Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Welcome to field architecture, breeze blocks, where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters, and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is Charlie Cleos editor on field architecture's Amsterdam team. And this episode is the first of a two part interview with Marissa Courtright author of the failed architecture article death to the calling. And more recently, can this be surely this cannot be a book composed of three essays related to the subject of architects organizing in Europe. It's been one of my favorite and most useful reads this year, and I'd really recommend getting a copy for real. Uh, Maris is not paying me to say this just a quick reminder that failed architecture is, and always has been running on fumes, which is to say most of what the editors do is voluntary. And we don't have a great deal of funds.
Speaker 1 00:00:58 We know times are difficult, but if you can spare some money to support independent architectural criticism, then please head to the donate page on our site. You might also want to know why we've been a bit quiet with articles lately. It's partly to do with the related problem of capacity, but also because we've been busy turning our three current special series into print versions. So stay tuned for that. Also last thing we recently set up a discord server, an invite link to which you can find in the show notes there, you can discuss all things, failed architecture and speak directly to us editors. We're the ones whose names are in red anyway, enough housekeeping in this first part of my conversation with Marissa, we speak about our shared position. As non-A architects working in architecture, then we go on to talk about the function of certain key words in entrenching existing power dynamics in the architectural practice. But first we start by talking about the content of the book's free essays and particularly the second essay on the definition of Europe and its historic role in facilitating inequities, both in the architecture industry and the world at large here's Marissa starting to talk about the book structure in the preamble. Just before I ask my first question,
Speaker 2 00:02:11 The book does jump around a good bit. I have been reflecting now that it's over with and published six months on like, gosh, what was I doing? I don't really know.
Speaker 1 00:02:22 Well, yeah. Tell me about that. Was the process kind of like trying to get to grips with some of the various like strands that you had noticed in the thematic universe that this subject falls within.
Speaker 2 00:02:35 Yes. And this was an unwise decision to try to bring together those threads into my get song Kus or whatever. My total art of all of the things I was concerned about in architecture, which is on the one hand, the most, the most straightforward part, which is this whole section on the architectural worker, who are they? You know, who, who might we include in that group? Why are we calling them an architectural worker? Because that was an extension of the failed architecture piece that I originally was discussing the need for that, that term in, and then bringing in this second essay on Europe, that was the wild card because I am not a historian of, let's say the formation of Europe throughout the centuries, nor the contemporary development of the European union. And I think I set that up in such a way as to say, look, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is realizing it, that, that Europe poses, this kind of material problem, or at least certain regulations and customs of the European union, as it, as it exists today is a problem for architectural workers based on what I've seen in my workplace.
Speaker 2 00:03:53 And I went from there all the way to, uh, laev <laugh> ter Rodney ran Rova. So I was trying to bring together both this initial issue of why are there so many Southern Europeans cycling in and out of big architecture companies in Northern Europe to what does it mean to be in Croatia, relatively new country? We might say on the edge of Europe and in this region of the Balkans, which has historically been this kind of, let's say, uh, a tug of war <laugh> for, for whether it's part of Europe or whether it's Ottoman, uh, in, in some respects. But it's, I think important to think also about Croatia as one of the countries who provided the so-called gas star Biden or guest workers to Germany, there were a number of these kinds of guest worker programs during the sixties and seventies in countries in the north of Europe, where workers from the south of Europe would migrate ostensibly as guest workers or temporary workers to these countries in the north of Europe earn far better salaries than they would ever have been able to in their original countries.
Speaker 2 00:05:09 And then they were largely expected to leave and go home once their stay was, was no longer welcome by their employers in the north of Europe. And this has created obviously kind of interesting immigration dynamics over time as guest workers have settled in, in countries in the north of Europe. But we might think of that program as in many ways, informing how migration works in Europe. Now it looks a little bit different because of the so-called freedom of movement that the European union grants to European nationals who now have the right, you know, without any restrictions on how long they live in another country in the EU to move at will. But there are still restrictions of course, on people who are outside of the EU. So instead of, of this north south divide in the same way, which, which we see, but in a different way, we see a kind of east west divide of countries who are not in the European union, but are from Southeast Europe like Serbia or Belarus for their north.
Speaker 2 00:06:13 The point being that there are always going to be workers who need to migrate into the European union, into Europe, into these quote unquote European countries to find work and who are at a disadvantage for that reason and who are economic migrants at the behest of a very violent and all the more sophisticated form of, of immigration control now, more than ever. And of course, one of the dynamics that I track in the book is immigration from the middle east and from Africa and the ways in which the EU has set up the so-called fortress Europe to expand the border of the European union outside of the countries that comprise it into the countries where immigrants or would be immigrants would be coming from, and this is really disconcerting for European nationals because it removes from their consciousness, any awareness of this border of Europe, the freedom of movement means that they don't experience it.
