About The Architect as Workerdeamer

Directly confronting the nature of contemporary architectural work, this book is the first to address a void at the heart of architectural discourse and thinking. For too long, architects have avoided questioning how the central aspects of architectural “practice” (professionalism, profit, technology, design, craft, and building) combine to characterize the work performed in the architectural office. Nor has there been a deeper evaluation of the unspoken and historically-determined myths that assign cultural, symbolic, and economic value to architectural labor.
The Architect as Worker presents a range of essays exploring the issues central to architectural labor. These include questions about the nature of design work; immaterial and creative labor and how it gets categorized, spatialized, and monetized within architecture; the connection between parametrics and BIM and labor; theories of architectural work; architectural design as a cultural and economic condition; entrepreneurialism; and the possibility of ethical and rewarding architectural practice.
The book is a call-to-arms, and its ultimate goal is to change the practice of architecture. It will strike a chord with architects, who will recognize the struggle of their profession; with students trying to understand the connections between work, value, and creative pleasure; and with academics and cultural theorists seeking to understand what grounds the discipline.

About Modelling Vienna: Real fictions in Social Housingrumpf

The present book is the monograph of the imaginary architects collective __. __ stands for “Blankspace”. __ is a placeholder for various, partly contradictory approaches and diverse practices of a group of architects. The book focuses on their works on public and social housing in Vienna.
__’s projects are interventions in current economic discourses related to the concept of scarcity. They are proposals and speculations seeking out the relationship of constructed and actual scarcity (of living space, of resources, of financial means) and the production of our built environment. __ propose possibilities that are not limited to the design of objects, but instead take a broad view of the concept of architecture. The architects collective includes various social and political levels, but also various forms of communication. The spectrum of the work by __ thus encompasses not only the concrete architectural blueprint, but also the abstract level of policy-making and scenarios, manifestos, and polemics. __ untiringly pursue and test different ideas and strategies of spatial intervention.