For Solidaristic Practices in Architectural Work Marisa Cortright

The Architectural Killjoy

If I were to summarize the role that I had in an office job at an architectural company, it would be that of an Architectural Killjoy - a figure grounded in Sara Ahmed's Feminist Killjoy, who kills the joy of, or causes problems for, other feminists.1 The Architectural Killjoy is the architect who kills the joy of other architects. Even now, the independent work I'm doing as a writer, researcher, and editor is killing architects' joy by inciting critical analysis of architectural production.

In 2018, a friend from graduate school and I put together a proposal for the Architecture Fringe Festival in Scotland. We called our proposal Architect Killjoys, invoking Ahmed and the feeling propelled by what was then a new phenomenon, the "Shitty Architecture Men List," a spreadsheet where anonymous contributors shared experiences of harassment and abuse by powerful men in architecture.2 We advertised for a bar gathering where we could air criticism of the industry's institutions and practices. Yet either because of the way we advertised the gathering (with snippets from the Shitty Architecture Men List) or because no one felt it was necessary, or wanted to be seen attending such an event, no one showed up. At the time, I was disappointed, but in retrospect, I think that's the life of the Killjoy - the sound of crickets chirping around you.

Fortunately, later that year, I had the experience of seeing someone more powerful than me model what it would look like to be an Architectural Killjoy when someone is actually listening. The architectural historian Aaron Betsky gave a talk at a party hosted by my employer to celebrate the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam, an annual event that attracted the company's consultants and clients. Betsky advocated a halt to new construction, arguing that architects should drastically shift their energy toward renovating existing buildings. During the talk, the company's owner smiled along. Later, he expressed his displeasure with Betsky's message. Betsky had killed some major joy, indeed. Even though I'm not speaking to the owners of architectural companies when I write and talk, I do try to channel Betsky's willingness to upset a party or a client.

Recently, I was on a selection committee for the architect-in-residence program at the Amsterdam Centre for Architecture (arcam). Many applications included a budget with insignificant honoraria for speakers in arcam's public programming. In our jury session, I commented, "If this applicant is going to receive the residency, they're going to have to adjust their budget to respect the labor of the people they're inviting to work with them." The person running the jury session replied dismissively, "Of course, you think that. That's your thing," because I've written about architectural workers and the need to compensate them fairly for their work. If I'd pushed my Killjoy sensibilities further, I would have responded that arcam needs to make paying people for their work their thing. Killjoys do this: they insist on making their thing the thing of others. Ahmed describes how, when the Feminist Killjoy points out a problem, they are subsequently identified as the problem. In other words, the difficulty shifts from the difficult thing (being underpaid) to the person saying it is difficult, the Killjoy. Judging by how no one showed up to our Architect Killjoy event in Scotland, it can be lonely to inhabit the role of the Architectural Killjoy.

However, finding peers who share your misgivings and with whom you feel comfortable discussing them can be really encouraging. The office job I used to have involved communication and business development. It was architectural overhead work - not billed directly to the client. It's the kind of job that can be held by someone who studied architecture but isn't necessarily the job of someone who is trained in architecture. It's the kind of job that doesn't require more than the contractually agreed forty or however many hours per week. The longer that I worked in this job, both alongside and in close collaboration with architects who worked more than their contractually agreed number of hours per week, the more sharply I felt a divide between those working in administrative positions like me, and those working in architect positions, even interns. The latter shared several misgivings with me. For instance, we wondered, "Why is there so much unpaid labor in this office? Why are we working on these kinds of projects? Why are we working with these kinds of clients?" And yet we seemed to lack the will or the ability to channel those misgivings into the Killjoy's critique.

This divide between overhead workers and architectural workers is the subject of my 2019 article, "Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture Is Still a Job." 3 "Calling" refers to the mystical faith in one's relationship to architecture, which downplays the significance of hurdles encountered in studying or working simply because one is "called" to be an architect. I identified this divide as a barrier to non-architects and architects finding common ground and organizing together to address their misgivings. I also cited the efforts of a group of people in the uk who called themselves architectural workers and later formed the Section of Architectural Workers (saw) union in 2020. They initially organized against unpaid overtime, salaries below living wages, and unfair treatment and discrimination in the workplace. They were the first instance I had seen of people working in architecture organizing specifically as architectural workers. Inspired by saw, I wrote a book of short essays titled "Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?" Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe.4

Architectural Workers

Who are architectural workers? Why refer to them as such? What do I mean by organizing? And organizing for what? I understood Europe as a political project that controls labor flows in all kinds of work, including architectural work, and used it as the geographical boundary for the book. I interviewed union members and people working in different positions who are organizing in different spaces, including academic groups like the tu Delft Feminists, Claiming Spaces, and the Future Architects Front, as well as a moderator of the Instagram account Dank Lloyd Wright.5 My interviewees described how their careers and lives had been shaped by the forces of the eu, or rather, the "freedom" of movement of labor that nationals of eu member countries are granted to work in other member countries, a freedom that was foreclosed for British nationals following Brexit.

For foreign architectural workers in the eu and non-eu nationals, the "freedom" to move can become a compulsion, depending on how the market is working. Architectural workers from Southern European countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, or Italy leave because there is not enough dignified architectural work for the number of qualified architects. Keyword: dignified. I'm putting scare quotes around "freedom" because the seeming smoothness of Europe's open borders for eu passport holders comes with an inverse hardening of Europe's borders for the others - most obviously, refugees who are fleeing perilous circumstances, namely in Africa and the Middle East, to come to Europe, but also workers from countries outside the eu who come for labor reasons. For those workers, the ordeal of living and working in the eu, and in Switzerland, as a border regime, has been made intentionally onerous to discourage labor immigration, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to discipline the labor that does make it into the country.

An anonymous group called Foreign Architects Switzerland (fas) published a zine in 2012 that took to task the idea that employed architects in Switzerland have it easy by virtue of working in such a rich country.6 It asks, "Is the idea of an architectural proletariat a joke? Why do you complain about your salary? Are Swiss-employed architects spoiled bastards?" 7 Most crucially, for me, the zine puts forward the claim that "it's not because it's worse elsewhere that you should accept bad at home." 8

Zine #4, Foreign Architects Switzerland, 2012

I took that forward into 2022 when I wrote "It Could Always Be Worse" for arch+.9 I based the piece on interviews with architectural workers in German-speaking countries - Germany, Austria, and Switzerland- who had originally come from the southeastern periphery of Europe, primarily from former Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, and Romania.10 I argue that fas's claim to not accept bad at home because it's worse elsewhere "chimes with the cause of architectural workers organizing in the us and Europe, who insist that it's not because it's worse in other industries that architectural workers should accept bad conditions in architecture." 11 Among organizing spaces in architecture, we frequently hear that "the architects who organize as professionalized workers, who are white-collar workers, are relatively well-off." And that may be true, but that's no reason to stop and wait until everyone else has gotten to where architectural workers are.

A similar claim...