Labour, prescription and alienation in architecture: critical notes on the architect's practice

Abstract

The essay seeks to point out contemporary phenomena of decreasing autonomy by the alienation of everyday skills that, together with architectural drawing, promotes the architect and urbanist’s figure to that of an expert, thus immobilizing its practice in a heteronomous form. It aims the exposition, with the critiques of Ivan Illich and Sérgio Ferro, how the architect’s practice contributes to the alienation and exploitation of the construction worker’s labour in detriment of the body-skill dialectics, which would allow for a closer relationship between individual and society. Opposing this alienation processes, both in consuming as in the production of architecture, with studies about technology and anthropology, it argues in favour of a politics of transformation of architectures technology based on the relation between body, skills, apprenticeship and technique