TAL October Update - Palestine, unpaid competition labor, and upcoming events.

Hello everyone!!

We hope you all are faring well these days. This month, we, your friends at the Architecture Lobby, are excited to share several pieces of news and upcoming events on which we’ve been working with you all.

In September, the International Union of Architects (UIA), passed a resolution condemning the genocide in Palestine and urging architects to refrain from participating in the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine. We put out a statement alongside our colleagues at DAARNA urging the AIA to adopt this resolution. You can read and sign onto the statement here. Right now, we’re strategizing how architectural workers could support Palestinian liberation. If this is a cause that interests you, please reach out to us!

Our Boston chapter recently released a statement on unpaid design labor during competitions and interviews that you can read here. When clients require unpaid design work, it diminishes the value of our work and creates a race to the bottom situation across our industry where firms must compete to produce the most unpaid work in order to land a project. As part of this project, we have a series of pledges, for clients, individuals, and firms to commit to. Workers pressing their bosses in tandem with allyship with the current president of the Boston Society of Architects have led to several local firms signing on with more conversations ongoing! If you would like to know more or sign up your firm, you can reach out to archlobbyboston@gmail.com.

We also have several upcoming events we’d like to share with you all:

These recent issues have led us to return to one of the central beliefs of the Architecture Lobby. We believe that the political power of architectural workers for the most part does not exist in the buildings we produce. Ultimately, it is capital and not us workers in our current society that decides what gets built and what form it will take. Instead we believe that our power, like that of all other working people, lies in our ability to refuse work.

But what actually does it mean to refuse work and how can those of us who are employees and not firm owners refuse unethical work? It would be great if we all had unions in our firms to support us in this, however, what could you and I do in our workplaces right now? There are plenty of moments when we might have qualms about a potential project, client, supply chain, or environmental effect of a building product, just to name a few issues on which we may want to sway our firms.

So to lay the groundwork for several upcoming campaigns related to this, we’re planning an event next month to be held in mid December titled “How to Talk to Your Boss About Uncomfortable Issues”. We want to empower individual architectural workers to organize within their firms and win singular demands on issues of social justice from their firms. We’re envisioning an event where workers who’ve succeeded in convincing their firms to change course can share their stories and we can hold open discussion on how to make change in our own workplaces.

To this end, we need to know what situations you all are encountering in your firm, what qualms you have about organizing, and what help you’d like from us. Please fill out this survey that we’ll use to guide the discussion in the event. We hope to see you there!

Open to all!

Things we’re reading:

Adam Tooze on the scale of data center investment in the US (and how it dwarfs any other investment in our built environment)

Exocapitalism by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo - an observation and warning about today’s capitalism’s manifestations in software. Though it focuses on the escape of capitalism from the need for humans, the authors seem to ignore the hardware infrastructure upon which these folded systems are built. Exocapitalism is a timely rip of a read that falls short of offering a role -- “because none exist!” the authors might exclaim -- for either workers or joy in our current and future systems of Lifting, Dragging, Folding and Holding. As the afterword quotes from Byung Chul-Han, “Server farms are places of death. The revolt of death cannot unhinge the capitalist system. What is needed is another form of life, one that rescinds the division between life and death and reconnects the two.”

Galo Canizares on last week’s Autodesk shutdown Hope everyone had a great “Revit Is Down” day on 10/20 last week! It’s remarkable how much of our internet infrastructure runs through a singular chokepoint of Amazon Web Services and how dependent our industry is on outside actors in the tech industry. This piece contextualizes that event and asks some great questions about how much of our agency has been handed away to Autodesk and other tech companies and at what cost…

Campaigns you should support:

Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard. If you’re in New York City, we urge you to support DBNY’s campaign to evict weapons manufacturers complicit in the Gaza genocide from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. You can read more here. There’s a picket every Wednesday, 4:30-6:30pm, and if you’re an architect who works in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, let us know~