We’ve made incredible gains in our organizing work this year, with many active campaigns and several new inquiries. But there’s still a persistent challenge that we confront when working with architects, and it has us returning to the same question: why is it so hard for architects to see themselves as working class? The very idea is still so contested within the discipline that forming any union has workers doing the double work of not only organizing, but shifting their identities, or what is often called consciousness; it’s no small task. I’m confident architects will outgrow their old identities (there’s plenty of evidence that they already are), but there is still a long way to go before we’ve reached a substantial bloc who have a different understanding of class.

At the core of The Labor of Architecture is a question related to the challenges above, which is: why did it take so long for architects to organize into a union? Of course the idea of class consciousness is directly tied to this question, a concept that is entirely new to the discipline besides a small blip during WWII (If you’ve seen the movie Oppenheimer, you’ll recognize the acronym FAECT). For our union effort to accelerate, we have to fully understand the unique challenges that prevent a particular kind of class consciousness within architecture.

The first barrier for a new class consciousness, which is fairly common today worldwide but especially acute in the United States, is the economic theory of class. If you’re like me, this is how you understood the word class, a three-part categorization based solely on money. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that this theory shaped every bit of my reality prior to forming our union.

In this theory, we find the Upper, Middle, and Lower categories. According to the Pew Research Center, about 30% of Americans fall into the first category, 50% into the second, and 20% into the third. Even here we can point out the flaws associated with this on economic terms, like the fact that the “Upper” category obscures a class within the class that has an outsized role in shaping society through an absurd amount of wealth. Put another way, there’s a big difference between the top 1% and the remaining 10%, let alone the top .01%

So why am I using the term theory? Because that’s what it is, nothing more than one way of seeing something (the Greek root of the word theory is theōria, shared with theater, meaning a particular view of something.) If it was easier to see it like this, then the term would suffice. Unfortunately, every part of our capital-dominated society fights tooth and nail to ensure that this is presented as a fact, the singular way of viewing class. Which is why a better term might be ideology. Once you realize this, you see it everywhere: from our earliest social circles in school, to our predetermined career paths, to our communities in adult hood, the pressures of society do everything they can to sort us into these three categories. And it largely works. Based on the numbers, it’s no wonder politicians spend a lot of time appealing to the Middle Class, while selling the idea that anyone can make it there and beyond.

The second “barrier” theory, one popularized by sociologist Richard Florida, is that of a “Creative Class.” For Florida this was a catchy label to put on some research based mostly around millennials re-occupying cities hollowed out by their parents and grandparents, and in the process discovering that the city had better vibes for a certain kind of life. According to Florida, this shift was so strong and so permanent that this “creative class” emerged as a new socio-economic group that would rewrite the future of the United States. This didn’t quite pan out; creating a new class out of character traits that are arguably real is largely an identity game. But there are some clues that help us understand how professionals like architects see themselves.

If our first theory prompts an “economic” consciousness, then our second one presents a “creative” consciousness, an idea I devote an entire chapter to in my book. In addition to the way I described theory above, I also tend to think of the term consciousness in this regard as an identity-based “pull” towards something. For the economic case, it is a pull towards seeing the world, and making decisions about it, through money. The same is true for the creative case. So how is our perception of the world shifted when we remain there?

For architects, creativity is king: it’s the trait that we’re first taught, and it’s the primary identity we carry through our careers. From the first minutes in studio, architects are educated to be problem solvers not through traditional means found in science or math, but through something more esoteric and closer to the arts. It is a process of “self-discovery” that has them finding their own unique ways of approaching problems, through a particular creative process. Spending a whole semester designing a project, they became intimately acquainted with their creative strengths and weaknesses, supposedly unique to them.

This education, and the identity it initially shapes for young designers heading into the workforce, is so strong that it even takes precedence over the economic theory of class. Who cares how much money I’m making if I get to do a job that I love, shaping the world around me? But if you don’t care about money, you certainly won’t value your labor, or yourself. In other words, you become easily exploitable.

