Studio BA5 (Malterre-Barthes)

Summary

This drawing based research studio examines construction as nested systems of material extraction, exploitation, cultural production, and value generation. It seeks to unpack, reveal, and communicate the complexity of actors and forces shaping contemporary space production.

Content

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Keywords

Architecture, systems, political economy, construction, actors

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Map complex actor networks and capital flows in construction
• Analyze how invisible actors shape what gets built
• Identify intervention points within construction systems
• Conduct original research across various media
• Develop convincing final diagrams, drawings, renderings, simulations, physical and digital models.
• Deploy design skills toward systemic change
• Articulate strategies for representing complex-systems
• Think critically about architecture's role and complicity in extractive industries
• Develop abilities to work across scales: from material specifications to financial instruments to policy frameworks

Teaching methods

 

We believe that both bachelor's and master's students can engage meaningfully with the studio. While we understand that the complexities of the topic can be intimidating, we will deal with these from our respective perspectives, joyfully and hopefully, and we welcome everyone to join us in this process.

 

The structure and method of this studio follow prior RIOT-led design studios. As such, we do not recommend students take the studio with us more than once.

 

This is an experimental research-design studio- we hope to set the path for an innovative format where drawing research gets the full credits it deserves. Through a comprehensive exploration of the forces (economic, financial, legal, technological, material) that mandate, produce, control, and profit architecture and construction, we seek to expose how, why, and by whom architecture is made and unmade. We will investigate built works as case studies, unwrapping their genealogies, redrawing spatialities, tracing capital flows and actor networks from initial commission through motivations, financing, acquiring permissions, to design, construction, and operation. Our research will be grounded in actual sites and projects in Switzerland, as we seek to mobilize our context.
The studio also engages with critical readings on political economy, extractivism, construction labor, material supply chains, financial instruments, and regulatory frameworks-and other connected topics dear to the RIOT lab such as class, race and gender. These readings serve as analytical lenses to understand the complexities we encounter. Collective research works (mappings, diagrams, timelines) emerge towards a representational outcome of what was uncovered.
The goal is potentially, toward the end of the semester, to identify leverage points-namely where one could act or design intervention to alleviate the status quo. Because the studio conducts self-critical reflection on architecture's attachment to solutionism and building-as-default, we acknowledge the limitations and complicity of architectural practice within extractive systems. By focusing on understanding systems subtending individual buildings, this studio hopes to articulate an agenda for architectural research that acknowledges the complexity of construction, values and materiality and critique the political economy of space.

 

Expected student activities

 

We will deploy designers' skills and organizational abilities to understand, and transmit complex systems behind the production of space. We shall develop the ability to think critically about the status quo while exploring ways of engaging with both the built and unbuilt environments, pushing forward forms of spatial practice. For this, we will develop literacy in policy, economics, technology, intersectional activism, care, preservation, and other related fields, borrowing from different disciplines and learning to doubt while staying hopeful as we help planning disciplines pivot toward better practices of stewardship.

 

 

Assessment methods

 

The grading will be based on consistent engagement and learning/unlearning curve of the students with each episode in the Studio. The grades will be proportionately distributed over the episodes listed as follows. The studio relies on self-assessment questionnaires to help with the grading.

Episode 01: 15%
Episode 02: 20 %
Episode 03: Phase 01 > 20 %
Episode 03: Phase 02 > 30 %
Reading Sessions & Overall Participation 15 %

Supervision

Office hours	Yes
Assistant.e.s	Yes

Resources

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

No

Bibliography

Political Economy

• Deamer, Peggy, ed. Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2014.
• Deamer, Peggy, ed. The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
• Deamer, Peggy. Architecture and Labor. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte. A Moratorium on New Construction. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2025.
• Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.
• Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
• Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
• Martin, Reinhold. The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 201

Materials, Extraction

• Moe, Kiel. Empire, State & Building. Barcelona: Actar, 2017.
• Hutton, Jane. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. London: Routledge, 2020.
• Forty, Adrian. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
• Gomez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Arboleda, Martin. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020.
• Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Race, Labor

• Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.
• Wilson, Mabel O. Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
• McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Real Estate, Value

• Soules, Matthew. Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2021.
• Stevens, Sara. Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Weber, Rachel. From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.
• Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012.
• Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014
• regulations, governance
• Easterling, Keller. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• LeCavalier, Jesse. The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
• Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.

Drawing

• Corner, James. "The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention." In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 213-252. London: Reaktion Books, 1999.
• Kurgan, Laura. Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books, 2013.
• Nichols, Sarah. "Pollux's Spears." Grey Room, no. 71 (2018)

Archives

• Tayob, Huda, Suzanne Hall, and Thandi Loewenson, curators. Race, Space and Architecture: An Open-Access Curriculum. 2020. https://www.racespacearchitecture.org. (Source of the "looking sideways in the archive" passage; see esp. the "Extracting" frame.)
• Hartman, Saidiya. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
• McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
• Azoulay, Ariella Aisha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.
• Frichot, Helene. Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture. Baunach: AADR, 2019.
• Schalk, Meike, Therese Kristiansson, and Ramia Maze, eds. Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections. Baunach: AADR, 2017.
• Rendell, Jane. Art and Architecture: A Place Between. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Maintenance
• Fitz, Angelika, and Elke Krasny, eds. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
• Mattern, Shannon. "Maintenance and Care." Places Journal, November 2018. https://placesjournal.org.
• Jackson, Steven J. "Rethinking Repair." In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221-239. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
• The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso, 2020.

Swissness

• Diener, Roger, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron, and Christian Schmid. Switzerland: An Urban Portrait. Basel: Birkhauser, 2006.
• Nichols, Sarah. "Concrete Stories." In Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past, edited by Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, and Laurent Stalder. Lausanne: EPFL Press, 2021.

Ressources en bibliothèque

• Mouvance : cinq mots pour le paysage / Berque
• Peraldi M. "L'Etang de Berre, interpretation d'un paysage metropolitain." Ethnologie francaise, dossier "Crise du paysage," 1989
• Paillard B. (et al.) La damnation de Fos
• Find the references related to the Berre case study at the Library
• Construire avec la nature / François
• Le territoire de l'Etang de Berre. In : A.M.C. n 82, sept 1997