Architecture under Capital: On Sérgio Ferro
Entrées d’index
Index chronologique :
XXe sièclePersonnes citées :
Ferro Sérgio (1938-)Texte intégral
- 1 See, for instance, Christine Wall, An Architecture of Parts. Architects, Building Workers and Indu (...)
- 2 Gauri Bharat, “Centering Jugaad, Challenging Construction Historiography,” Platform, October 14, 2 (...)
- 3 See Otto Ulrich, “Technology,” in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books, (...)
1It is probably safe to say that every architect knows a dozen anecdotes about construction workers: how they misunderstood a drawing, how they executed something in a completely different way than intended, how they devised a workaround or a trick. We tend to interpret these episodes as amusing or annoying deviations from a production that we tacitly assume is consistent in itself and provides every means for the “rational” implementation of an architectural design. After all, since Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s motion studies on bricklaying in the late 19th century, much effort has been made to optimize procedures, and there have also been advances in site management, prefabrication, and machinery. The truth is, however, that even the most sophisticated projects, or those that are said to consist “merely” of assembling components, still depend on countless impromptu solutions.1 These adjustments that fill “the crucial gap between the architectural specifications […] and the exigencies of the construction site”2 even have names of their own in some languages, like the Hindi jugaad or the Brazilian gambiarra. This is not because they only happen in so-called underdeveloped countries, as side effects of incomplete transfers of technology from so-called developed contexts.3 They in fact occur everywhere. If workers literally and exclusively did just what they were told, construction would never proceed. It would be brought to a standstill everywhere.
- 4 Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design just launched an exhibition with the title Architec (...)
- 5 See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, An (...)
2My point is that many of these unforeseen practices can be interpreted as more than curiosities—namely as remnants of a certain kind of ingenuity and know-how. Furthermore, the gradual devaluation and cancellation of this knowledge coincides historically with the takeover of building production by capital. Now you might ask why, if we are going to discuss architecture, capital, and labor, we should start with the incongruities between design and construction site. Wouldn’t it be more logical to deal with low wages, poor working conditions, safety deficiencies, or occupational diseases? It is because these last topics can be addressed without questioning capitalist relations of production as such. Striking examples are the reports published by Human Rights Watch, such as Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates (2006). Any well-meaning architect would rightly decry the problems raised there and yet not doubt that design and construction must be separate realms and that detailed drawings and careful specifications are essential to good architecture. In contrast, themes like jugaad and gambiarra remind us of the limits of design, of the operational intelligence of the people who actually produce our buildings, and of the frustration we felt when we first realized that our professional lives had a lot to do with instruction and very little with hands-on construction.4 The unease these subjects cause, often met with humor, reveals a historical wound that concerns us. They can hardly be addressed without considering the genesis of contemporary relations of production and our role within these relations.5
- 6 The research project Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour (...)
3This is precisely where I see the core of the theory and historiography developed by the French-Brazilian architect and painter Sérgio Ferro over the last six decades, which is now finally being published in English thanks to the research project Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges (TF/TK).6 Unlike authors who have approached architecture under capital stressing symbolic and ideological functions, impositions of ways of life, and other questions on the “reception side,” Ferro mobilizes critical thinking to decipher architecture’s production. This includes its place in the broad picture of political economy, as well as the ins and outs of production processes as such.
- 7 This quote and all subsequent quotes not otherwise indicated are taken from the Preface written by (...)
4Ferro was born in the Brazilian city of Curitiba in 1938, and studied at the University of São Paulo Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAUUSP) from 1957 to 1961. He says himself that he would have preferred to study painting, which he loved and practiced from an early age, but his father objected. Ferro therefore was not particularly enthusiastic about architecture at first, until he got to know real building sites and the revealing contrasts they contain. On the one hand, he followed the rather small sites of upper middle class single-family homes designed by FAUUSP professor Villanova Artigas and other modernists in São Paulo, and usually executed by Osmar Souza e Silva’s company CENPLA. Ferro recalls in a recent text that “Osmar was very attentive to his clients and his workers, who formed a supportive and helpful team,” but that the “congeniality” and “facilitated experimentation” of his company also “deceived novices like us about the reality of other building sites.”7
5Ferro and his friend Rodrigo Lefèvre (1938-1984) encountered this other reality when they visited the construction site of Brazil’s new capital Brasilia. In 1960, when they were still students, they were commissioned by Ferro’s father, a private developer, to design two office buildings there. “Rodrigo and I travelled to Brasilia several times to check that the constructions followed ‘our’ designs and to resolve any issues. From the very first trip, our little bubble burst. Our building sites, like all the others in the future capital, bore no relation to Osmar’s. They were more like a branch of hell.”
- 8 James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, Chicago, IL; London: T (...)