When I first started the organizing process at BA, a new seed was planted that would eventually become a new understanding of class. I wasn’t necessarily aware, or conscious, of it at the time, but with the formation of our new union my working conditions changed in a way that reality would begin to appear a little differently. No longer an “at will” employee, meaning I could be fired on the spot, the protections afforded to me and my coworkers strengthened our position in the office. Overnight, my material conditions had changed.

Once we sat down at the bargaining table across from management, things immediately felt different. If we had issues that were important to us, our bosses were obligated to bargain over them in good faith. In the past we would offer suggestions and receive an earnest response, but little would happen. At the bargaining table, now we could actually get things done. Instead of various job titles, or project managers and teammates, or even the office as a “family,” all things that strongly stratified us, there were two groups: Employers and Employees. And with it, an alternative theory of class based not on economics, but labor.

In this theory, there are only two classes, with Employers representing 10% of the workforce and Employees representing 90% (this number includes the “self-employed” category, which is important in architecture). Per these categories, an Employer is defined as someone who owns a business, or means of production, and an Employee is someone who is paid a wage to perform specific tasks but has no ownership of anything other than their labor. In terms of union negotiations, the Employer is defined as someone who has the ability to hire or fire Employees.

Because of this, it asks us very different questions: who owns the ideas produced in the office? Who is more dependent on who? How is pay structured for each? And most importantly, which group has more power? The answer to the last question is obvious, but with this new class distinction, our union shifted some of the power our way. Not all of it of course, but enough to change our conditions around us. Traditional haggling, neatly fitting within the economic theory of class, couldn’t get us there. Neither could sympathetic appeals to our common passions of good design. What it took was a little bit of friendly class conflict between management and workers.

It wasn’t until I began taking courses at the New School, what would turn into the early research for The Labor of Architecture, that I discovered the many writers and thinkers outside of my discipline who already developed many answers to these questions. With the help of classics like Marx and Weber, along with more recent writing by Nancy Fraser and Michael Yates, among others, I was able to dive deeper into the labor theory of class, translating universal concepts into the unique language of architecture.

This kind of work, organizing a specific industry, is a paradox since ideas like this have to be articulated in unique terms so that individuals can see themselves as the broadest classification possible: that of workers, or the 90%. But once this kind of consciousness sets in, one built on new ideas of class and solidarity, a new world of possibilities opens up not just for individual disciplines, but workers across all industries.

In architecture, it begins with shifting our identification away from owners and instead towards the other labor in our industry, construction. This not only makes sense because these are the folks who make our designs physically possible, but because they have, through their own understanding of class, leveraged huge gains for their working conditions. Through concepts like prevailing wage, design labor could ally itself with construction labor and shift money, i.e. power, away from the capitalist class that currently controls much of the built environment.

Outside of the building industry, architects could intersect with community groups and political stakeholders to shift policy towards a democratically designed built environment. Without this, their identification with owners, while maybe more comfortable, is the biggest risk towards keeping them in a position of weakness. For architects, and those in design professions, unlearning class isn’t just a matter or theory, but one of survival. Without entering this struggle, the accumulation of wealth and emerging technology like AI will only further erode design.

It’s difficult work to confront the realities of ideology, especially related to money. In the United States, from the day we are born, our identities are shaped so strongly by the economic theory of class that many of the paths ahead of us feel predetermined. While we like to think that what makes Americans special is our shedding of the staunch class identities that we emerged from in Great Britain, reality is quite different. Socially this might be the case, but research shows that children born into lower socio-economic positions face incredible odds at attaining societal mobility. In other words, if you’re born Lower class in economic terms, odds are you’ll stay there. Same for the other groups.

While challenging orthodoxy is hard work, it can be done. My colleagues and I found a new way of seeing ourselves that set a precedent for other architects. And in reality we were doing nothing more than following the footsteps of not just the other professionals that came before us, but the countless workers who organized to make their lives and society more equitable for all. The United States’ unionization rate peaked in the 1950s, and has been on the decline ever since. But before this peak there was a rise, one that came from a place just as low as today. I like to think that we’re about to ascend to a new one, but first we need to see ourselves, and the path ahead, a little differently.

References

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm#:~:text=Table_title:%20Employment%20by%20major%20industry%20sector%20Table_content:,21%20%7C%20Percent%20distribution%2C%202024:%200.3%20%7C

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47596