B (15:23)

Thank you. It's great to be here.

A (15:25)

Okay. You just released literally on the 1st of October. If I have it right. A new book, and it's called the labor of Architecture. Tell me, why did you write this book at this time? What's the importance for our audience of this event? Which I think is important, but I want to hear it from you.

B (15:49)

Sure, yeah. I think there's kind of two main reasons why I wrote this book. Which one is to share the. The work. Right. The collective story of how we got to the first architecture union in 100 years, like you said. So that's the one purpose. Right. But I would say the second reason is to really ask the question why this took so long and to look back into some of the historical, theoretical barriers towards unionization within the architecture industry. Right. I mean, we have other professions, engineers, nurses, doctors, that are highly high union density, but we're the first in architecture. So that's really kind of the core of the book is why was this so difficult to do?

A (16:38)

All right, good. You're doing my work for me. Now I want to ask you, why was it? What did you find? Why has it been. And you're right, it's not just architects. Right. A lot of professionals, yes. Medical. Are organized, but a lot of professionals have had a hard time finding their way to unionization. How do you account for it among architects?

B (17:02)

Yeah, it's a good point. So we see some professionals are really organized, like you said, and others aren't. And it's a big question that I'm still thinking a lot about. But at least for this book, in terms of architecture specifically, it's a very old profession. Right. I mean, it goes back a very long time. It's not the oldest profession, but it's one of the older professions. And so it really saw. I mean, we could go back to like ancient Greece or whatever. It's some form of it, but we really started to see a change in the medieval ages. Medieval ages where you had a kind of actual. What was called a master builder on site. Right. That was the historical term for an architect, a master builder on site, coordinating various trades. And so this was a live, you know, building in action kind of discipline. And often the master builder was a stonemason or someone who had a labor kind of oriented understanding. That really started to change in the Renaissance. Right. And that's where we kind of start to see a strong separation of. The architect is more of a theorizing person. Right. A more a director of things, but off site. And that's really where you get the practice of drawing to be incorporated in architecture. It's not to say there Wasn't any drawing in the Middle Ages, but during the Renaissance, through figures like Alberti and Leonardo. Right. You kind of get drawing as a practice, and that really becomes embedded in architecture. And so you go from the master builder on site. Right. To then the architect doing drawings and giving them to someone else to build. And so that's really where you get that first separation that I think, you know, it seems like we're going way back here, but I think that really starts to lay the groundwork for why architects distance themselves from labor. Today, it's a little different. We have a kind of. In contemporary practice, just to bring it back to today, you have this sort of triangular relationship, Right. So you have, like, the owner who represents capital, the builder who represents labor, and the architect who represents design. Right. And so in theory, they're supposed to act as a sort of set of checks and balances, but in reality, we see architects and designers in general identify much more strongly with the owner's interest. Right. With the interest of capital versus labor on site. And even, you know, you see that in reality, where architecture, excuse me, the construction industry is one of the highest, you know, highest unionized industries in the country. Right. And has been like that for a while. Whereas the architect resembles something much more like the owner, when in reality, their position is something quite different than that of the owner.

A (20:10)

Yeah. I remember when I was a graduate student, I had friends who were going through the architectural program, and they were being told by their professors something that we were not told in our classes, namely, that part of their future was Would be endless cocktail parties where they would have to go and hang around in hopes of being noticed by the capitalists, the ones with the money, so that the project, whenever they got around to it, would include them rather than somebody else. It was a wholly different way of thinking about your own professional future. Okay.

B (20:49)

Exactly.

A (20:50)

I know many of my people in my audience have this in their mind. Is artificial intelligence a major immediate threat to the architecture profession? And might it therefore be part of what makes people open to your unionization efforts?

B (21:10)

Well, I think the short answer is absolutely, where is AI not coming into any industry and beginning to really change things. But again, it's really very important for the architecture and design context in general is to think about taking a step back again and, say, realizing this sort of evolution of technology that started in the 80s with the computer introduced in the workplace. If we go back that far, we can see that Harry Braverman's predictions and observations about the degradation of labor. Right. And labor monopoly capital are really coming to design now. We're a little behind, but it's coming now. And so we see the computer introduced, right? And that's where we get rid of our craft in drawing, right? Our physical craft. And then really, more recently, we've seen a different type of model, which is called bim. It stands for Building Information Modeling. That's pretty standard across the building industry. Government contracts are going to require all offices to use this. In that case, the architect is making a model on the computer, and then the computer is actually making the drawings, right? So now we're not even making drawings anymore. So it's not hard to see where AI is going with this, right? With technology, this. This sort of trend that again, Braverman so astutely observed, right. Of this just general pattern of. Of the degradation of work. So, you know, you can. Even right before the computer was around for architects, you'd go into an office and you'd see everyone rolling their sleeves up, smudges all over their hands, right? It was like a very physical process to make actual manual physical drawings. And so that part of architecture has completely disappeared. We don't make physical drawings anymore. And so I worry about this question a lot, to the point where, if we've seen what AI is doing with writers and other kinds of creative labor, what's going to be left with architecture if we don't push back in the way that we've seen writers in Hollywood push back? And the only way they've been able to do that is through a strong union effort. We don't have that right now. And if we don't have it, I'm incredibly nervous about what's going to happen.