Speaker 2 00:07:21 And the fact that the border has been displaced to outside of Europe means they don't see it at all. They don't see the deaths in the Mediterranean, they don't see, uh, police beating people in the forest, right. They don't see the violence that, that the European border entails. And while that might not seem like a specifically architectural problem, there is still this insistence, I think, in architecture, as well as other kind of, let's say, middle class or so-called wealthy professions or industries that, that Europe is this unbridled good. It's something that we have to, we have to be so thankful for because it's offered so many opportunities for us. And I think we really have to be careful about what we accept when we think about Europe in such, uh, unqualified way. And so I, I just thought to bring together a whole bunch of things that I had been concerned about ending perhaps more, uh, relevantly with this idea of organizing, which we've seen a lot of good examples of, um, in different, in different cases, uh, across Europe.
Speaker 2 00:08:31 And I thought that would really be the, the thing that would be useful for people to see, um, that there are a lot of different things going on and that we might be learning from other contexts. Doesn't just need to be people in the UK, learning from other people in the UK, although obviously that's happening. And that's a good thing, but they also need to know what's going on in Spain, in, um, Croatia for that matter and, and from all the ends of, of Europe to connect. And that was, I suppose, my, my rationale for bringing the Europe part into this idea of architectural workers organizing there needs to be some kind of geographical basis because there is this, let's say geopolitical force that governs everything that's happening here.
Speaker 1 00:09:14 Yeah. I mean, no, but the, the whole essay on Europe is I, I, yeah. You saying it's a wild wild card. I mean, you, you are also at the same time saying, you know, there's obvious reasons why it's useful, but I, I have to say it it's the main thing I found illuminating about the book was that chapter, in terms of situating things in bigger questions going on right now, I guess I was thinking about the workers' inquiry that we've been pursuing and how quite a lot of the time it comes up, that the main people being exploited in the Netherlands are people either coming from Southern or Eastern Europe or from outside of Europe. But nonetheless, the geographical scale on which these sorts of things are happening is, is within these, this, this, this zone, um, which is actually a kind of historic in a way, like not an aberration, but like, um, is, it is an aberration as, as like continents go because it doesn't really exist from, from the perspective of all other continents.
Speaker 1 00:10:19 It doesn't have like a geographical line that says this is the end, right? Like, and I think that's something that people forget quite quite quickly and, um, not enough people know about and realize that actually the struggle kind of has to happen perhaps on that kind of scale. Um, um, I, it would be quite nice to sort of talk a little bit more about the original article, I guess, like the way that we came in contact with you was this article deaf to the calling. And, um, that seems to be the kind of, to a certain extent, the jumping off point of the book, I'm wondering, I guess, as a start point, what your, yeah, like what your own position is in relation to the field and how that affected you observing this, because obviously you, you are an architectural worker, but you're not an architect.
Speaker 1 00:11:06 Right. And, or you've been an architectural worker, but not an architect. And it gives you this. I feel very similar in a sense, like I'm an architectural worker to the extent that I'm a teacher of architectural theory and I've worked in practices as like a copywriter and I've written about architecture, but I'm not no way at all interested in it. It as a cool, I'm not, I'm, I'm fascinated by the subject, but yeah, I, I'm just interested to, like, if you wanted to talk a little bit about like, yeah, how your own position informed your entry point into kind of theorizing this, uh, this subject, I
Speaker 2 00:11:44 Guess certainly when I wrote the original article, I was several years into working at an architectural company and was starting to understand what that meant for me as someone who wasn't an architect. I found it very strange, particularly in an architectural company that really traded in these maxims of belonging of a certain kind of high end design that attracted only the very best from the best schools and who were really in it for all that it took who would be willing to engage in the kind of unpaid overtime that, that we know is so rampant in the profession. And then sitting on the other side of that, watching that happen, but not being subject to it to the same extent in the sense of not needing to work on the weekends, for instance, or feeling as though I could say, no, I'm not going to do that because I wasn't working on a project team, but on a different kind of team that really struck me the wrong way.
Speaker 2 00:12:49 I, I felt, I felt really bad. My coworkers to put it in, in the most basic of terms, I thought this isn't right. And of course it just is that way. But then I, it got me thinking, what, what, where do we go from here? Because I'm not the only, only one who feels this way. I knew that the architects know that this isn't right, but we need to, we need to develop some kind of way to talk about it. And, and one of the ways that I started to think about it for myself was this differentiation between architectural workers who are subject to the calling, namely architects. And then those of us who are just working there because that's the job that we're qualified for and that we happen to get. And we're happy to take home a paycheck every month for the fact that that starts in the architectural office.
