 But I thought we would get started, you know, for some of the videos and other things that are going on this afternoon. But I just want to say welcome. My name is Mabel Wilson. I'm a professor here at the graduate school. My presentation planning and preservation was, you know, affectionately known as GSAP. And so I just want to say this is going to be a sort of presentation, I would just say at this point it's still ongoing work, because we start the projects kind of in the middle, but it's an advocacy project called Who Builds Your Architecture, or as we affectionately call it, W-B-Y-A. It's sort of like a radio station. And it's a group of architect, scholars, students, you know, where many have, but we deploy the tools, methods, and approaches of architecture to probe and evaluate how the process of building locally and globally impacts the work and life conditions of those who build our architecture. So as I said, we're academics and scholars and designers and curators and writers and students who advocate for fair labor practices on job sites around the world. And I just want to introduce my collaborators, I'm going to do that now, and also say a few things and introduce our participants today as well for joining us for further conversation. Katamari Bhakti, who is an architect and professor at EMPAR, who's widely published and exhibited work, sits at the intersection of media, technology, architecture, urbanism and politics, Jordan Carver, the writer and educator. He is the founder of the Avery Review. He's a doctoral student with American Studies and also a graduate of our M.R.C. and our PCCP program here. Laura Dynan-Dixon, which is writer, she's also a M.D. doctoral student here at GSEP, and also co-founder of KUMARA, is that KUMARA? TAMARA projects here in Berlin, and I think I can do. Tiffany Rajoy, who is here in front, she is a GSEP graduate where I'm proud to say she received the top honor of the McCann Prize in her class, and I'm currently working at TAP Studio in Brooklyn. We are unfortunately not able to be joined for Lindsay Woodstrom Lee, who is also a very recent GSEP graduate, who also opened the McCann Prize last year, and the prestigious SLN Traveling Fellowship. I wish I could say Lindsay was out there doing her work in China, but she apologizes. She has a deadline in three years today, so she couldn't join us. So today we're going to present our advocacy work and research, and we're officially launching our critical field guide, which you can find on whobuilds.org. And you can find a critical field guide at whobuilds.org, and it's available for download. And so it's really a combination of, I believe at this point, almost six years on the ground and field research. So along the way we've collaborated with many people, and we do want to say a special thanks to Glenn Cummings, Elisa Dizek, Michaela Poglieri at NTWTF, who worked with us on early exhibitions, and also on the critical field guide specifically. We want to give a special thanks to GSEP as a whole because it's been supported at the University's President's Office for the amazing grant we received, and also Dean of all, Andreas, for the ongoing support of this project. Joining us are a few of our interlocutors in this advocacy project. Andrew Ross, who is sitting on the end, is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU. Andrew is the author of more than a dozen books, countless articles, and editorials on the changing nature of work, urban life, and our shared ecologies. He's a family member of Gulf Labor, which is very important, and I'll explain why, and Gulf, Gulf Ultra Labor Faction. His most recently edited book, actually this isn't the most, this is the one before, his recently edited book, The Gulf High Culture and Heart Labor, pros the low ball labor practices underwriting the high stakes real estate gamble behind the signature architect of Saudi Arabia in Abu Dhabi. Andrew's participation in our early forums, our workshops, and also a contributor to the critical field guide. We're also fortunate to be joined by Phil Bernstein at AIA, who's an architect and a professor at Yale University. Until two months ago, he was the VP at Autodesk meeting strategic industry relations, in other words, starting the vision for new emerging practices in the field of architecture. He writes and lectures extensively about practice, product, and related technology, with in part, with a focus on questions of the future of labor, both in the office and on site. He edited with Peggy Deemer, Building in the Future, recasting labor in architecture. And then we're also joined by Amal Andreas, who's the dean of GSAP, principal of work AC, her recently published collection, The Arab City Architecture and Representation, offers a critical perspective on the very landscape of architecture and urbanism, one that includes questions of politics, of labor, and work. Amal joined our first workshop three years ago, and is a contributor also to the critical field guide. So, those are architecture. That's our logo. And really what we started with were questions, questions. We really started with a conversation that Kanabarian and I had at a dinner that was sponsored by GSAP. And, you know, we embarked on, we are not experts in this area, but we had questions about it, and I'll explain why. So we were inspired by Walglamers Petition, launched in the spring of 2011. Their effort raised awareness of the human rights violations that were taking place in Salah Island, a large-scale development project in Abu Dhabi, where the Guggenheim Foundation was planning to construct a new multi-million-dollar museum designed by American architect Frank Gehrig. The Gehrig's transcendent design would help the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, according to their website, contribute to a more inclusive and expansive view of art history that emphasizes the convergence of local, regional, and international sources of creative inspirations rather than geography or nationality. But the backlash quickly ensued. Artists, curators, and theorists whose work we admired because of their radical stances on social and political issues had signed petitions. Some were friends and colleagues like Andrew Ross and Wally Brog. The signatories, many were artists based in the Middle East, refused to cooperate and collaborate with the new Guggenheim or any other branch, unless contractual guarantees were offered from the Foundation that would protect the rights of workers employed in the construction maintenance of its new branch museum in Abu Dhabi. That's part of the petition. However, we noticed something unusual about the petition. Among the list of signatories was not one was an architect. We scanned the media and the artisteer, but no outrageous debate had erupted about the dire conditions and the human rights violations of construction workers. Any sort of critical commentary about the workers who would build the $800 million, $450,000 square foot they needed along the Persian Gulf was nowhere to be found. We drafted our own petition, but that quickly faded as we realized that architects enter and work within the system in different places than artists. We needed other strategies to ask other types of questions. So, with that in mind, over the last six years we've been directing the question, who builds your architecture? To professional organizations, to architectural firms, to architects, to students, activists. I can report that it's been highly met, at least initially, with signs of polite evasion. Those architects who did respond to our initial query often cited contractual constraints as the reason why they had no power to intervene in the exploitation of workers involved in constructing their designs. This rationale categorically passed the problem's responsibility outside of her view of the profession. And this is Sakha Shining. That means kind of using a sense of the context. That's Harry, John DeVell, and you're all architects. You know the other kinds, right? So, we've been working on this project, and then, lower the hole, this also effort to respond by now-the-late-architect Sakha Hadeed. When The Guardian newspaper asked the Prince for prize-winning designer in February of 2014 to comment on the deaths of migrant workers on Qatar's construction sites, where she had been commissioned to design the flash of stadiums for FIFA's World Cup. Now, her project was not under construction at the point. So, what she said was, quote, I have nothing to do with the workers, quote. She observed quickly and transferred responsibility for their flag to the authority of the state, quote. I think that is an issue the government, if there is a problem, should pick up. Hopefully these things will be resolved, quote. Hadeed has expressed her deep concern over the deaths in Iraq War, but it's sort of that, just as she could not intervene in that conflict, architects like her were not obligated to guarantee the fair treatment of construction workers. I don't take it lightly, she added, but I think it's for the governments to take care of. It's not my duty as an architect to look at it. Hadeed's choice of the word duty illustrates the risks of adversity and class divisions that characterize the prevailing mentality of the construction and design industries. Like many of her defenders, she's highlighting the fact that the architect's contractual obligations are at the service of the project's owner and do not extend to the contractors and the workers engaged in realizing their designs. While this might seem to be a technical distinction, it shields architects from claims that they have any sort of legal responsibilities towards construction workers. The word duty points to the very carefully defined accountability that minimizes the risk to architects and insulates them over the course of the construction process, at least ideally. But it also evokes the perceived class distinctions drawn between the intellectual labor, the design professional, and the physical labor necessary to the building. Hadeed is one of many prominent architects in terms of various sizes working on projects in countries whose governments have four records on human rights and labor laws. As mentioned, Geary, another prize winner, has long been the focus of Gulf labor's criticism. Let Andrew pick up on that one. As the architect for the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, in contrast with Hadeed, Geary hired Scott Horton, a prominent human rights lawyer to consult about protecting the globally and rights of workers in the construction of the Guggenheim project. But on the other hand, Geary has readily admitted that as far as ideal clients go, perhaps quote, the best thing is to have a benevolent dictator who has taste in trouble. So the agency of the architect by definition is a delicate balance. Unlike artists, architects are hired not just for their creativity and design capabilities, but also in a service role of interpreting and executing a project within a framework and to satisfy a client's needs and desires. At the same time, international-scaled projects often presented as cultural synapses for the senior state garner international prestige by exploiting the image of so-called star architects and thus provide a platform for architects to expand their role beyond form-maker, problem-solver, and service provider. But we cannot expect architects to shoulder this responsibility alone or to resolve the ethical challenges that arise from these outside projects. In their effort to ensure treatment of the migrant construction workers building the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, the artists and activists of Gulf labor have shown that many points of pressure are needed to shift the networks that coordinate all of the actors and resources in building large-scale projects. In alignment with the Gulf labor campaign, Guggenheim's architecture asks architects how architects can be the most effective in bettering the conditions of workers employed in building their designs. To better understand the how, we needed to understand the what and why and probe the vast array of what we call the global supply chain of the construction industry to find the linkages between architects and construction workers. So this is just the excerpt of some of the things that we've been working on. So these are from various things So who builds? Over the past few decades, the construction of