Drawing on the work of the Brazilian theorist Sérgio Ferro, who has conducted the single most sustained enquiry into design from the perspective of labour and the construction site available in any language, Production Studies challenges the tendency of architectural theorists, historians, and designers to sideline the industrial, technical, and socio-economic contexts in which building is constituted—or to maintain that these are not the proper concerns of architecture.
At a time when enslavement and deaths at building sites make international headlines, and the distance is growing between architects and the sites of production for their design, accompanied by the increasing deskilling, precarization and forced migration of construction workers across the globe, we ask what critical tools and methods can we employ to do this work, and what alternative forms of practice can we identify? The series explores the 3 areas of action, which Ferro argued in his persuasive talk at CSM in February 2022, are needed to develop the possibility of 'The Emancipatory Building Site'.