This first of May marks our fourth birthday! To celebrate, we are offering thirty-five 51%-off coupons—one for each issue we have published. Simply subscribe and use the code MAYDAY at checkout. Only first-time subscribers are eligible.
Already a subscriber? Send the coupon to your colleagues, friends, enemies, and then consider inviting them all to join us on May 13 for our next issue launch party. Subscribers attend for free.
But today is not only our birthday—it is International Workers’ Day, celebrated annually on May 1st in honor of the Haymarket riot of 1886, part of the eventually successful fight for an eight-hour workday. In honor of that day, we are including here a few articles from the last year of our publication that address labor and collective action.
JOSHUA MCWHIRTER: Strike Fever
“This building vs. these people.”
It was a message that stood out from the litany of signs and slogans that proliferated on the picket line. The words were scrawled on a large, double-sided cardboard arrow. One end pointed up at The New School’s University Center and its shingled, muntz-metal facade. The other pointed down to the stretch of sidewalk upon which dozens of part-time professors—unionized under the local 7902 chapter of the UAW (yes, the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America)—alongside full-time faculty, staff, and student allies trod back and forth for several chilly weeks last winter. Architectural antagonism felt like a decent proxy for a situation that would become the longest adjunct faculty strike in US history.
In contrast, Massey’s administration has focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures like a “College Compact”—a document detailing the inclusive culture Taubman seeks to establish—and a “Phonetic Name Initiative” to teach people how to correctly pronounce each other’s names. These gestures shirk the actual material concerns that Taubman students are striking over and don’t effectively address issues of diversity within the college, which, for example, has not produced a single black PhD in architecture for at least two decades.
In an exercise in the bleakest of next-next-level cynicism, the Qatar Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy established an annual “Workers’ Cup,” in which laborers contracted to different companies for the World Cup buildout are selected to play on opposing teams in a full tournament. (The games are depicted in the excellent 2017 documentary The Workers Cup.) Victories, celebrated under the company’s banner, are used by recruiters to advertise the excitement of working in Qatar to potential new employees in other countries. Ultimately, members of the winning team split the equivalent of a few thousand US dollars, while the company they played for rakes in unnamed profits off the backs of a new crop of laborers.
DOUGLAS SPENCER: Big Names Back the Bartlett
The core values so often conveyed to students of architecture—competitive individualism, self-sacrifice and self-exploitation, a one-dimensional devotion to what Marisa Cortright has identified as the “calling” of architecture—ultimately serve neither the individual nor the society whose real needs they might wish or imagine they are going to be working to fill. These values only serve to maintain the mystique of architecture on which abuse thrives. That this mystique is, at last, being dismantled at the hands of its victims is to be welcomed by the growing number of architectural students and workers no longer content to accept the exploitative conditions supposedly essential to practice.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Commune People
The Marxian objection to these experiments—that utopian enclaves do not affect the workings of the capitalist system at large and that capitalism will eventually force them to conform to its demands—is pretty spectacularly borne out by the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century around 100,000 Americans lived in communes (a significant number in a far less populous country of 23 million people—it would be over a million Americans today in relative terms), yet the US has notoriously never produced a mass socialist or labor party.
ANJULIE RAO: In Debt and in the Dark
For those who do make it through school, the debt-labor machine continues to hum, Fleming has observed. “The idea is to get them in the door, you have this talented group of energetic young people whose work is the only thing that keeps the firm going… and to churn through them as fast as you can,” he said. This results in what Cowles calls “the profession getting dumber”: students saddled with debt and working to pay it off until they burn out, and the richness of architecture school’s collaborative, creative environment lost to a seventy-plus hour workweek.
In some versions of the elephant parable, the blind men come to blows, unable to accept the competing visions of the object in their grasp. Perhaps conflict is necessary to truly define what something is; without its rent strike, Co-op City would never have been forced to made good on its promise as a bastion of relatively affordable, tenant-controlled cooperative housing. Yet it’s hard not to wonder what might have been created with the same financial resources had organizing efforts been rooted in a united tenant movement from the start and had government actors not been so intent on limiting their own involvement.
In just the last year, workers at Bernheimer Architects organized the first-ever union of architects at a private firm. In academia, major strikes won advances at the New School and are ongoing at Taubman. We are excited to see what the state of labor organizing in architecture will be by our fifth birthday.
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Happy May Day.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. It is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
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