large-scale, architectural and infrastructural projects around the world has proceeded as a dizzying case. And even today, as the construction boom may or may not be showing signs of regional and even the global slowdown, transnational construction products remain a cornerstone of the global economy, one that's clearly in alignment with recalibration, you know, that's to speak. To better understand these kinds of declarations by leading architects, we realized we needed to better understand how the global supply chain of the construction industry produces buildings. Not simply how buildings are conceived by architects, but also how they are materialized by a network that mobilizes architects, construction workers, and a host of other actors. This required approach that deploys the representational tools and techniques of architecture along with the critical analysis that explains and makes visible architectures and tanglements with geopolitical and economic structures. WBY's investigations ask, where is architecture within these circuits and what various actions might architects take to better the conditions under which workers build? So, with the growth in accumulation and intensification of globalization and accumulation of capitalism, regardless of the definition, urbanization in various regions of the world has functioned as a lucrative capital, a lucrative terrain for surplus capital generation. A growth facilitated by the internationalization of finance markets. The property market by Stated Harvey has absorbed a great deal of surplus capital through new construction. This is what's happening. For the cycle of capital accumulation to generate additional wealth through large-scale building projects, a substantial workforce employed over the course of several years of the construction process is needed. If the local pool of labor is too small, especially for projects requiring army workers thousands strong, or state authorities draft the labor pool from migrant and immigrant populations to live elsewhere. So these are examples of these kinds of large-scale constructions. And so these are some of the sites that we've actually looked at. So, on building sites in places like Saudi-Island, Abu Dhabi or Doha Qatar, for example, construction works are being recruited from all parts of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Northern Africa. According to Amnesty International, there are more than 1.5, 3.5 million nationals working in Qatar, a country home to approximately 250,000 citizens. Since migrant workers are not citizens of the nations in which they work, they have very few rights. There are very few avenues available for abused workers to protest for treatment even though many have committed to a multi-year labor contract. Construction workers often face unscrupulous conduct by recruitment firms, subcontractors and also local authorities. Persistent problems with the recruitment process can involve exordinate fees, for example, charged for recruitment firms and false representations of the type of working compensation that workers are to be to receive. Employers can confiscate passports to prevent flight or to literally fail to issue proper identification parts that allow workers to move freely around the city. And migrant workers are also subject to dangerous and at death times deadly conditions on job sites. In the worst-case scenarios, workers live in purportedly maintaining and substandard accommodations located in sprawling worker camps. Companies construct these camps at the outskirts of cities far from job sites in areas where the amenities can be easily accessed. The worker's camp results in the segregation of a large population of women outside the civic and economic life of the city, that they are actively constructing. This separation produces the dual effect that keeps workers from integrating into the social and cultural life of the city and entails the establishment of migrant-owned businesses that might fuel additional movement of men and women to a particular city or region. Their isolation and lack of political agency also stifles political reforms that open host nations to more immigration and the creation of immigrant communities that would form outside the curfew of limited employment contracts. So this is kind of the scale, let's go to the project that we recognized. And so because of the challenges posed by the jurisdictional differences between the nation-states where migrant workers come from and the countries where they end up working, human rights and international labor organizations have been systematically challenging the legalities of the current recruitment system found in many parts of the world. A process of cross-border movement, one with racial and ethnic undertones has grown even more fraught and complicated with the recent state of protectionist moves as market forces recalibrate. The law is clearly the primary area in which to intervene and abolish exploited dimensions within the current system. However, many of the problems that we now realize through this research that migrant construction workers face are inherently spatial, urban, and architectural in nature. And in order to understand these problems we need to make them visible within the complex networks and systems that they exist within. And this has been the project of WPYA. So we're going to now talk specifically about what we've been up to. So thank you Michael and thank you all for coming. There are a few WPYA members. As I see people who participated in our workshops, etc. Panelists who have been part of WPYA's events. And it's really a pleasure to see many new faces of students here. So I will just talk a little bit. And this is a bit of a relay race as you will see. All the WPYA members, core members are going to speak and we're going to go a bit faster now. So, last five years we've done forums, panels, workshops, exhibitions which this is also a bit of a timeline here. So the first panel we did was at the Vera List Center at New School. And Andrew Ross and Michael Martin, but participated in that. And this really came out of our first discussion and the petition that was circulated as made by Mabel mentioned by the Gulf Railway Coalition and this was really supposed to be one panel that was what all we were going to do and then that really started and really spawned kind of now almost six years of discussions and events. And I wanted to just share a short clip from Bill van Aspen who's from right swatch. The United Arab Emirates, 9% of the population is foreign and citizenship and many of them are construction workers who have very little ability to advocate for their rights. Really an awareness of the entire complex of who's involved in this activity that you as an architect are helping to get off the ground and so I think it would be useful just to bring this down to a very human level who built your architecture to just imagine yourself as you're from Southeast Asian country. Maybe the majority are now coming from Bangladesh. These are people who may never have left their village. They tend to speak an incredible number of languages but Arabic and English are not among them. You have very little chance of ever pulling yourself out of poverty if you stay where you are. So you've heard about an opportunity to go to the rich Gulf and work for a few years and then come back home and you know you could buy property, you could invest, you could you know, you don't have to go to the Grameen Bank, you've got your own money. So you would and the way you've heard to get there is to go to a city and you go to a labor supply agency who says well we'll get you there but you're going to have to pay us say $3,000 $2,500, $3,000 that's more money than you've ever seen in your life and you don't have it. So you sell your wife's gold jewelry you mortgage your small house and you collect all the money you can from your relatives maybe you get a thousand bucks you need to go to a money lender the money lender because you have no real collateral you can't go to a bank even the Grameen Bank so you take that alone from a money lender at 10% per month interest you don't sign a contract or maybe you sign a contract or maybe you just sign your name on a blank piece of paper in your home country then you wind up in Abu Dhabi or the Dubai airport and you get sent to Abu Dhabi there you sign a different contract written in Arabic and English which you don't understand which may be completely different from what you thought you were doing it may not only be a different job. I met people who thought they were going to be working cooking food for people in a hotel because the name of the construction site was the name of a hotel but they wind up building that hotel for about a third of the money that they were promised the average was often 50% less than you were promised by this labor sending agency in your home country was what you actually wind up getting paid so now you're on the work site you may not be happy you're there for about three years maybe you're being underpaid maybe you're being paid late maybe working conditions are poor maybe your housing conditions are poor but you really have no recourse because you owe money to the guy who lent it to you and you are going to have to work for whatever it is that you've been offered you can't unionize to demand better treatment you also can't switch employers because your work visa is limited to that specific employer so if you quit you were illegally present in the country and it would be difficult to quit anyway because the employer has your passport so if you quit you'll be deported if you try to get a new job you'd be deported some people do quit and work for other employers but only the most unscrupulous employers who'd be willing to take the risk to employ you and in exchange for taking that risk they're going to exploit you even worse and pay you even less so that's the sort of broad sphere I mean that's the whole sort of human story that one needs to think of and that one needs to capture when one thinks about one's risk so this sort of human story has been collected in many different types of reports from Human Rights Watch and this is international and so part of the project when we've been doing these panels in exhibition was just to put these reports in front of everyone repeating these stories again and again from different people we also started looking at within the discipline what kind of documents or mechanisms it sets to start addressing these issues so the first document was to look at was to the code of ethics for architects that's put together by the American Institute of Architects and hasn't been revised as far as I know in many years here you'll see just a quick demonstration in talking about issues of sustainability there have been a lot of issues discussed and clauses that are addressed to environmental sustainability so even in the code of ethics as it stands now you see three clauses that address environmental sustainability but you see a very tiny little really generic statement about human rights and human sustainability so our first move and this was kind of an image we produced which was also sent to the Gulf Labor 52 weeks campaign action that they produced was just very simple but in the ethics or professional code of ethics how do we expand the clauses of human rights that led to a series of workshops as we kept getting deeper and deeper we realized that this issue has to be covered from many different angles we did as some of the workshops are here and we did two workshops at the studio at St. New York we also did workshops in Mumbai and Stockholm in Istanbul there was a workshop in Venice that Mabel and Philip and so just to say that this is a ongoing conversation and more issues keep coming up again and I'll just mention I'll just mention a couple so one thing is this by the way in this picture is Mitch McEwen who is also an alum of TESA teaches in Michigan and has her own practice and I think her group worked on this idea of just building council kind of a professional body she almost had a business plan just building council but how a kind of a professional body could start addressing some of these questions before I go to the exhibition I'll just mention two other things that came in other workshops in Stockholm there was a group from women in building association that is a group of network of professionals who are architects, urban