Image of workers laying rebar for a concrete slab

'Production Studies':

Perspectives on Remaking Studio

by Silke Kapp , ​Lara Melotti , Mariana Moura , and Will Thomson

Tags: labor , authorship , collectivity

Abstract

This workshop seeks to question the centrality of design in architecture and studio education. Studio typically focuses students’ energy and critical attention towards outputs of the designed object, evaluated in an imagined state of completion—while ignoring the questions of how it would be produced, by whom, and under what conditions. Regardless of whether a design project focuses on achieving formal or functional attributes, it remains in the realm of reception/consumption. Can we instead imagine an architecture studio from the construction site?

Learning Outcomes

  • What new sets of problems would be possible to address in process-centered studios?
  • What reflexive techniques might allow for attention to the production processes to inform design and studio practices?
  • How might we rethink underlying ideas of authorship, individual expression, and evaluation?
  • What kinds of buildings and spaces may be possible through a reconceived approach to design?

By re-centering questions around production, we aim to shift the terms of discussion in studio to the labor conditions, social relations, and divisions of labor, which architecture and design education too often tacitly assumes, accepts, and reproduces. ​The session grows out of ongoing work from the TF/TK project, a Brazilian-British collaboration (www.tf-tk.com).

​The workshop will begin with an introduction to the emerging field of Production Studies in architecture and design, along with a discussion of the work of Brazilian theorist Sergio Ferro, whose writing constitutes one of the most sustained and rigorous efforts within architectural theory to analyze the social and political economy of design’s relation to construction. Then, facilitators will briefly present four examples of studio-education experiences that highlight themes of production from Brazil and the UK. These presentations will be followed by small and large group discussions, where participants will consider the implications of applying the work of studio to questions of production relations and processes. What new types of projects, outcomes, concepts, or proposals could we imagine and debate? How might our questions and experiences help us further address design centrality in architecture?

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