Architektur Immaterieller Arbeit

English Abstract

»Architecture of Immaterial Labour« is an investigation into (workplace) architecture that deals with a contemporary concept of work – a concept of work that increasingly diffuses, and increasingly penetrates all aspects of human activity, in which work-time and spare-time merge, and the actual job becomes indistinguishable from education or vocational training. Modes and means of this more and more dominant production of our western societies require different spatial figurations for work that are permanently and continuously manifest in new and unprecedented formations and figurations. The investigation of this book follows these increasingly immaterial organizations of spaces.

The old dictum of spatial and temporal simultaneity and concurrence of work processes, as well as the functionally distinct, well-defined attribution of spaces of production disintegrate with current organizations of a labour concept that is becoming increasingly immaterial, thus challenging traditionally well defined, functionally seperated orders of spaces of production. I use the concept of immaterial labour (Negri & Hardt: 1997, Paolo Virno: 2001) as a political concept that allows me – on the one hand – to question significant forms of production of a value-adding, symbol-producing activity within the Western industrialized countries and – on the other hand – to follow emerging forms and
qualities of architecture, that is no longer is fixed to closed, mono-functionally determined spaces.

Thus the title »Architecture of Immaterial Labour« is at once the hypothesis of my investigation: Do we find, parallel to a dominant cultural practice of immaterial labour new forms and orders of architecture? Which forces are composing these spaces? How is an architecture of immaterial labour being discursively constructed and how is it being produced? Which forms does it take on? As means of subjectification and as part of an organization and of representation, architecture does offer a research subject that is directly connected to the disparate forms of capitalism. In its outstanding examples, dominant discourse formations crystallize: the idea how people shall assemble, how people
are being made productive and how such an assembly can be controlled and steered.

The spatial aspect of a form of production that diffuses into society, that corresponds with no traditional manufacture of physical products but defines itself through communication opens up the problematic of an architecture of immaterial labour. From there I deduce questions that are bound within a political field of the concept of immaterial labour. Every postulated improvement towards more life, every movement that tries to emancipate labour from capitalism is always and already utilized within prevailing discourses – in this case the capitalist system.

Precisely because architecture is directly linked to a political, social and societal discourse and since architecture is shaped by a multitude of different discourses, I want to propose an analysis of the diverse framings in which architecture, but also working subjects, are being produced. Thus I hope to be able to show the conflict and frictions that are immanent in an architecture of immaterial labour, making new knowledge productive for today’s practice of architecture.

Six significant projects of the 1960s – projects that are bound to a discourse on automation and leisure society – make it possible for me to identify and analyze contours of an architecture that mirrors tendencies of altering modes of production and labour conditions of a value-adding immaterial practice. Partly reactive, partly – seen from today – prophetic, these projects that I discuss deal with two things: firstly, the sheer endless extension (both in terms of time and of space) of workplaces in society, and secondly, the modes of assembly and the modes of living together.

With the first ever built office-landscape Buch und Ton for the media corporation Bertelsman (1960/61) its architectonic antithesis, the office-building Centraal Beheer (1968-71), as well as the emancipatory spare time project Fun Palace (1962-66). I show the necessity, after the Second World War, to give form to a new social and economic hypotheses – namely cybernetics. In the second part of the book I discuss strategies of furnishing (einrichten): I refer to the experimental project Mobile Office (1969) by Hans Hollein, the Yellow Heart, a project by Haus-Rucker-Co., and finally to the performance Bed-In. All three frame miscellaneous strategies to deal with a new concept of life and
work. Simultaneously, the projects I discuss formulate a variety of architectonic practices that comply with a concept of labour, a labour that converges with life and diffuse into society.