planners and construction workers and what they mentioned was the issue of wage discrepancy especially a construction site as in Sweden in Stockholm you have more and more immigrant workers workers coming from Romania and Poland but now increasingly from Syria on even on smaller job sites residential home building sites there's an incredible wage discrepancy between Swedish workers and on the same website on construction site and immigrant workers and not only was this was something there quite an open what they really brought up the question was that this was what can be done with that information and they really felt that there should be a professional body or somebody who this information could be reported to but also something that can be regulated by some organization this issue also came in Mumbai by sociologist professor Sharif Meku who I very recently learned passed away so I'm very sad to hear that but he's a very well known labor activist and he worked on policies for formalization of street vendors and this was an issue he brought up that these policies that are written often in academic settings or with NGOs the policies need to filter to various levels of actors who are involved in these kind of projects and again for professionals to participate in these policies or even make sense of these policies he strongly believed that a neutral non-governmental professional organization could be a best sort of a body that can bring many different actors to table but also we translate these policies to different levels of people who engage these processes so some of this work then also became a form of exhibition where it was a challenge to communicate these complex web of issues in different contexts the first time it was exhibited was at the Istanbul Design Biennial North West last year but the one before in 2014 which was curated by Zoy Rohan and the theme of the biennial was the future is not what it used to be and they had put a call out for manifestos and our manifestos we submitted a manifesto which was simply this one question who builds their architecture and really looking at it as a double sided question where one side of the question really goes outwards and looks at the global networks that come together to build global projects but also then look at looks inside to our discipline and looks at questions of ethics and design and new technologies to see how those questions might be addressed so the installation itself was a large table where discussions could go around and work these wall what we call action posters on the table is a large global network growing that Tiffany will explain that exhibition with the same curator is now at the Chicago Art Institute and this is in a common in a space that is the Poracava gallery that is right next to the cafe some of you are familiar with the Art Institute just to say that it gets a lot of general public audience so the challenge here was to then communicate all these complex issues to a general audience and here you see a similar sort of setup where on one wall is the global network of a fictional architectural project showing architects and architectural documents going from one side to a construction side in the middle and then the workers coming from the other side and then on the facing wall is another interface that we've developed through graph commons which looks at specific case studies in Chicago New York, Istanbul and Doha when we selected projects in these cities and just looked at the building facade and tried to map all the networks of consultants and contractors etc that are associated with that one particular building and element and that is something Laura is going to show further so this drawing was used across both of the exhibitions that Maria just spoke about in Istanbul and in Chicago it's currently up we used drawings to relate architects to the workers through the construction site so we begin to realize how isolated the world of people who designed buildings, the architects is from the people who build the buildings the laborers this drawing operates in multiple scales at a territorial scale the urban form of an imagined metropolis in the United States is compared to a city in the Middle East and to a village in mainland Asia building materials and workers are contextualized across different landscapes in their journey to the site a series of axon metrics and perspectives are superimposed on the drawing that document the way in which villagers become laborers they leave their families and move abroad to work on large construction sites simultaneously the life of an architectural detail is described and the detail and labor are to be on site in this drawing so on one side you can see where the architect and engineer are working to design the truss the truss is then manufactured and shipped overseas to the job site at the same time workers from small villages attend training camps in nearby cities where they learn construction trades and obtain foreign work permits often at their own expense both the building materials and workers arrive at the site where finally the labor power parties come into contact the drawing demonstrates the architect's responsibility to the worker each party is connected through the building itself architects and engineers advocate for the safety of those who realize their visions while we don't often see this relationship while sitting at our desks in our offices downtown it's important to be aware of this responsibility even from a distance these are a series of posters that we developed that are a positive propaganda enabling architects to become stewards of the good labor practice the posters call for architects to expand their observations on site to include keeping an eye on conditions they also ask architects to adopt new nomenclature to ascribe global building practices beyond this new lexicon the posters call for an expansion of the AIS quota ethics to ensure basic protections and rights of workers and they call for realignment of technologies in order to make architects more aware of the global impact of their work as well as make construction documents that better inform laborers of how to complete their job safely so I'll be going through discussing the database that was in our Chicago exhibition and we worked on the database over the summer this was after we had done sort of over a number of years we worked on the long drawings that took names from the room and this was a bit of a shift for us those drawings the previous drawings that you just saw those were you know more diagrammatic more sort of abstract or based on relationships that do unfold around the construction site but here we're really looking at very specific relationships so looking at the different companies and different entities that are involved in building projects this was a collaboration with graph commons based in Istanbul and I think here in New York as well and we basically this is the there's a screen in the exhibition you can also find this online so any of you and there's links for our website so if any of you want to look at this you know later and we started with an Excel spreadsheet and wanted to really track the relationships just only through facades on buildings that were in in Doha, Chicago New York and Istanbul so it's a really sort of dense web that we sort of after accumulating all this data but one of the things that sort of came up again and again was that there was very little information on the workers themselves so the sort of maybe lack of visibility of workers in cities sort of the questions around citizenship those in a way in the data there's sort of inequality where you know there's much information that you can find for particular buildings on various contractors and subcontractors but information on the workers is largely missing so that's where you see here you know this question mark is sort of just asking you know where is this data because certainly the data is missing so one thing that I'll just quickly say before passing to Jordan is that in addition to sort of seeing that there's this lack of data around workers one of the other things that was sort of interesting to discover is sort of labor histories that are associated with each building so you think each project has a labor history and so for one World Trade Center for example you can click on the project and then information comes up so since it was difficult you know an architectural journals and sort of information online to find specific information about the workers who went to other sources so the New York Times for the World Trade Center the New York Times had this really interesting piece where it was a feature and it showed many of the workers who have been involved in building one World Trade Center and and so you know their experiences were but also listed the various unions that were involved in building so we went through and took those the unions level one, level 28, level 3 and then put that into the database so it was a process of sort of seeing the lack of data of labor within our discipline but then looking to some other sources to try to fill that in and sort of add information where we could I'm going to be the last WBY speaker and I'm going to talk briefly about some of the publications we've done so along with our exhibitions WBY has tried to publish our work through a broad array of publications to date including essays not just on our work but also book chapters and research driven publications writings on various issues that motivate a project to publish at Andy Ross and both labor architecture, lobby books on labor and visual culture in the Middle East and fairly recently on the website eFlex each of these venues has allowed us to project because a lot of our project circulate in several different contexts from architecture to the activists, to the academic and beyond to wide audiences within the art and cultural production of communities. It has been important for us that our work maintain academic rigor with a research focus but can speak to different audiences and move between multiple disciplines at the same time. In short knowing that the problems that we are approaching are highly complex and the solutions are far from obvious we want to address as broad our audience as possible in ways that are clear and open to critique and dialogue and so our latest publication which is now available to Donald and Shader is the WKY Critical Field Guide and it acts as a primer to the issues of architecture of magnet, labor and exploitation which is what we have been talking about this afternoon. The Field Guide introduces key terms ask key questions as case studies and presents proposals that look at architecture within the complex transnational networks of contemporary building and construction connects problems faced by the global systems of design and construction for the workers to exist and labor within them. Like all our projects, the Field Guide includes representational tools and techniques of architecture along with critical analysis to explain legible architecture encabements of the vast geopolitical and economic structures of contemporary design construction. And importantly, the Field Guide offers proposals for best practices, ideas for action and resources for more in-depth study on the issues, challenges affecting the principle of red technique presented some of those key ones in the development. The Guide begins with a redefining of lexical terms in order to help us organize a larger dialogue for the project and serves to bring a variety of different voices. With lots of architectural terms we can question how we as architects, planners and designers talk about the issues pertaining to migrant workers in the global architecture profession. So highlighting what terms like recruitment fee might mean both to the migrant worker but also what it means with our own practices and what it might mean as drawings and big art jobs and how those buildings are actually constructed. And so within this discourse that we're trying to establish, we draw case studies, we try to map out global connections between architectural practice and material production and global construction. We make explicit links between sending countries such as Nepal and receiving countries such as Qatar and how workers travel within and between them. We investigate the networks of human capital and flows of the workers from rural farm-based colonies