Speaker 2 00:13:36 I think I was still dealing with a lot of the minute hangups I had with the particular company that I was working for. I tried to make some certain digs or some certain critiques of how that kind of office operates, but now that I'm not working in that company, I've started to think of that dynamic of architectural workers, both the ones subject to the calling and those who are not in a broader scheme of how does this function kind of across the industry? How does this function, not only in the context of private architectural companies and particularly those kinds of architectural companies that are located in places like the Netherlands, which have, we might say a larger number of architectural workers who are not architects, right? They're bigger companies. They export architecture around the world. And so they need marketing teams. They need people who do copywriting.
Speaker 2 00:14:30 They need, I don't know, lawyers, accountants to the extent that, that smaller, smaller offices, um, simply don't have the financial resources for, right. So it would be architects trying to cover those kinds of things themselves and holding within themselves this dual role of, well, on the one hand, you're an architect who's called to do the architectural part of it. But on the other hand hand, you have to do business development because you can't afford anyone else to do it. So I think it's interesting to think about this dynamic kind of across Europe again, but let me come back to the original article maybe, and, and how it gets to the book, which I think is the article was, was my particular concern in 2019, what has this experience been like for me? And then I thought, well, really, I need to try to expand this and think about how other architectural workers are, are experiencing, experiencing this dynamic, but also where they think it should be going
Speaker 1 00:15:23 On this. I just, from a personal perspective, like I haven't had that much experience doing this because of, of the, like nature of the work culture. My one time really kind of being ensconced in an office. I was, yeah, I was really struck by the, the, the expectations placed on me, even though I wasn't an architect that the, the real dissonance in terms of, I I've, I've never known someone to just sort of, so blithely expect submission to, to sort of like a work rate that involves weekends involves just staying the length of time that it takes for a job to be finished. And yeah, really the kind of taking for granted attitude of the people in management positions to the idea that, like, it's not even a question it's not open for debate. Like, yeah, like we need to finish this now. So you are staying like, it, it's sort of almost unconscionable the idea that you'd be like, I have something to do, I'm going, right.
Speaker 1 00:16:22 Like, it, it, it is funny that, you know, it, it does come up against reality in all sorts of situations, you know, it does like, you know, I'm, I'm an outsider. I haven't gone through the educational churn of like, you know, yeah, you should stay up until this amount of time. You should love your boss. You should feel like you're part of a family. This is this kind of hero's quest to use your phrase at the beginning of the article. Like it's not, for me. I was just a journeyman writer. Like I, I just wanted to get a bit of money. And like, I remember the negotiations. I, I acted how I normally act in a, a negotiation for what my rate would be. Uh, I say like, this is my rate and I'm not going lower <laugh>. And like, it was just really like, they couldn't, they get used to the idea that the, that people would submit. I, I, you know, I don't, I'm not a, I don't play hardball anyway. I dunno if that was the same sort of, you know, you felt that same weird dissonance, I suppose, of, of like, I, yeah. I'm not gonna do that
Speaker 2 00:17:19 Most definitely. And I, I do think you're right, that, that the submission, or at least the acceptance of that kind of work schedule is inculcated in architectural education. And that architectural companies really benefit from not having to let's say, do the work of getting their employees to submit to it because they're already used to it. They accept it as, as a given. But I do think they find certain ways, rhetorical ways to encourage it, to continue to normalize it. Particularly as younger employees who are pushed the hardest, because they are the most precarious, maybe because they have temporary contracts and they don't want to be seen as slacking because they would be the first to be, let go, their employers find certain phrases or activities that try to encourage this sense of belonging. And it's so difficult to pinpoint where that goes from being something potentially good, because it might give someone who has moved to a new city, some sense of, uh, a place that they're doing an internship.
Speaker 2 00:18:41 They don't know one, they need to feel like they belong, but it can, can very quickly become a negative impact of, well, this is the only place I have. And so I'm going to spend all of my time here. We hear that from particularly small companies, but also large ones who refer to themselves as families. How could you leave your family? There was one woman I interviewed in my book who said, well, I know the only reason why enters saying that we're a family and that they care as they can call me up on Sunday and have me come into the office. It's harder to turn that down once there's this expectation of a close, intimate relation with someone like that.
