• a collection of essays about architecture and labor, genericness and abstraction
  
  
  • architecture and revolution
  • typical and generic
  • the office and the loggia
  • pure program and almost no form
  • logistics takes command: architecture, warfare, abstraction
  • architecture of fulfillment
  • delirious equivalence
  • the architecture of logistics
  • the architecture of the industrial district
  • acceleration and rationalization
  • architecture and living knowledge
  • the factory of precarity
  • a certain kind of life
  • together alone
  • a lesson on the typical plan
  • destroy all monsters!
  • to desert
  • accumulation, abstraction, architecture
  • deserts
  • architecture and real abstraction
  • arquitectura genérica y trabajo vivo I

Generic Architecture - Primitive Accumulation - Real Abstraction

An advanced graduate theory class on architecture, accumulation, and abstraction at the UIC School of Architecture

Using texts from Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Silvia Federici, Cedric J. Robinson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Mario Liverani, Fernand Braudel, David Graeber, Hannah Arendt, Dolores Hayden, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paolo Virno, Paul B. Preciado, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Manuel De Landa, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney, among many others, the course looks at the history and theory of architecture, from 5000 BCE to the present through the notion of accumulation, exchange, and production.

Beginning with hunter-gatherers and early urban aggregations to the rise of linguistic abstraction, the parallel diffusion of measuring and exchange systems, and the unending land grabbing and dispossession, the course delves into the progressive development of a generic architecture that puts at work the "common ability to produce" of the human species: from the intimacy of domestic spaces to factories and office buildings, from storage and warehouses to knowledge institutions, data centers and sites of extraction, discussing the role of the architect as producer, from the challenges of representation to unionization, from the architecture of labor to the labor of architecture.

(Photo: Francesco Marullo, from the series Tó Dínéeshzhee, Naabeehó Bináhásdzo, 2022)