6It is important to bear in mind the herculean task that Brasília represented. Thousands of workers and hundreds of contractors, suppliers, and technical staff came from all over the country to meet the impossible deadline of four years to finish the city’s essential structures, in a location lacking even proper road connections. The whole endeavor was fraught with contradictions from the outset. According to James Holston’s analysis, it was supposed to “signal the dawn of a new Brazil,” and thus its planning “had to negate Brazil as it existed,” while its construction could not rely on anything other than the existing Brazilian society with all its inequality.8 Ferro and Lefèvre tried to somehow understand this contradiction between the noble discourse of planners, architects, and the government, and the dire reality on the ground, as well as the contrast between Osmar’s and Brasilia’s building sites.
- 9 See Pedro Arantes, Arquitetura Nova: Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Império e Rodrigo Lefèvre, São Paulo: Ed (...)
7At that time, in the late 1950s, when major leftist movements and struggles for social change were taking place throughout Latin America, Ferro and Lefèvre became members of the Communist Party. However, they found that the party was far from providing clarity on the theoretical front—its “Marxism […] was pitiful.” They started their own studies, took up teaching positions at FAUUSP shortly after graduating and, together with Flávio Império (1935-1985), founded the collective that later became known as Arquitetura Nova.9 From 1961 to 1970, the group carried out a series of experimental projects and research in an attempt to “thoroughly rethink how to be an architect.” This meant distancing themselves from the kind of practice advocated by their “masters” Artigas and Oscar Niemeyer, who also saw themselves as communists. Nevertheless, Artigas and Niemeyer had a rather uncritical embrace of the idea of “development”—at least as far as architecture was concerned.
- 10 Cf. note 7.
“The way we were taught was to start from a desired result; then others would take care of getting there, no matter how. We, on the other hand, set out to go down to the building site and accompany those carrying out the labour itself, those who actually build, the formally subsumed workers in manufacture who are increasingly deprived of the knowledge and know-how presupposed by this kind of subsumption. 10”
8Arquitetura Nova’s radical approach was violently interrupted in 1970, when Ferro and Lefèvre were arrested by the military regime that had taken power in Brazil in 1964 and suspended civil rights in 1968 with the “Institutional Act Number Five.” After a cruel year in prison, Ferro was released, and he and his family decided to go into exile in France. He was not allowed to work as an architect there, but, paradoxically, he was permitted to teach aspiring architects. And so he did. In 1973, Ferro became a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble (ENSAG), founding the Dessin/Chantier laboratory and undertaking experimental building projects with students, as well as several historical and theoretical investigations, until he reached the mandatory retirement age in 2000. But he never stopped studying, writing, painting, exhibiting and publishing. In a way, he never stopped refining the Arquitetura Nova approach.
- 11 Written for the conference Industries of Architecture and published in the book with the same titl (...)
9What does that approach entail? Ferro himself has summarized it several times, one instance being in the lecture “Dessin/Chantier: An Introduction for Newcastle.”11 I will try to roughly sketch a few of the main points, but what follows should be taken with a grain of salt. Ferro is a dialectical thinker, and dialectics do not translate into discrete conceptual units. What he proposes in terms of architectural theory, history, and practice is infinitely richer than this brief outline.
- 12 Karl Marx, Capital, London: Penguin; New Left Review, 1976 [1867], vol. 1, p. 457-458.
10Firstly, there is the assumption that architecture is part of the construction industry, which in turn is a branch of capitalist commodity production and has to be understood as such. Ferro soon realized that the harsh working conditions he had witnessed in Brasilia were not an exception, but an extreme manifestation of the way capital organizes construction in general. A Marxian concept that he uses extensively—as in the passage quoted above—is central to this understanding: manufacture. It means a kind of production in which labor processes are divided among many workers and centrally coordinated, while the technological basis remains that of handicraft. Former craftspeople become wage laborers and, instead of making and selling their own products, they are forced to sell their capacity to work or, in Marxian language, their labor-power. Nevertheless, no matter how much a production process is divided, every operation “retains the character of a handicraft, and is therefore dependent on the strength, skill, quickness and sureness with which the individual worker manipulates his tools.”12
- 13 Ibid., p. 455.
- 14 The text was first published as two articles in Almanaque: Cadernos de Literatura e Ensaio, in 197 (...)
- 15 La Villeneuve, in southern part of Grenoble, was designed by the Atelier d'urbanisme et d'architec (...)
- 16 Sérgio Ferro, Design and the Building Site, op. cit. (note 13).
- 17 Karl Marx, Capital, London: Penguin; New Left Review, 1981 [1894], vol. 3, p. 273-301.
