 | The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age A critique of prominent architects' approach to digitally driven design and labor practices over the past two decades
Analyzing many major international architectural projects of the past twenty years, Arantes provides an in-depth account of how this "architecture of exception" has come to dominate today's industry. Articulating an original, compelling critique of the capital and labor practices that enable many contemporary projects, Arantes explains how circulation (via image culture), consumption (particularly through tourism), the division of labor, and the distribution of wealth came to fix a certain notion of starchitecture at the center of the industry. Significantly, Arantes's viewpoint is not that of Euro-American capitalism. Writing from the Global South, this Brazilian theorist offers a fresh perspective that advances ideas less commonly circulated in dominant, English-language academic and popular discourse. Asking key questions about the prevailing logics of finance capital, and revealing inconvenient truths about the changing labor of design and the treatment of construction workers around the world, The Rent of Form delivers a much-needed reevaluation of the astonishing buildings that have increasingly come to define world cities. Pedro Fiori Arantes is an architect and urban planner, professor of art history, and Pro-Rector of Planning at the Federal University of São Paulo. Adriana Kauffmann is a translator in São Paulo, Brazil. Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture and director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. He is author of Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010) and The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (Minnesota, 2016). |