to construction training programs in urban areas and finally to construction sites and fraud. And here some field research that Laura has done in Nepal. We look at how global logistics and standards organizations have created platforms that allow materials to be sized sorted and shipped from anywhere to anywhere and we question why internal labor standards have been denied the same attention. If a screw pitch can be standardized across the world then surely more attention can be given to international labor standards that have been established but may not be included. It's bigger than those other standards. One of the main goals behind the guide was to make available the many voices that have participated in our events, our workshops over the years and the many methods of action they have suggested from redefining the design process to better integrating the workers at the other end of the drawings to improving methods for site safety and observation and fundamentally shifting what agency means in the client architect relationship. The guide offers concrete goals and further avenues for research and investigation. On that note, one thing we are currently developing is a more city or city specific, state specific pamphlet on working conditions and worker organizing in Istanbul. We've been collaborating with architects union representatives, lawyers to gather information and present architectural strategies for addressing specific issues in Istanbul, Turkey. This could mean more fully articulating the very complex construction and labor laws in the country like infinitely complex to the point where architects, more laborers, more contractors seem to really have full grasp of what governs who and how those laws are implemented much less what happens if those laws are broken. And another option or another thing we look at is how to stage a construction site by migrant housing. A lot of migrant workers come to Istanbul from Syria and bother in eastern from eastern Turkey in the cursing populations. So last time we were in Istanbul one of the construction unions was on strike for bank pay due to the nature of construction contracts sub and sub and sub contractors often go when paid and so their workers stop working and don't strike. We have a short video they'll play just to show what the scene looked like. In eastern Istanbul we have a new development project a condo project and another architect and rather than a contractor so it will be a very technical project to start with all that kind of stuff. So these workers many of them from eastern Turkey hadn't been paid for months and so we're really colleagues for this day. So ultimately this strike was a success the contractors met them and they agreed to give them full back pay by the end of the working day so long as they went back to work and they did and it was tense but it seemed to be one of the new protests. So Istanbul and Turkey of course are more relevant case studies to do the high numbers of Syrian refugees currently in Turkey and a large Kurdish population that migrates to and from Istanbul on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So these workers are on construction sites that are often in the process of being built and many similar issues migration due to war international identity that are facing these workers are of course ones that we are facing in our own country not just because of the recent ban on Nigerian citizens and refugees but of course having developed and self-proclaimed builder in the White House and not to give any new attention to that person I just think it's a good time for us to be asking these questions how architects can begin to address these issues of global migration and equality and keep people to architecture and so with that I'm going to turn it over to our guests and I believe Andrew is going to say something so far and I really do hope that being Andrea's faculty here at the school are able to promote and push this initiative as far as it can into the profession because this really is doing the right thing at the right time and in the right place and so for the past several years WSBY had been working kind of in tandem with the Gulf Labor Coalition which I helped fund and really one of the common points of origin that you picked up was this opportunity and I put it that way quite in a utilitarian fashion this opportunity that arose for us to put pressure on the high profile cultural institutions that were building in Abu Dhabi and in order to try and raise labor standards for the region as a whole but the the formula which was used for this actually originated much earlier in the 1990s in the anti sweatshop movement which targeted high profile garment brands in a way that threatened to tarnish those brands so that they would take responsibility for what happened further down the production line and unlike a garment factory's archetype design cultural institutions buildings at least are very difficult to move overnight when you shine the spotlight on the uses that occur on site in addition unlike Nike and the Gap cultural institutions have moral value that's built into their brands and lastly they're also different because they have internal constituencies of conscience by which I mean you know faculty, students, artists, performers curators architects who can you build up pressure from below upon leadership of the institutions at the top and for sure yes architects of note can stand to have their reputation sully by association with human rights abuses and in the course of our campaign we did actually try to engage with some of the top-level architects that were involved in commissions on Sadia Island Rafa Benjali and John Nivelle with the design of the Louvre and Frank Gehry who designed just the design for the Guggenheim Museum we didn't get any responses from the offices of the first two and as Nivelle described there was some dialogue with a legal representative from Frank Gehry's office and in addition Gehry himself publicly on a radio show I think it was the Leonard Wilkes show and did actually claim that there was language in his contract about fair labor standards but since he chose not to make that language public we only have his word for it now you also learned today that the AIA's code of ethics does contain a passing reference to upholding human rights but in practice that discussion really has never really strayed very far from the Halver-Schwer question which applies to instances where an architect is directly in complicity with an authoritarian regime and it's a matter of debate what difference there is between the Third Reich and the benevolent dictators that again Frank Gehry and both may well mention that earlier on but there was a kind of flare up of this question locally I think in the fall when the Robert Ivy Robert Ivy very warmly extended commitment on the part of the profession to the Trump administration to work hand in glove and fulfilling contracts and infrastructure projects and the backlash to those comments was very loud and very righteous and very good and he had to walk back the statement it's difficult to mention comparable clamor that might arise in the case of gross violations of labor rights which is something perhaps to think about and part of the reason of course is that architects generally are well insulated from the fallout that can come from exposure with human rights or labor rights abuses on construction sites and material supply lines legal liability generally is not why with the lives of the contractor and not even moral responsibility public perception and I'm not even moral responsibility it's in a corner of architects and you would think that public perception at least has shifted a little and the way it spread commentary surrounding comments concerning conditions in Qatar and there was indeed a moment an opportunity for notable architect to stand up and offer himself or herself as a counterpoint to Hadid an opposition associated with Hadid but no one really did and that was unfortunate or not my knowledge at least no one has done so far and maybe that's just a side reflection of how much of the profession is still beholden to the gravy train contracts that are flowing from buildings in the Gulf states and East Asia but let me just conclude by saying addressing the issue of what is the solution here obviously and Mabel has already alluded to this the solution is not solely something that architects can bring about for sure it would be wonderful if architects would be conscious to step forward and publicly take those pledges and declare themselves as the alternative to Hadid but what's needed is something in the long term that involves a network of professional and trade groups that can work together that can forge a kind of master agreement that covers the whole chain that WBYA has mapped out so in such a useful fashion so that you have the whole design to build chain and an agreement that covers each point so that there are no gaps in the chain at which point deniability can pop up and that's the point at which the responsibility ends people can say I'm not responsible for what happens below me and what are the precedents for that kind of network obviously the Bangladesh and the garment industry the Bangladesh Accord on fire and building safety is one that springs to mind and involves a lot of different groups along the chain unfortunately it only really came about because of a major disaster the atrocity of mass deaths just as the garment industry in this country really wasn't until the triangle shirt was factory by a century earlier but in the call let me just mention another precedent or something that might be useful in the course of our campaign Gulf Labor we put together a network of many different international organizations that included trade union groups like the building of Woodworkers International and the International Trade Union Confederation human rights organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the UN Commission of Human Rights and professional groups like Engineers Against Poverty which is a very interesting group you might not know about and lastly NGOs like the Society for Labor and Development in New Delhi mostly with worker groups in descending countries and this was a network that we shared a lot of information and shared tactics and obviously there are many of these organizations that have vast community vast constituencies internationally and a lot of expertise in this area and we brought all these people to the table in our negotiations with the Guggenheim Museum of Leadership which lasted for six years altogether but laterally we brought all these organizations to the table and more or less invited the leadership to work with this network in an effective way and unfortunately they declined to do so they walked away and so our campaign is a little bit dormant right now but that network, that coalition of partners we felt was was the best I mean not the only not the only membership you could put together but one of the best coalitions of organizations that could deal with this problem but if it was similar if you could translate that into a setting that would speak to the needs and goals and the type of profession if you wanted to move forward then I think it's that kind of network that might be very useful to think about, could be reactivated could be open to adding other organizations and so that's just leave on that note but that's the suggestion that we're thinking about, thank you Thanks Andrew, I want to hand my compliments to the other team, you guys have come a long way since that informal chat we had in 2013 but I was really honestly wondering what I was doing there amongst that group at the time I was heads down acting as a technology vendor, making stuff my goals changed a little bit now but in reading the report and listening to the discussions today it occurred to me that there's an enormous confluence between the work that this team has been doing and these larger questions of what the agency of architects is in the systems that we operate in and a lot of my professional work and my research has been about this relationship between supply chain, the agency of the architect and how technology is intermediary between those things and I think this discussion really raises some interesting questions about whether there could be a transition in the architect's role in answering questions about labor and supply chain