The Brooklyn Rail

According to Karl Marx, what distinguishes architects from bees is that the former raise structures in the imagination before realizing them in reality. But whereas bees produce their honeycomb cells themselves, architects rely on a group of construction workers to build on their behalf. This material separation between ideation and execution is responsible for the particular class structure of architecture, a trace of which is always legible in the final product (with varying degrees of dissimulation): sleek modernist curves conceal the history of their making, exposed pipework betrays the mechanics of construction, ornamental finishes index the handicraft of the worker. It is almost tautological to point out that buildings would not exist without the labor that produced them. Yet the field of architectural history has, perhaps for this reason, remained largely uninterested in the construction site as an object of analysis, preferring instead to focus on transitions between period styles or on the mastery of individual architects. Standing this method on its feet again, the recently translated writings of Brazilian architect Sérgio Ferro enjoin us to view architecture “from below,” demystifying the commodity fetishism of architecture by mounting an immanent critique of capitalist design.

Design and the Building Site is the second instalment in a three-part anthology of Ferro’s writings, made available to an Anglophone readership now for the first time. An octogenarian with over fifty years of experience as an architect, educator, and artist, Ferro cut his teeth on the building sites of Brasília in the late 1950s, where he was commissioned to design a series of office blocks and commercial buildings. As he explains in the preface to this volume, the new capital was a symbolic “re-founding of Brazil.” Spearheaded by star architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, it represented the country’s attempt to lift itself out of underdevelopment through industrial modernization, emblematized by president Juscelino Kubitschek’s famous promise to deliver fifty years of progress in five. But behind the sloping concrete aesthetics lay a much darker reality. The worksites of the city were sprawling, muddy wastelands populated by emaciated candangos (poor, itinerant laborers), who were forced to withstand miserable sanitation conditions and outright theft in the calculation of wages. Far removed from the cloistered world of the architect’s studio, the construction of Brasília was, in Ferro’s words, “more like a branch of hell.”

Throughout the 1960s, Ferro collaborated with Rodrigo Lefèvre and Flávio Império to reconceive architectural practice from the standpoint of the worker. In this way, they were able to overcome the kinds of exploitation that Ferro outlines in “Production of Houses in Brazil.” Instead of disaggregating production into a series of discontinuous tasks, work was distributed equally across a succession of specialized teams, each vested with decision-making power and the ability to fully complete their assigned operation. By demoting the figure of the architect to “a kind of general secretary for the cooperative collective,” the building sites were transformed into “nests for the return of revolutionary syndicalism.” A signature stylistic feature of this new practice was the catenary vault—a parabolic structure made of cheap, easily assemblable prefab beams and ceramic blocks, which minimized costs and streamlined production. Another was the refusal to hide essential infrastructure like pipework behind walls or cladding, a convention that Ferro caustically describes as “the modern version of the servant’s corridors.”

The radical trajectory of “Arquitetura Nova,” as it later came to be known, was curtailed by the hardening of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the late-1960s, at which point Ferro was tortured and imprisoned for his involvement in the armed resistance. Upon his release, he went into exile in France, setting up the Dessin/Chantier lab at the Grenoble School of Architecture, details of which are provided in “A Word from Grenoble.” It was in this state of political isolation that Ferro wrote what remains his critical masterwork: O canteiro e o desenho (Design and the Building Site). Published as a standalone volume in 1979, it is laden with dense syntax and arcane terminology (partly a red herring to elude censors back in Brazil), but quickly gained notoriety for its heterodox attack on the métier of the architect.

The key polemical argument of the book is that the primary purpose of the architectural plan is to organize the convergence of atomized labor under the rule of capital. Diverging from the typical insistence on its “functionality,” Ferro characterizes the design-form as an autonomous and self-referential function: it homogenizes space, abstracts from particularity, and maintains the worker in a state of fragmentation and servitude. The labor of construction, on the other hand, is presented as an archaic holdover from the era of manufacture, resisting the tendency towards automation in large-scale industry. For this reason, exploitation appears in a more naked form in architecture than elsewhere, since the low value composition (or high labor content) renders the arbitrary nature of command more visible. The great dialectical move of the book is thus to have demonstrated the building site’s subordination to value by establishing its exceptional status within capitalist society at large. It will be of interest to all those wanting to understand (and abolish) the concrete forms of unfreedom today.