Building Sites

Building Sites addresses the urgent need to advance the critical understanding of relations between architectural design and the labour of building. While recognising that in many parts of the world building takes place through self-organised processes and traditional skills, the book questions a central and problematic omission in architectural discourse, education and practice – the production of buildings and the erasure of construction labour entailed by that omission. Through its engagement with the groundbreaking work of the architect and theorist Sérgio Ferro, who developed a history of architecture ‘seen from the building site’, the book sets out a programme for a new field of Production Studies for architecture and other disciplines.

First, the field requires careful research into the production of the built environment – at the construction site, in the factory, in the design office and beyond. This volume explores historical and contemporary cases from Brazil, the UK, Yugoslavia, Germany, India, Mexico and the USA. Second, the book asks why the disciplinary silencing of production prevails. In Ferro’s view, the tendency of architectural discourse to ignore issues of labour and processes of construction is no mere oversight but rather a structural necessity for maintaining the profession’s capacity to act ‘on’ and ‘over’ the building site, a necessity arising organically from the development of capitalism. Turning also to Morris, Harvey, Chakrabarty and Malm, the collection provides the first sustained English-language engagement with Ferro’s theories and critiques. Chapters on radical pedagogies, unions and political alliances, and alternative forms of building take the third step – to respond to contemporary crises. Production Studies must mobilise its understanding to seek alternatives and work towards change.

Matt Davies is Reader in International Political Economy at Newcastle University (UK) and Professor Visitante at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His work has engaged with cultural imperialism, precarity and unprotected workers in the international political economy, and popular culture and world politics. His current research focuses on urbanism and cities as spaces of world politics.

Will Thomson is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary researcher at Newcastle University, where he was a postdoctoral researcher for the Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge (TF/TK) project. He received his PhD from New York University in socio-cultural anthropology. His ethnographic fieldwork has focused on Chinese migrant construction labour and the global building industry.

Katie Lloyd Thomas is Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Newcastle University and a founding member of the feminist collective taking place www.takingplace.org.uk. Her research is concerned with materiality, labour and technology, as in her most recent publication Building Materials: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification (2021).

João Marcos de Almeida Lopes is Full Professor and Director of the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism – IAUUSP (2024–2028) of the University of São Paulo. He is a member of the Housing and Sustainability Research Group (HABIS). He was a Principal Investigator of Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge (TF/TK). He is the author of Geodesics and Co., with Vitor Amaral Lotufo (1981) and of Engineering Architectures or Architecture Engineering, with Marta Bogéa and Yopanan C. P. Rebello (2006). He is the author of several articles on popular housing, construction technologies and construction history. He is one of the founders of the USINA – Work Centre for the Inhabited Environment, where he remains as an associate.