11Manufacture was the predominant form of capitalist production from the 16th to the late 18th century,13 but the introduction of large machinery in the 19th century did not extinguish it. Several branches retained this labor-intensive form, including construction. Ferro’s most influential text, O canteiro e o desenho, or “Design and the Building Site,”14 is above all an investigation of construction as manufacture and the role architectural design plays therein. It was written soon after his arrival in Grenoble, where he was living in the middle of the very “developed” construction site of La Villeneuve.15 The text reflects the realization that, despite the different working conditions, relations of production on the site were structured in exactly the same way as in Brasilia. And thus Ferro begins with the striking insight that “the fundamental function of architectural design today is to enable the commodity form of the architectural object that could not be achieved without it.”16 The raison d’être of architectural design as we know it, carried out prior to and remote from the construction process, does not lie in any functional or symbolic purposes of the end product, but in providing a tool that enables the centralized control of capital in the manufacture of construction. Ferro explores the consequences of these relations for the people on both sides, design and building. He also explains how the alleged backwardness of the construction industry fits perfectly into the economic system. Labor-intensive branches produce huge amounts of surplus value, which raise the general rate of profit through the market mechanism of “equalization.”17
- 18 For instance, Construção do Desenho Clássico, Belo Horizonte: MOM, 2021, English version forthcomi (...)
12Another Marxian concept profusely used by Ferro—and also mentioned in the above-quoted passage—is formal subsumption. It is not explicitly mentioned in “Design and the Building Site,” but becomes pivotal for later writings, particularly regarding the historiography of architecture.18 Formal subsumption designates the kind of subordination of labor under capital that is characteristic for manufacture. Since in manufacture, no machinery or new technology determines the labor process and objectifies the workers’ dependence on capital, their “obedience” is conditioned by nothing more than certain social relations of production (legally anchored as property relations). Their subsumption is formal. The labor process as such relies entirely on their knowledge and know-how. In contrast, real subsumption sets in when capital is able to take over essential knowledge and determine the labor process.
13From capital’s perspective, formal subsumption is always fragile. It needs the artisanship of the workforce—which is as intellectual as it is manual—and at the same time must devalue that artisanship as if it could be easily mastered by anyone. In Construction of Classical Design, Ferro examines the history of Western architecture by analyzing how this contradiction evolved from late Gothic to 19th-century eclecticism and how, in this process, the figure of the architect and architecture as a liberal art gradually emerged. Classical design here refers to the repertoire of forms and ornaments that the Renaissance created with the legitimation of a reborn Antiquity and which primarily served to take the definition of what was to be built out of the builders’ hands, even if (or because) they were still the only ones who knew how it would be built.
- 19 Sérgio Ferro, “Against the Grain,” in Design and the Building Site, op. cit. (note 13).
- 20 Still another of these reactions—actually the earliest—were the changes in practices of specificat (...)
14By and large, the authority of the classical repertoire and thus of architects was crumbling around 1800, when virtually any craftsperson in the building trades was capable of creating a Greek or Gothic-style façade. Together with the general labor struggles in which these trades represented a significant front, this forced capital to react. One of its reactions was constructive eclecticism, which Ferro analyzes in “Against the Grain.”19 Another was the introduction of new materials, as he convincingly argues in “Concrete as Weapon.”20 Although structural engineering and materials science were still in their infancy, the capitalist construction industry succeeded in introducing reinforced concrete to diminish the expertise of the most powerful craftspeople on building sites: carpenters became shuttering joiners and stonemasons became concrete mixers.
15There is much more to say about Ferro’s approach and the perspectives and questions it opens up, for example in the historical analyses of the visual arts in comparison to architecture, or in the use of Hegel’s dialectics to decipher the relation between design and building site from identity to difference, opposition and contradiction. However, I would like to conclude by returning to the subject of jugaad and gambiarra, emphasizing the practical side of Ferro’s approach.
16Ferro has often been interpreted as demonizing architectural design and blaming architects for the existence of the capitalist construction industry and the exploitation of its workers, as if the former were part of a historical conspiracy. None of this is true. What Arquitetura Nova’s experiments and Ferro’s later research aimed at is emancipation in the broadest sense. In architectural production this would start with a return to the building site, “fostering the reconstitution of [its] knowledge and know-how,” so that “the architect would serve as a kind of general secretary for the cooperative collective.”
- 21 Cf. note 7.
“We proceeded […] as Marx recommended in his analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871: without expecting miracles, without decreeing a ready-made utopia, we started from what already existed. We tried to repair the disaster capital wrought upon the heritage of construction, which the world of labour had preserved and passed on from generation to generation at least since the eleventh century and all the way up until the beginning of the twentieth century.21”
17Ferro is aware of the fact that such experimental practices cannot take place on conventional construction sites under the premise of profit. But we should not forget that there are still many contexts where people build for other reasons. Instead of forcing their “development” towards the kind of management and technology established under this premise, we should rather use such opportunities to favor the tandem of design and construction in the most autonomous and collaborative way possible in each case.