Speaker 1 00:19:19 I was thinking, I mean, this does kind of like feed into the next thing I wanna talk about. I've been really into the keywords of capitalism. John Patrick LE's book for a while now is I find quite a useful way of conceptualizing the way that, uh, architecture speak sort of unfolds, not just in the terms of the workplace, but the way that architecture practices speak about what they do, what kind of projects they're involved in. He, he talks about sustainability. For instance, he, he has a great chapter on design. He talks about like creative terms that obscure the worker boss relationship to turn wherever you are into a creative experience, which obviously like works differently in different places. Like you see it working very badly in the, uh, hospitality industry, trying to turn these sorts of things into a kind of creative thing. Hasn't worked as well, but in architecture, it's sort of like ready, made in the sense that the educational system indeed, and the way that the whole profession sells itself to clients, to the sort of other industries that it works for is very much left side of the brain thinking is about like, we can do these things that go beyond automation and, and, and are sort of a, a bit more ineffable, hard to pin down.
Speaker 1 00:20:38 But like, he talks about the way that certain words engender these kinds of relationships. So indeed. Yeah. Talking about family, I don't know, like if you, you wanna talk a little bit about that yourself?
Speaker 2 00:20:49 Yeah. I think, I think maybe the trickiest, one of them all, and that I'll, I'll discuss off the, off the top because no one has really managed to crack this. I don't know if John Patrick Leary picks it up because it does seem kind of particular to an architectural or urban design or even engineering context, but it's the figure of the user who is this all for? Right. I rely in my book on, unfortunately it's already the F to talk about the user who is this group of people that we're supposed to be working for. And it's obviously not the same person or group of people as the client or the financeer of the project or the government for that matter. But I think that many of the people I spoke to were coming back to this idea of this disconnect in the language that they were able to use as people trained as architects and the people they were meant to be designing for ostensibly
Speaker 1 00:21:48 Something you mentioned in the book, uh, you quote SEHA, Cassandra chalk, who notes that designers tend to unconsciously default to imagine users whose experiences are similar to their own. This means that users are most often assumed to be members of the dominant and hence unmarked group.
Speaker 2 00:22:06 Yeah. Not only is there a lack of a good term to use for them, whoever they are, but there also is a lack of a shared vocabulary that might bridge people in the design profession. Let's say architectural workers and they're ostensible subjects. Again, I'm lacking the words myself. So I'm kind of dancing around deciding on one, but we could say user as the, the standin or the placeholder, and then where we go from that, that lack both of an idea of who we're supposed to be working for and of how we're supposed to be communicating with them is that we, we lack the capacity to understand maybe the, the purpose of it or, or how in combination with other consultants, it might be for just talking about architecture, how are architects supposed to be working with other kinds of people to develop these projects, but how are they supposed to be involved in broader societal organizations to bring about things that are, that are good for people and the most basic level?
Speaker 2 00:23:08 I mean, we're talking about really, really basic things. So this, this lack of vocabulary in a way is almost more damning than the words themselves, which are fleeting on the other hand. And I'll to say about fleeting vocabulary, that there are certain phrases that cycle in and out of let's say relevance or usefulness for people. I would say amongst them are diversity inclusion, maybe even equality. We can add this idea of DEI, diversity, equality, and inclusion. I think it is that that is now a professional capacity unto itself. These words are all around us all of the time. And we have to be really, really careful about what they're doing and whether they are acting in a way that is helpful for us, might again dance around defining us, because I think that that can be itself appropriated, but let's, let's say that there's on the one hand, a lack of certain kind of terminology and on the other, this very slippery terminology.
Speaker 2 00:24:05 And what I try to argue for in some respects is landing on a kind of vocabulary that cannot be co-opted that is not so slippery. For instance, abolition organizers have been really good about this in the summer of 2020 in the black lives matter protests, following their murder of George Floyd, there was a strong insistence on the demand to defund the police and defunding the police is not a phrase that can be co-opted and indeed it has not, but reforming the police or finding these other kinds of, let's say lesser versions of, of change. Those certainly have been utilized in a number of different ways. And I think there's something that architectural workers can really learn from this rhetorical lesson of how do you arrive at a demand that cannot be co-opted. How do you arrive at certain kinds of language that cannot be co-opted. So I'll give one more example, returning to diversity, for instance, instead of referring to diversity, how do we talk about anti-racism? How do we talk about antis sexism? How do we talk about the particular forms of discrimination that a word like diversity would be covering up?
Speaker 1 00:25:15 Okay. That's it for the first part, stay tuned for the second part, which I'll put out next week, where we go on to discuss the progress prospects, and also obstacles in organizing architectural workers into unions.