from one kind of advocacy and I would put all that stuff related to AIA and AIA code of ethics into a stack called the advocacy stack which is less interesting, this frankly the AIA is less interesting and more toward questions of whether or not we could be in positions of influence in all over the process and that's going to require rethinking of some relationships that are pretty fundamental the architects have at least for the last 50 or 60 years had a very ambivalent relationship to the delivery supply chain we have not been active in the design of those systems and we largely allow ourselves as agents to be defined by these larger systems of delivery and it didn't occur to me until maybe I was talking today that at least through the lens of American practice there is an explicit separation between the architect's role and the architect's responsibility for labor on the construction site that comes from a lawsuit that was filed in the 1960s when a construction worker in Chicago was killed in an animal hairpin and there was a question at that point up to that lawsuit architects and contractors had divided up their work between design and means and methods largely as a matter of convenience when the Empire State Building was built the architect had 200 construction managers working for the front and this division of labor between intention and execution was largely an arrangement of logistical convenience until that particular moment when the forces of liability came to the fore and the American design profession decided that the only way they could insulate themselves from that kind of exposure was to emotionally and technically separate ourselves from the means and methods of construction and so that's now become instantiated into the sort of very fundamental activities that architects take on and the responsibilities frankly that we take on and it is a very clear dividing mind that has created a separation that is structural in nature and has been called into question now in the era of kind of modern digital and representational technologies so while a lot of the discussions around the role of technology in this context has to do with the precision of representation and transactional clarity and the ability to create and fabricate exotic forms there's in this context there's actually an interesting opportunity to attack that intent versus execution question which has its origins in the American architecture profession in a labor separation and it will be a long time before the large scale systems of delivery by which these kinds of projects that we're talking about are changed by neoliberal capital forces that are way beyond the control of the architect architects are two orders of magnitude too small to influence those systems themselves but what we can do is we can choose certain vectors through that system to pick where we can have influence at the beginning of that process of design and design ideation are choices about strategies about systems about materials over which the architect has an enormous amount of control and domain should we choose to exercise that control throughout the system of the supply chain so the strategy it seems to me that makes sense in the theological elaboration of the propositions that have been put forward in the report would be for us to systematically and carefully choose specific vectors through the supply chain where we know we can influence the endpoint which are the people who are actually executing the work on the ground that can be through choices of certain kinds of systems, strategies about prefabrication of offsite construction arbitrage materials and these are all strategies that can be instrumentalized by technology that are going to require us as architects to have a different attitude we actually make stuff I found the diagrams about building information modeling in the report to be kind of interesting because they're very romantic there's a romantic vision that somehow technology is going to magically integrate the dog's breakfast of data and processes that result in the construction of complex building I thought they were charming and a little bit reductive but they do present an opportunity on a couple of different fronts the thing an idea like building information modeling presents us as architects is an epistemological structure that we can use to control the information flows of design setting aside all your complaints about the efficacy of the technology itself it's a knowledge system it's a way of controlling the flow of information out to its end points so representational strategies that are clear about the way things are made more transparent all the way out to the job so I can be exploited using the platforms like building information modeling there's a whole constellation now of other technologies that are about understanding prediction and analysis thinking about really see what you're going to do predict what you're going to do before you do it this is that today most of the technologies that we use are exploiting questions of geometry and materiality but that the newer simulation opportunities that are out there are actually about human activity instead of material optimization I think you're going to start seeing more advanced project teams using technologies to do things like labor optimization it's not possible to use a combination of a building information model analysis engine and a gaming engine and actually simulate the physical activities that are going to go on a site that will change the nature of labor as a resource on a construction site from something that's frankly heavily commoditized in these kinds of projects that we're talking about something that has to be managed and designed and then we as architects can by choosing systems and materials and construction strategies we can actually extend our reach out into those things and try to exploit those technologies accordingly the other opportunity that's emerging because of these technologies that are more easily available to architects now is under this broad umbrella that's starting to be called industrialized construction which is the pre-making of things and the bringing of those things on to a site and you can the truck's example was an early example but the systems are starting to become more aggregated and more heterogeneous and architects make those decisions a priority so if you make those decisions in a way such that you understand the labor implications of them and make choices in the supply chain that privilege the more labor advantage strategies and that's how we can reach through the I think I kind of would set and jumps between and you left the design architects out so if you're Frank Garrett he has to jump through the associate architect then to the client then to the CM then to the contractor, the sub the sub-subcontractor, the labor provider your life is 8 degrees of separation away but you get to make decisions at the beginning of the process that can influence these things but it's going to require a degree of conceptual and legal intestinal fortitude that frankly at least the American architecture profession is always beginning to understand so I would have not expected that this kind of discussion would have brought me to these kinds of conclusions but it's pretty clear that in some form combined with a commitment the instrumentality of some of the new emerging technologies gives us some opportunities to address these questions that I think this team is so well articulated and brought to the floor so thanks for the opportunity to take it back well thank you I'm Marien Jordan Tiffany Noah and Andrea it's been really fascinating I think as said to watch the evolution of the new BYA so my very short statement that I added to the guidebook and then open it up it's called The Other Maker in 2002 the first fabrication laboratories were launched at MIT after decades of digital research and development this reinvestment into making unable by a grant from the National Science Foundation was intended to help technology institutes in developing countries acquire the tools and knowledge to build their own products and design small scale interventions with the power to have large scale impact for architects and architecture students across the United States in particular this signaled to the end of the seminal quote paperless studio which started in 1994 throwing the field of the world of conceptual practices for more experiments and exclusive virtual representations these constructed worlds have been continuous fluids, smooth, topological scaleless, infinite and e-material as fab labs took off within architecture schools, material assemblies construction methods, tools and tooling were ushered back surfaces were now visibly sarcastic and made of individual pieces and parts gradually morphing into an infinite number of connections and interruptions constructing incomplete and finite pools the architect was reconnected to her craft with no middleman standing between the virtual and the material except for the perfectly human and less printers and robots in 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale created by Alcantara Rivera and titled quote reporting from the front presented an unfluttered celebration of this material return as it assembled architects and architecture responding to the call to engage the world and the emergent issues of our time against technologically driven machine aesthetic of the quote global north and the metal stars and sheet rock panels that were in the city built by an uncomfortable aesthetic aestheticization of the quote global south emerged as careful bricklaying primitive hut making and precious earth casting techniques were deployed throughout the exhibition undermining the Biennale's important and welcome call this renewed engagement with the real instead soon became alibi for renewed fetishization of the quote local of authenticity and tradition and craft and materiality while reconstructing the romantic narrative of architecture as unmediated building experience and practice the Biennale being stated not unlike the promise of the Fablach the same nostalgic longing for a long ago disappeared architect as fast man finally reconnected with his poetic project in 2012 WBYA launched an ongoing research project into the design building of global architectural icons neither nostalgic or romantic WBYA firmly rounded its inquiries within the realities and demands of scale even as it also underscored the importance of reconnecting architecture to its material realities like the Fablach or the architect craftsman the resulting WBYA critical field guide and lists the same fundamental attachment architects have to the abstracted objects but instead blows up and expands space in between rendering visible the vectors of interconnected after is human and material that constitute the complex web of global architectural practice and discourse today. Simultaneously zooming out and away from the architects abstracted object and zooming into the realities of this making the WBYA critical field guide registers through drawing and writing the infinitely complex and invisible journey of the architects alter ego the good other maker living and working on the other side of that same object and with his or her own story and aspirations for the transformations it affects upon his or her life. Drawing connections across scale and site as it projects synergies where there are none the WBYA critical field guide is critically important and urgent contribution to the future of architectural thinking and education as it invests the lines we draw as educators, scholars, students and practitioners with the power to represent the realities we engage in our part of and thus with the whole power to change them. So I wanted to kind of bring this to you the question of education and I think for me part of the kind of strength and fantastic foray that the guide does is precisely at school for those of you making things there is this kind of intimate connection but of course the moment you're launched into practice that intimacy is gone and I think for the first time we're starting to kind of map that sort of scale of connections that we are just a very tiny part of and I appreciated whether I hope to see or having a kind of sense of where to push in terms of infection points in the time making process. I think all of these are really fascinating strategies that we can now