A (23:37)

It's an old lesson of the working class. Your enemy is not the technology. Your enemy is who's in control and how do they use the technology. I used to teach this in my econ classes. I would explain that the machine that replaces labor can lead the employer to fire half his workers and replace them with machines. But there's an alternative. He could cut their working day in half, keep all the workers there, have the machine, and have the beneficiary of technology be the leisure of his workers rather than the extra profit by firing half his workers. And that's a political, ideological question, has nothing to do with the technology. A union could make it happen, but without one, you're at the mercy of the capitalists. And they will use the technology to profit because that's what they're in the business for anyway. Lead me to my next question. Is There a basic difference between architecture that is there to create the aesthetic environment of living for the people, or is it there as an instrument of profitability?

B (24:54)

You know, I think much like any industry of the US right, we are here at the service of profit and that's, I mean, we are a service based industry. There are exceptions. There are actually here in New York there are a number of unionized architects that work for the city government and their union is DC 37. So, you know, across the country there are unionized architects doing civic and governmental work, but it's a really small percentage. I mean, most of the market is in the private sector. And so there's. This is where a lot of this work. Trying to understand it. Not only do we want to have architects understand that, you know, the majority of them are working class in my opinion. Right. They're living on a salary. And without that salary, they're, they're not going to have an easy time providing for themselves those who are employed. Right. But you know, that getting beyond that, it gets to this question of, well, where do all the decisions come from about what gets designed? You know, who starts a project, who initiates it, where's the money come from? We're just totally excluded from all those questions in the private sector and we're really at the behest of what the client wants to do. And so this project is really hopefully the start of sort of raising a little bit of awareness about how can we insert ourselves in those original conversations. We all go to school with really good ethical aims of wanting to make the world a better place. And the reality is very starkly different when we get into our jobs and all of a sudden are doing projects for Saudi Arabian oil companies or other prisons or all these things that are really morally questionable.

A (26:50)

You know, for me, it's also a question of democracy because the rich people are the ones who hire you and tell you what design they want or don't want. But the rest of us have to live with that for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. That building that you helped to design, I have to walk through it, I have to walk around it, I have to look at it. And I don't have other things that might be infinitely more supportive of my life and my dreams and the quality of my aesthetic life. And yet the mass of people who have to live with the architecture are excluded, like the architects themselves, from the design idea. That seems to be only in the hands of the tiny minority rich enough to hire an architect. We're running out of time but could you in 30 seconds or less tell us a little bit about the Utopia Project in Scandinavia and whether that has anything to do with what you're hoping for?

B (27:53)

Yeah, I'll be very quick. The Utopia Project was in the 1960s, a project in Sweden that was initiated by the government unions and private sector. Right. And the idea was to bring in journalists and graphic workers to actually work with the private tech companies to design the software they were using. And it was a really radical model, but it spread. You know, it wasn't long lived, but it spread to quite a few industries in Sweden. So to me that, you know, that really gets at this existential question of technology and architecture design, because right now we have two monopolies who own all of the design production, which are Autodesk and Adobe. And so we have no say in the design of our software. And so I see this model not just as the Hollywood writers strike model, which is about protecting and being against AI taking over, but this being really powerful in a democratic way, democracy at work to actually get ahead and design software that you want to use and that benefits you. But right now it's a total one way street and we're forced updates constantly that we don't ask for. The subscription price goes up every month, right. Kind of rent system. It's a total mess and we're totally at the behest of these two companies. So you could see something like this in combination with the minor plan, right, the sort of wage labor savings fund that was also proposed in Sweden, really dramatically transforming the workplace of designers.

A (29:30)

I wish we had more time, Chris, because it's true for all the professions or for many of them. But I want to thank you and I give a shout out to people that are interested to pursue connecting with you to be part of your unionizing effort, if they can help. I'm sure you'll be welcoming whatever inquiries they send to you and to all of you, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. And in any case, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.