Includes bibliographical references and index

Foreword / Joan Ockman -- Introduction / Peggy Deamer -- Dynamic of the General Intellect / Franco Berardi -- White Night Before a Manifesto / Metahaven -- The Capitalist Origin of the Concept of Creative Work / Richard Biernacki -- The Architect as Entrepreneurial Self : Hans Hollein's TV Performance 'Mobile Office' (1969) / Andreas Rumpfhuber -- Work / Peggy Deamer -- More for Less : Architectural Labor and Design Productivity / Paolo Tombesi -- Form and Labor : Towards a History of Abstraction in Architecture / Pier Vittorio Aureli -- Writing Work : Changing Practices of Architectural Specification / Katie Lloyd Thomas and Tilo Amhoff -- Working Globally : The Human Networks of Transnational Architectural Projects / Mabel O. Wilson, Jordan Carver, and Kadambari Baxi -- Labor, Architecture, and the New Feudalism : Urban Space as Experience / Norman M. Klein -- The Hunger Games : Architects in Danger / Alicia Carrió -- Foucault's 'Environmental' Power : Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization / Manuel Shvartzberg -- Three Strategies for New Value Propositions of Design Practice / Phillip G. Bernstein -- Labor and Talent in Architecture / Thomas Fisher -- The (Ac)Credit(ation) Card / Neil Leach -- Afterword / Michael Sorkin -- Index

"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 profession. 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"--