start to unpack thanks to some of the research that this team has done. I think it is obviously a really important time and it's been coming up in so many conversations post-election time to understand what is both the agency and also the possible advocacy that architects can take within their kind of practice and expertise how do we develop different forms of organization artists always seem to be able to get organized. I mean even kind of post-election there's already a kind of movement of artists and yet for us we have AIA. It was the kind of really stuff in the face. I think the only comment that comes up is something that we don't have many of us here represented in and so you know what are ways to think through all of these. Obviously putting research like that it brings these questions into consciousness make things make these connections visible. I think the question of ethics is certainly one that is sort of challenging and very very complicated and so this is the beginning of how we start drawing the lines and opening up the complexities because it's really not simple as someone involved in practice who also as part of the system didn't get paid almost went bankrupt we are also part of that system of exploitation and abuse in some ways but so far the position has always been you don't say it and you're going to make it so as long as you don't go under any making you're the one we're seeing that the start of this generation may be the last generation that was able to do that and it's much more complicated for us technology is changing how we work, what are the expectations how you will work expectations in terms of speed in terms of delivery, in terms of fees it's a kind of a different scale like I said symmetries where they are not but I think it does help to create a sense of connection to understand that it is all connected the only question of the means and the methods and the responsibility I can assure you that even if the contractor doesn't follow your drawings and the building leaks it is still the architects fault in the mind of whoever the client is and so maybe we can take the sense of we are still there even though we are not contractually there to clip it on its head a little bit and then the last thing which is to try a little bit to my own research as it relates to the question of the arts in the representation which maps out a little bit the the shift of power through real estate between the old centers and the new centers let's say you know they moved Damascus, Baghdad and then Dubai Abu Dhabi, Doha etc it's not a coincidence that the old centers are getting destroyed while the new ones are rising and real estate and architecture has something to do with it but I was kind of very disappointed to hear someone like Rampool has say not the many things he says that you know why should we criticize we should give the Gulf a break because they are at least trying to find a way to bring together modernity and Islam and this is like such a slap in the face of history and the long engagement of the Arab world with modernity and modernization as a progressive secular modernist project that was constantly crushed by the West and what we have left now with questions of religion and orientalism and etc etc I can go on so all of this is interconnected and the production of these meanings and so the fact that we are left with bringing together Islam and modernity is very sad so anyway these are my thoughts and I will continue to support this effort and and it is really great and I think it's great that you are asking these difficult questions so thank you can you hear me do we have to use this because it's being recorded and thank you for I think an amazing response because you have been part of the course of this project and I think it's still pointed out we didn't know we started working on this so it really has been for us an education project which is part of the reason why we wanted to produce the primer because we didn't know anything and we felt that okay this is one one vehicle this is one outcome of the project and I think Andrew really touched upon the kind of question of activism and politics how these questions can be engaged in that arena I think Phil rightly brought out one of the things that we realized that it's both professional and economic and that's one area of engagement and I'm all clear with you today are the questions that we all had at educational institution like what can we learn about this question in order to begin to understand how we can transform these conditions under which we're all accountable and I guess I'm going to just ask my collaborators what have we learned out of this project after after five years just like because it's true we started with that event and it just kept going well what about this and what don't we know and we talked to a number of office and we talked at that spa we went to shop we talked to human rights watch folks we talked to lawyers and what's interesting is the latest thing that we're working on is who goes Istanbul it's amazing because precisely I think with Phil there's no firewall between architects and contractors so it's a completely different organization between how building happens and some of the questions that come up are precisely about well how do workers learn what forms of delivery and how that can be and in a way architects also don't have liability and it's a very very different kind of environment of construction but no less ruthless precisely because one of the issues have to do with labor murders and the number of deaths on construction sites in Istanbul so it's in that every time we move into a new arena we learn a whole host of things that then apply back on to where we are so I'm the inventor I think one of the things that I've learned really has to do with sort of understanding the chain from the architect to the contractor to the subcontractor and to to start to be able to think about how that relationship between the architect and labor is really sort of divided up and so it's very difficult for them there to be a sort of direct relationship and this I guess a sort of way of working against that system is something that Andrew is saying which I think is really important to think about collaborations and how the discipline collaborates with human rights organizations but also labor groups in South Asia or with with small or maybe too small I think there's a model of the discipline sort of looking outward into different allies which is really a very it's like it's very difficult to think about how to deal with this system because it's vast and it's also it's very historically entrenched and it goes back to colonial labor but I think that collaborative model really opens up over to before yeah I think when I first started this research project I was just graduating from school or in school so I think it seems so far away the idea of labor on these construction sites seems so far away at that time but now kind of being in the workforce and entering into working at larger firms and smaller firms I think it's an important thing to start thinking about now as a student because you will soon be working for firms large or small and having an impact on the labor that's producing the work that you're developing so now I'm drawing details as an architect drawing even small things like millwork details or things that somebody's might be building I think it's always it just kind of keeps it fresh in my mind and I keep thinking about how yeah how the people that are going to be building this are producing it Okay I'll just say something about the role of institutions perhaps was something that I think we can intentionally talk more about especially with some of you who are in the audience and maybe I'll mention one thing so in Istanbul when we first went to visit before we did the workshop we came across this really interesting group of recent graduates and students architects who were working in big firms or you know changing their jobs every two years and one of the things they wanted to do was actually as recent or young employees or students form a union but there actually wasn't one so they joined the construction union which was really interesting I thought that they actually took that step but I come back and when we met with them work was also interesting that they really didn't have places to meet at their meetings and so that was something we encouraged studio X in Istanbul to take a role and I think that as universities if we do have these global centers in these different cities and perhaps universities and institutions can just play this simple role by giving the space for all these different constituencies to meet so that was what the other thing I wanted to also say that I wanted to talk about but I sort of left behind was when we did the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago our first idea was really to take an element that's a project designed by Renzo Piano as some of you might know and we really wanted to take a building element let's say a skylight in that building because our mandate was to really how do you explain these complex processes of architecture to a general public so we thought well why don't we just take a part of the building and really try to draw the kind of these various networks and we show how this skylight was built, where did the materials come from, where did the workers come from etc. it sounded very kind of apt to us but surprisingly that was nixed not by the curators, the curators loved the idea but the legal team in the institute completely nixed that idea and I'm still not sure why, I think one of there is sort of a pending lawsuit because all roads lead to lawyers if I can say so I don't know if that was the reason but I do feel that with cultural institution perhaps there is this resistance, I mean when we see a film we wait till the end of the film and there's this long roll of credits that down to every single extra and cameraman the name shows up and somehow that information is not completely accessible to the public for architecture projects and I'll pass this on to okay so not wanting to re-actually but also we have a meeting one of our early meetings members of human rights watch were there and the conversation tends to go from a problem of architecture and labor to like the endless oppression of capitalism really quickly like one step and it's like you can't do anything but in a room with people who are actively pursuing human rights abuses over the low their advice which we still address those was to just take very small steps and take off very small chunks and know what you can about that and try to address that which is maybe a more positive way of saying things take time to change but just knowing how things, how slow changes occur but knowing that it's very incremental and to kind of not lose hope that was the best thing we could have heard it's not about local capitalism it's about little practices that we do every day it's about kind of educating yourself and trying to create platforms that can educate whatever context students and that's the step it's not fixing all immediately it's addressing the issues that we can I'll start with one question there's addressing this issue of kind of incremental change I think there's been attention I think in activist work and sometimes we describe this work as activist work it's a pedagogical project sometimes it's a public control project but it sits kind of somewhere in there on how to come and grasp agency and I think maybe having Andrew and Phil all here can talk about the different aspects and how to address these projects there's one idea of kind of labor opposition unionization strikes saying no or kind of preferring not to there's an idea that we can innovate to create solutions that might create these vectors to kind of address the problem in a different way and then there's of course the long project the kind of long-distance education trying to do a generational shift and I think maybe I'll ask the panel and then the audience to kind of think about how those three are working in concert to each other because that's often how we think about it and kind of a proposition to go for it's a company a question that I'll ask or pretend like that was a question so do you want to pretend that you have an answer well I think that the broader framework for your question and everything we've been discussing is the big