18For architectural history as a discipline, Ferro’s work provides a perspective that has been little researched to date. It means investigating behind-the-scenes social relations, as opposed to focusing on architectural products as expressions of certain intellectual values and mindsets. Changes that are otherwise only explained as the mysterious results of an advancing zeitgeist can suddenly be understood as the results of very down-to-earth conflicts. The aforementioned case of reinforced concrete is one example. Many historians see the emergence of this building material as a natural consequence of technological development, as if architecture—and everything else—automatically followed the path of modern science. However, a look behind the scenes shows that the rather scant knowledge of this material was available for decades without being applied, and that its sudden and still very improvised use was triggered by labor disputes. Architecture should certainly not be reduced to this dimension, but overcoming our blindness in this respect and looking at architecture “from below” can lead to significant discoveries and reinterpretations of its history and current practices.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Christine Wall, An Architecture of Parts. Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940-1970, London: Routledge, 2013 (Routledge Research in Architecture).
2 Gauri Bharat, “Centering Jugaad, Challenging Construction Historiography,” Platform, October 14, 2024. URL: https://www.platformspace.net/home/centering-jugaad-challenging-construction-historiography. Accessed 23 December 2024.
3 See Otto Ulrich, “Technology,” in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books, [1992] 2010; Víctor Saul Pelli, “Notas para uma tecnologia apropriada à construção na América Latina,” in Lucia Mascaró (ed.), Tecnologia e arquitetura, São Paulo: Nobel, 1990.
4 Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design just launched an exhibition with the title Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art (curator: Farshid Moussavi, co-curator: Abby Kuohn. August 25-October 15, 2024, see: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/exhibition/architecture-as-an-instruction-based-art/. Accessed 23 December 2024).
5 See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), New York, NY: Urizen Books, 1978, p. 254-269).
6 The research project Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Field of Production Studies was funded by the ahrc and fapesp from 2020 to 2024, and led by Katie Lloyd Thomas (Newcastle University) and João Marcos de Almeida Lopes (Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos). I had the privilege of working on the translation team with Ellen Heyward, Ana Naomi de Sousa and Mariana Moura. We translated and edited a series of three books: Architecture form Below: An Anthology, London: Mack, 2024; Design and the Building Site, and Complementary Essays, London: Mack, forthcoming 2025; and Construction of Classical Design, London: Mack, forthcoming 2025.
7 This quote and all subsequent quotes not otherwise indicated are taken from the Preface written by Ferro in 2023 to the forthcoming book Design and the Building Site.
8 James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 199.
9 See Pedro Arantes, Arquitetura Nova: Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Império e Rodrigo Lefèvre, São Paulo: Editora 34, 2002.
10 Cf. note 7.
11 Written for the conference Industries of Architecture and published in the book with the same title edited by Katie Lloyd Thomas, Nick Beech, Tilo Amhoff, London: Routledge, 2015. Republished in Architecture from Below: An Anthology, London: Mack, 2024.
12 Karl Marx, Capital, London: Penguin; New Left Review, 1976 [1867], vol. 1, p. 457-458.
13 Ibid., p. 455.
14 The text was first published as two articles in Almanaque: Cadernos de Literatura e Ensaio, in 1976, and as a book three years later (O canteiro e o desenho, São Paulo: Projeto, 1979). Its English translation is the central piece of the forthcoming book Design and the Building Site.
15 La Villeneuve, in southern part of Grenoble, was designed by the Atelier d'urbanisme et d'architecture (aua) and built between 1970 and 1983. Conceived as an almost autonomous community with private and public housing units, schools, shops, and public facilities, it was the largest urban complex ever built in the city and is home to around eleven thousand people.
16 Sérgio Ferro, Design and the Building Site, op. cit. (note 13).
17 Karl Marx, Capital, London: Penguin; New Left Review, 1981 [1894], vol. 3, p. 273-301.
18 For instance, Construção do Desenho Clássico, Belo Horizonte: MOM, 2021, English version forthcoming. See also the chapter “From Paris to Dubai,” in Architecture from Below, op. cit. (note 10).
19 Sérgio Ferro, “Against the Grain,” in Design and the Building Site, op. cit. (note 13).
20 Still another of these reactions—actually the earliest—were the changes in practices of specification, as examined by Katie Lloyd Thomas in Building Material: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification, London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2021.
21 Cf. note 7.
Haut de pagePour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Silke Kapp, « Architecture under Capital: On Sérgio Ferro », ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 12 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16498 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13935
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page



