Architecture from Below: An Anthology recentres architectural theory on the building site and the workers who make architecture possible — a provocation that exposes the profession's long habit of looking past the labour that sustains it.
About This Book
For Sérgio Ferro, the persistent erasure of building labour from architectural history is not mere negligence — it is a structural feature of capitalist production. This anthology collects ten essays written across five decades, each confronting architecture with critical theory drawn from Marx and beyond. Ferro traces how capitalist relations of production have reshaped architecture and its connections to painting and sculpture, moving between specific historical and geographic contexts — Strasbourg, Brasilia, Dubai — to ground his argument in material reality. The result is a rigorous, politically engaged body of work that demands architectural discourse account for who builds, and at what cost. The first collection of Ferro's essays to appear in English, this is essential reading for architects, theorists, and historians serious about the politics of architectural production.
Key Features
- 320 pages of critical theoretical essays engaging architecture, labour, and capitalist production
- Edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura; translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa
- Case studies spanning Strasbourg, Brasilia, and Dubai across varied historical periods
- Published by MACK, 2019
What You'll Discover
- Why the exclusion of building labour from architectural history is a structural necessity of capitalist development, not an oversight
- How the architectural profession's authority over the building site functions as a mechanism for suppressing the recognition of labour as the source of value
- The relationship between architecture and artistic practices such as painting and sculpture as mediated through relations of production
- How Ferro's critical framework applies across distinct geographical and historical contexts — from European modernism to the urban projects of Brasilia and the labour conditions of Dubai
About the Author
Sérgio Ferro is a French-Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter whose work has consistently interrogated the political economy of architectural production. The essays collected here, written between 1967 and 2019, represent the first sustained presentation of his thinking available to English-language readers. This volume is the first of a planned series of three books by Ferro to be published by MACK, made possible through the TF/TK translation project led by Katie Lloyd Thomas and João Marcos Lopes.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 320
- Dimensions: 16.5 x 22.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781915743374
- Publisher: MACK
- Publication Date: 2019
Perfect For: Architectural theorists and historians, practitioners engaged with the politics of construction, and students of critical theory seeking to understand how labour is written out of — and back into — architectural discourse.