challenge of doing cross-class political work and building any kind of cross-class relationship is the biggest challenge in any organizing field labor or otherwise and that's what's underpinning this discussion in many ways it's also an initiative that crosses lines of nationality and often highly racialized lines of nationality so this is Kanabari's invitation of this incident where the designers joined the construction industry was very suggestive to me because it reminded me of what happened in this country during the 1930s when the CIO developed a great organizing drives and industrial unionism was swept into prominence to replace the old craft model of unionism which really observed these very strict lines of demarcation between skilled workers and unskilled workers and craft workers and semi-professionalized workers within an industry swept that old model away and made way for everyone in this industry amongst the same union and that didn't go up the skill chain as far as it should have done but it went pretty far up there and that was a model that was very much in the saddle and in the driver's seat for much of the post-war period in this country and then it got demolished by the internationalization of production began in the 1970s it became much more difficult to maintain that kind of cross-class coalition and so in a sense what we're trying to do here is bring that conversation around and try to think about how to reconstitute that big industrial union I mean across national lines and across all of these barriers that are now in its way if you think about it in large scale terms that's what this conversation is about of course it's very difficult for folks at the top end of the skill chain to speak to people at the bottom end in our Gulf labor campaign we actually made the efforts to go out and do field research we visited labor camps we did interviews with workers not just in labor camps in Abu Dhabi but also in source countries in India especially we sent a few organizers back to do these interviews so we did establish some relationships with workers some of us were banned from entry into Abu Dhabi which made it a little more difficult to do that that kind of work but we're still trying to figure out how to build a platform a digital platform that will allow workers to be in contact not just with us but also with their peers and help their organizing efforts in some way that's kind of rudimentary about as far as we got in terms of building up that conversation it's very difficult because there's all these obstacles that are put in your path but that's the kind of thing that really needs to happen and yes it is in the spirit of breaking out of the insularity of a profession and the mentality of a profession even at the very same time insularity provides insulation from the legal liability that's the paradox of this particular circumstance but I think yes I do salute the spirit of opening up and collaborating and building conversations and relationships across the entire chain as you were asking the question Jordan it occurred to me that another way to build a system is from within its internal economics you know construction almost anywhere including in this country is unbelievably inefficient and wasteful and there's a lot of money on the table available from attacking the inherent inefficiencies of construction and one of the reasons that you have these enormous labor abuses in countries that are not accustomed to building western style buildings is because they don't have systems in place to build those buildings so they solve the problem with the cheapest most commoditized available resource which is an infinite supply of cheap labor but if you can torque the system in a way that you attack the inefficiency problem and simultaneously eliminate the demand for that kind of flavor or create demand for a different kind of labor then you might be able to torque it at the same time from the inside I think you're thought about chunking the problem into small pieces and attacking it from different directions is correct and this is one direction if we said to the guys that built the Burj Khalifa and it cost what, $2 billion well you know what guys, you left $300 million on the table because of all of the inefficiencies of that project that will even attract their attention to go after the $300 billion with a different labor strategy that's going to require some systemic design innovation that's a lot different than napkin sketches handed to international construction management firms I also like Jordan's chip away every day I think that I mean just when you write this I think when I like you Phil, when I showed up at that workshop there was a surprise there was a sense of urgency there was a sense of importance there was a sense of being overwhelmed and how you even start to enter into the conflict especially if you're practicing and that is like on a everyday basis there are questions like that that are emerging but it came into our consciousness in the same way that now we have a different way of drawing details and I can't say that we can always be you know we have our hands dirty very literally but I think to ask the question who's going to build this how it's going to be built where are people coming from and you know at some point I think if enough people start to ask these kinds of questions so just that making that visible bringing that to consciousness I think has already been quite important I can only imagine that it was just not as visible I do want to say the image of the strike that labor union in Chakis that was the labor union that has architects as a part of it so it's a really different I mean literally it's just a different construction industry in terms of how people move forward but there was an interesting architect Alexis I cannot remember her last name who talked specifically about what you were mentioning Phil around you know thinking through the detail to basically ask for a certain kind of skilled work that could be done as a way of thinking about how do you train workers to move from unskilled to skilled and so she's saying yes that's the kind of work we can do in the office she runs a very small office actually but she's thinking about these strategies for changing what's actually happening on there's also an economic development to mention to this in Singapore right now they decided that the construction industry is too on foreign workers it creates too precarious a circumstance there so they're starting to develop industrialized construction infrastructure as a matter of economic development they're moving the port and they're building these precast concrete factories and they want to be the precast concrete center of Asia construction so they want to be like the manufacturer center for them so if there were some way to do that to take that kind of an idea and move the work to the village instead of vice versa you'd have a completely different model that would be really interesting we were just laughing because ironically one of the main sources for those housing modules is Singapore in terms of concrete so we're just going to open it up to questions from I have a really good question that builds on what Andrew said about like imaginaries and structures of sort of solidarity across class, across internet and thinking about also how long this project has gone on I'm curious if one you've traced any of the change in the tone of people's shoulder shrugging from the beginning to now specifically when you ask them about this set of problems and if that has changed I would imagine one layer or another it might have and in that context if any of your work has aligned with the work of the group like architecture a lot of me that's working more directly I mean those people in the project basically in the spirit of any discussion like are you all thinking or working on how to how the imaginary of solidarity within the office say or whether this country between architects could or should be aligned with the legroom of people in the project I'm just curious if you're tracing any of the changes I can answer making part of it I think a lot of the people we approached at the beginning there was a lot of shoulder shrugging but I think as the years have gone by feel free to correct me it's not quite your impression then people are interested that it's not something that that architects or universities or institutions want to ignore often the question is like it's not that we want to ignore it it's that we can't address it directly I think this occurred in Chicago that there was some reason whether it was legal or there was a relationship between piano and the institution that they didn't want to disrupt that it was easier to say no and kind of direct the project into something else but I think we've been assembled that have been involved in biennials in Venice and at these major institutions there is an audience coming up and so the question then is how to take that and kind of convert it into a much more broader idea of action and I think that's something that we still struggle with and we're still developing the best ways to take people's genuine concern and their desires to something and what that is so I think a lot of I don't think there's really any architecture that want their projects to be built with exploited labor and so the questions of how to address that still remain living and the other I mean one I'm not answer but related is that I think also what we see from the present moment is that labor there's such an urgency for labor but in if labor continues as we've seen this invisibility of labor and then that invisibility can be manipulated towards some generous and malicious ends and so I think this sort of opens up a moment where having a conversation around labor and a discipline to some of the other issues that we're facing so hopefully that will because just even things that were said today that really opens up new possible directions and so I think we're having more people involved in a conversation can move the work forward in ways that we can jump in vision I just wanted to add a footnote during we invited Peggy precisely because of the book she had done with Phil, recasting labor and one of the things that Peggy kept saying after you were there, just like well what I don't understand is how are architects going to understand labor when they have bad labor practices within their office, right? and she kept saying this and that's actually where architecture lobby came from from that panel she kept trying to bring to the floor it's not just over there and she felt like we have to raise a level of conscious about what labor is in our own local practices in order to change where they are elsewhere so just is there a way to hitch I don't know what direction it goes but hitch your wagons to one another and it just seems like to me as we imagine these conversations with firms here with individuals there's more agencies to control their own labor we can think about labor more concretely in terms of your own practices so that that conversation develops in a certain way I just wonder how it can I think kind of following from Jacob's just brought up one of the discoveries in the project early on was that the projects that tend to have the worst labor conditions are those that are maybe more invisible than the cultural projects that we are kind of connecting with and maybe architects aren't involved and I just wonder if the project has any ambitions to kind of engage the mega construction firms aside from maybe the architects as not just from a sort of like perspective of organizing the labor but like how do you guys get in the heads of the people who maybe aren't architects and aren't participating in this discussion and get them aware I mean aside from I really appreciate Bill's comments about the sort of economic advantage and the things that you said too I like that that is a particularly daunting problem because at least we as architects have a view through you know when I make a decision about a certain curtain wall system if I'm conscious about it I can think about what it means but these global construction consortiums you know that contractor who's building that building is probably a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a Spanish construction consortium that makes its money not building buildings but arbitraging capital between building projects and arbitraging