New divisions of digital labour in architecture (original) (raw)
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Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice
Avery Review, 2017
This is a call for the development of a more robust theoretical position about the gender implications of advanced parametric design and the use of machines to design and fabricate architecture. As digital fabrication has made material the network conditions of cyberfeminism, it is time to revisit the relationships between feminism, architecture, and technology. We propose a framework that relies upon intellectual traditions of feminism and deliberately focuses on developing technologies as a locus of power and influence in architecture. Architecture has been slow to fully acknowledge, incorporate, and integrate women into its practices.3 Within the building profession, digital technology has emerged-and in many ways, is still emerging-as a site of architectural influence: those who control the process of design through technology control architecture. CNC fabrication and robotic construction are cultivating new cultures of digital craft, and in searching for future opportunities, we would do well to recall the long history that links craft and feminine labor. By looking again at the often-neglected contributions of Ada Lovelace and the Jacquard loom to computation and digital fabrication in the nineteenth century or a more recent project such as the Elytra Filament Pavilion, we might see how this digital moment has been framed by feminist craft rather than the more familiar origin stories that surround computation.
Women's Work: Attributing Future Histories of the Digital in Architecture
The Plan Journal, 2019
Conventions of authorship and attribution historically excluded or erased women's contributions to the built environment. As frequent co-authors and collaborators, women's stories often do not fit into conventional historical narratives about how architecture is created. In response, this essay proposes a technology called "attribution frameworks": a digital method for creating a transparent record of architectural labor. The authors argue that the integration of digital tools into architectural design offers a new space for more equally attributing, documenting, and counting labor and contributions to the discipline. This space allows for a more rich and inclusive narrative of contributions to architectural production for the future.
Sociotechnical Environments: Proceedings of the 6th STS ITALIA CONFERENCE, 2017
Architecture is characterised by a lack of women in the profession and a significant drop–out after qualification all over Europe, despite decades of policies of inclusion. The practice of architecture requires the use of specialised instruments and technologies that often collide with the social assumptions and stereotypes around the conflicted relationship between women and technology. Women are socially perceived as inadequate users of technology in terms of: knowledge of the specific characteristics of objects, ability to use an instrument other than for its basic outcomes, and capacity to use technology in collaboration with co–workers. What can be done to challenge this widespread social perception? The suggestion offered here is to develop an organic strategy of combined actions able to foster a simultaneous change on different levels: individual, relational, cultural and structural. The paper offers an outline of a possible framework of analysis to be initially applied to the architectural field as a specific case study, with the possibility to subsequently adapt it to other STEM sectors. The framework draws upon the concepts of Technologically Dense Environments and Integral Theory's AQAL method, used respectively to collect and organise empirical data.
Mapping the (Invisible) Salaried Woman Architect: the Australian Parlour Research Project
2015
Since the 1970s, feminist historians and polemicists have struggled to uncover the ordinary lives of women. They believe that gender ideals and biases are a critical part of the weft and weave of daily life. But the quotidian has been a restricted field in our discipline, often used to define a particular building type rather than the lives of architects. For example, we know little about the workdays of professionals or their labour in the workplace. The architectural office - its daily transactions and everyday culture - remains obscure. Even when represented in histories of the profession, the architectural office is filtered through a top-down lens trained on practice directors. The labour and lives of architecture’s male and female employees is unexplored terrain, but we could begin with the demographics: up to three-quarters of Australian women in architecture are salaried workers, continuing a historical trend. In the past, women generally worked for others. The gendering of ...
Becoming a Feminist Architect, … visible, momentous, with
2017
This issue is one of three publications subsequent to the 13th International Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Conference “Architecture & Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies,” which was held at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, between the 17th to 19th November in 2016.1 The conference gathered around 200 participants and included over a hundred paper presentations and performances, as well as two exhibitions. The overwhelming interest in reviving the feminist discourse in architecture gave us the opportunity to reflect on the process of becoming feminist architects. Becoming a feminist architect is a complex process, rife with strategies, tactics, frictions, advances and retreats, that will continue to engage us in the future as it does now. This became clear through the presentations of a wide range of different feminist architectural practices, both historical and contemporary, their diverse theoretical underpinnings and methodological reflection...
The case for Femwork: Feminist design principles in tech and tech-enabled work
Computer , 2024
In this essay, we propose the notion of ‘Femwork,’ a feminist framework of reassessing and reimagining labour in the digital economy. By integrating this framework into the building of databases and digital systems, we can make inclusivity a default and not an afterthought in our mandates on the future of work.
Resetting Medium: Proactive Practices of Women in Architecture in the 21st Century
PhD Thesis, 2022
This thesis aims to reveal and explain contemporary parallelisms between feminist thought and architecture in the mediatized practices of women in architecture. The place of women in the discipline, intensely questioned in the 1990s but mostly replaced by visibility debates after the 2000s, have not yet been sufficiently addressed through the mobility created by online platforms and the plural positions in feminist theory. Pointing to this gap and assisted by an inquiry into medium, shared concerns between feminism(s) and alternative architectural modes of existence form the central question of the thesis. By incorporating two different prior senses, medium comes to mean an environment of communication and functions on three levels. As a conceptual tool it enables to explain architecture's new disciplinary condition, to characterize an ephemeral aspect of space, and to examine practices of women in architecture. In the study, women from non-Western geographies are scrutinized and their practices unpacked via medium demonstrate four categorical alignments with feminist praxis. These indicate that the future of architecture is being shaped by the intersecting agendas of ecology, immateriality, cultural reparation and collectivity. Based on this revelation, the study concludes that in negotiating and communicating with the milieu of their practice, women operationalize architecture as a response. Though intersecting under the highlighted categories, this response varies depending on what each woman refines from their interaction with disciplinary and contextual medium. Complementarily, the study maps the online presence of collectives and reveals their distinctive agendas as well as strategies.It is found that these collectives take different webbed formatsincluding comprehensive projects, which enable accumulation and dissemination of data, extensions of offline support mechanisms and empowering activities of social networking.