The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design

by Peggy Deamer

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.

Genres: Architecture

291 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 30, 2015

About the author

Peggy Deamer is an architect, architectural educator, and currently Assistant Dean and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her research explores the nature of creative work, stretching from a psychoanalytic interpretation of art production and reception – initiated in the dissertation on Adrian Stokes, who was analyzed by Melanie Klein – to neo-Marxist examinations of creative labor.

Peggy (ne: Margaret) Deamer (February 15, 1950 – present) is a principal in the firm of Deamer, Architects and formerly, Deamer + Phillips, Architects. She received a B.Arch. from Cooper Union and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her dissertation was on the British art critic, Adrian Stokes. She has taught at Princeton University, Barnard College, Columbia University, Ohio State University, University of Kentucky amongst others. In New Zealand, where she was the Head of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland in 2007, she has also taught at Unitec and Victoria University. She has been a board member of Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and is currently on the board of Perspecta: The Yale Journal of Architecture and a member of ArchiteXX. She is the founding member of the advocacy group, the Architecture Lobby.