material prices they're not even in the business of building things they just move money around and keep some of it so trying to get their heads wrapped around this problem is a really much greater challenge than getting our heads wrapped around I don't have a little bit of an answer for you do you have a good answer because I don't know I don't have a good answer but let me give you one one example of a large international construction like this I mean they're based somewhere and this one happened to be based in Holland and we found out that they had a master agreement internationally binding with the building of Woodworkers International Union and this firm had actually been commissioned to to build a stadium in Abu Dhabi and so that agreement, that master agreement applies to Abu Dhabi it's an agreement that does encourage worker organization and worker representation at every level and we discovered this and it flies in the face of the official position in the UAE that there are no trade unions the trade unions are illegal in the UAE so the internationality that aspect opens up other possibilities when you're dealing with countries that are very illiberal let's say if you can find the leverage point but again just to go back directly to your question approaching architects on an individual basis and appealing to their conscience probably is not going to get you very far they're not like artists who have a kind of solo they believe they fly solo in many cases they do and an active conscience is something that's a market integrity for them a lot of professional architects of course are part of firms and what they do and what they say has a lot of implications for hundreds of people who are employed in the firms and so that can make those comments very consequential and it means you're isolated you're cut off from commissions you're not invited you're excluded from business and so on and so forth so it's very important then to be able to say as you're going to have that conversation to say look there is this chain of groups that is involved at this point and they represent at every level of the industry and you're not on your own you're not you're not vulnerable within your own profession either I think that's the important connection to make and that's the work that I would think at this point has to be built on it's not impossible Thank you so much for your insights I really appreciate this discussion just two quick questions one is to what extent is the counterparts of this question in terms of architecture for and presenting that not so much has kind of been a digital obligation because I think you've opened that in the architecture it's a natural public aspect that can go and most of it can be recursive but in a strategic way I wonder if that could be a question that actually is an extricable from asking who builds your architecture because in asking who is the score what is the score and as it's being produced and to what extent are they part of this score in the future production of this site and then the second question is a bit more abstract it has to do I appreciate the Jordan insight as to kind of this incremental approach which really is asking the question of how do we ask in every project that we do what is the ethic at every step I think that's what you're saying I don't know if that made you think a bit about what Phil is saying regarding building and creation modeling and all the software that kind of comprises the first immediate interface that a lot of architecture students have with building and so that's actually been a question that I've been interested in is to what extent are there questions that are possible to be explored by considering the media through which architects are producing fantastic works one thing I was wondering goes with the idea of endlessly or asking what data isn't there or as you proposed Phil with increasingly transparent making rendering transparent the supply models through the software is if there's a danger in kind of focusing on this idea of transparency which is another kind of fetishization for real also I'm focusing on in terms of speaking continuously in terms of systems designing and better systems there's something at odds with that as politics in the sense that to design systems is trying to create this loop that resolves those questions in a way that technology has this tendency of becoming accepted as politically neutral versus this other aspects I think with Convary it's more about having sites where conflicts can arise where different languages and different mistranslations can happen but just kind of what might be the basis to consider in pushing those different strategies good, who wants to affect that I want to agree so the first question who is your architecture for I think that really that sort of that question because a lot of the projects that we were looking at a lot of those were being built for the World Cup that's coming up and I think you've seen in Brazil for example there were so many protests around the cost of those projects and how that money could have been spent in other ways what extent is the state basically directing capital to these projects that are for these sort of single events and then are no longer used and so I just I think that I don't know but I think that it's sort of again maybe in thinking about how architecture connects and architects connect to different groups there's the sort of the citizens who are asking why do we have this architecture what is it being used for does that mean you have to take the second question or are we skipping to the next question I wanted to add to that question the second half of the question which I applaud very much I want to agree with I think in some of the discussions about labour and managing labour there's a tension between historical conceptions of managed labour that lead to some of the explanations that we see versus another kind of idealization in progressive concepts of rationality I think in your position in particular there's a kind of unresolved expression of the two sides of efficiency and the two sides of management I'm a little I think the organizational model that I'm hearing across the board seems robust and changeable but I'm scared of this I don't want to argue that I should resolve this with a high degree of clarity where my thinking comes from and I will stipulate that architects in particular internalize technologies by fetishizing that's what we do that's our process we overdo it but the direction that technologies are taking is more about deeper connection between intentionality and execution because right now we use our means of extreme abstraction we make diagrams those diagrams are progressively elaborated until they eventually end up in some form as labour instructions on the side the acts of representation and design intent that we commit to work by technology have a deeper reach and are going to continue to have deeper and deeper reaches we can direct that technology in a way that engages labour in some responsible fashion then that will be good if we're just using it as another tool of systematic compression then I agree with you that's bad we're really really really a far way away from that right now I'm heavily speculating technologies right now that even in a very rudimentary way represent the way a thing goes together almost everything represents what that thing is, what it's done one example I would put maybe slightly attention to is the disclosure on smart systems as a kind of hyper-regulated monitored system that is somehow going to fix everything and I'm worried that's lurking of the management systems you're talking about it might be I think it's a perfectly legitimate it might be what I'm kind of advocating for in a very simple way is that as these technologies expand the relationship into the supply chain architects can try to leverage them in a way that is advantageous to this discussion that's my only argument it's so early that we can do that but nobody is working on this problem so let's work on it I mean one model that came up very early on when we were looking at it was literally right at the start had to do with the code of ethics and the sustainability question and if you look at the history of that where it started and now how it's just become just the part of practice this question has come up also along the way about what if you had a labor lead that you actually had points for fair labor practices not only within a construction project but also in the materials that you're actually using on that project and that could be one way to sort of guarantee across the whole system a way in which labor conditions are improved across the board and not just in construction but also in the production of material so I think Patrice you had oh sorry I'm just going to have a little further question on that sort of following up with what Philip was saying in that is interesting that it's not what we're looking for is not a system that's going to dictate or proscribe how these decisions are made but what we're the objective is to look for is to continue the work that's being done by the group and finding out the information in who's out there what are the consequences who's involved in terms of labor and then being able to armed with that knowledge with technology to provide an efficient feedback to the active design so that you know as Philip says currently there's no system that actually does determine how something goes together but their technology is perfectly capable of taking what we propose as coming together and extracting or proposing what that formation is and being able to put behind that formation what is involved in terms of labor consequences there was a really interesting project done unfortunately this was way too early at MIT about 12 or 15 years ago as a professor in their civil engineering group who had written a series of algorithms that allowed you to examine a construction project and turn a dial and optimize the same construction outcome for lowest cost shortest time and safest construction scenario and those things were in odds with one another it was a really cool idea that was 15 years too early because the inputs were excruciating but the idea was really interesting that you actually explicitly had to make decisions about whether you were going to work fast or safe and those are the kinds of things that I think those are the kinds of things that I think are interesting as opposed to turning every construction robot worker into a pre-programmed bin robot which I think would be bad it feels bad to me at least I'm not going to say something here but in my experience at least and I've done field research in the Gulf and in China and right now I'm doing my research in Palestine and Israel wherever you have a production milieu where there's an abundance of labor and very cheap labor and very vulnerable labor then there's no incentive to to raise the technological standards and it becomes a labor intensive sector it's not a tall one that is conducive or receptive to advanced technology and these are the kinds of sites where the worst labor abuses happen labor intensive ones not the ones where and they're resistant economically resistant in other words to be receptive to new technological standards no it's absolutely true I was in India a couple of years ago visiting this enormous 5,000 unit kind of project that was under construction and the developer couldn't find the contractor so he started his own construction company and I said to him what is the biggest problem on this construction site and you expect this was kind of the twilight zone you expected him to say stuff like oh I can't get the right kind of labor I can't get equipment on my site I have construction logistics problems he said no the only thing I care about is the commoditized cost of cement just the stuff that goes on the contractor if I could get the cost of cement now I could make a ton of money he said he did not get a damn about the fact that there were 2,000 guys on that site hauling buckets of water up through these staircases he didn't care so you're right you're absolutely right I think we're going to have to end it is I just want to say thank you to the panel and my fighters for sharing their insights in an ongoing conversation I don't think this is over so we look forward to you talking about future events and also please circulate information about the guide