Course Syllabus - Spring 2026
Thursdays 15:45 - 17:30
HCI F2
ETH Hönggerberg
Work Work Work
On the So-Called Architect, Labour and the Field
This semester, Unmasking Space is challenging the role model of the ideal architect promoted in universities and professional culture. Over the past weeks we have already started unpacking these questions together, and we are very happy to welcome all of our guests who are joining us throughout the semester.
Together we are looking at working conditions in architecture, in both education and professional practice, from excessive workloads and precarity to strategies of resistance and collective forms of practice.
By questioning authorship in architecture, we aim to move beyond the figure of the solitary genius and recognise the many forms of labour that shape architectural production. This also means rethinking who else might be considered an architect, highlighting alternative role models and developing counter-canons that challenge dominant images of expertise and authority.
session 01 - 19.02.2026
Community Making
In the first session of this semester’s Unmasking Space course, we had the chance to get to know each other. We shared our key chains: some were hand-crafted, some heavy with memories, while others were absent, reflecting the fact that not everyone locks their doors.
Unmasking Space is a student-led course in the Department of Architecture in ETH Zurich. It aims to reflect critically on the current knowledge production in architecture education and bring attention to learning forms, voices, and methods that are currently under-acknowledged in the institution. Through multidirectional knowledge exchange and immersive activities, it experiments with other forms of learning, offering a critical lens on current pedagogies.
session 02 - 26.02.2026
House of Invisible Workers. A reimagined labour archive in Vienna
Buildings are never the work of a single individual. They are shaped by countless people and diverse stories at every stage of their existence. While architects are often credited as 'the sole creators', they are just one group within a vast network of people involved in the production of buildings. But what about the people who construct, clean, repair and maintain our buildings? Who carries out these tasks, and under what conditions?
This session examines the systemic erasure of labour in architecture, drawing on insights from the master's thesis 'House of Invisible Workers: A reimagined labour archive in Vienna'. Questioning the notion of buildings as isolated aesthetic objects, the thesis explores the intersection of class, race, gender, and migration in building production. Taking one of Vienna’s iconic municipal housing projects as a case study, archival research and critical analysis are employed to interpret the building through its absences, thereby uncovering hidden histories. In doing so, this study proposes new archival methods to prevent further gaps in architectural history and reflects on our role in demanding fair labour ethics in architectural production.
Reading Recommendations:
Ferro, Sérgio. Architecture from below: An Anthology. First edition. Edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura. Translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa. MACK, 2024.
Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte, ed. On Architecture and Work. The Political Economy of Space,
vol.3. Hatje Cantz, 2025.
Who Builds Your Architecture? A Critical Field Gui
This session examines the systemic erasure of labour in architecture, drawing on insights from the master's thesis 'House of Invisible Workers: A reimagined labour archive in Vienna'. Questioning the notion of buildings as isolated aesthetic objects, the thesis explores the intersection of class, race, gender, and migration in building production. Taking one of Vienna’s iconic municipal housing projects as a case study, archival research and critical analysis are employed to interpret the building through its absences, thereby uncovering hidden histories. In doing so, this study proposes new archival methods to prevent further gaps in architectural history and reflects on our role in demanding fair labour ethics in architectural production.
Reading Recommendations:
Ferro, Sérgio. Architecture from below: An Anthology. First edition. Edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura. Translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa. MACK, 2024.
Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte, ed. On Architecture and Work. The Political Economy of Space,
vol.3. Hatje Cantz, 2025.
Who Builds Your Architecture? A Critical Field Gui
Sinem Firat (she/her) is an architectural practitioner based in Vienna, who grew up in Izmir, Turkey. Her primary interest lies at the intersection of architectural production, ethics, and labour. She graduated from TU Vienna's Master's programme in Architecture in 2026, writing her diploma thesis, 'House of Invisible Workers: A reimagined labour archive in Vienna', which examined the unacknowledged labour and politics of work behind architectural facades.
session 03 - 05.03.2026
Carving the Unwritten – Making Feminist Woodworking Visible
We invite you to our woodworking studio in Zurich to share experiences and engage in hands-on craftwork. For us, feminist theory emerges from lived experience—it can also be felt and practiced physically and situationally.
In this session, participants will carve solid wood boards to make visible rage, anger, and unspoken expressions. Different tools and carving techniques will be explored, and the work is collaborative, emphasizing collective creation.
The session begins with a short input on the practice of women and non-binary makers in woodworking. No prior experience is necessary, and the session is open to all. Please wear clothing that can get dirty and sturdy shoes. We look forward to exploring feminist, embodied practices in woodworking together.
In this session, participants will carve solid wood boards to make visible rage, anger, and unspoken expressions. Different tools and carving techniques will be explored, and the work is collaborative, emphasizing collective creation.
The session begins with a short input on the practice of women and non-binary makers in woodworking. No prior experience is necessary, and the session is open to all. Please wear clothing that can get dirty and sturdy shoes. We look forward to exploring feminist, embodied practices in woodworking together.
gemeinsam bauen wir neu is a Switzerland-based feminist collective of women and gender-queer craftspeople and technicians working across art, architecture, design, scenography, urban planning, construction, and craft. Through political reflection and collaborative processes, the collective critically examines power relations within technical and construction professions. Its practice advocates for alternative, more equitable building methods and fosters fairer, solidarity-based forms of collaboration across disciplines.
session 04 - 12.03.2026
Dream Job Architect? On the contradictions between career prospects vs. professional reality in architecture education and practice
For many, entering the architectural profession is marked by disillusionment: there is often a gap between the self-image conveyed during studies—creative, socially impactful, ecologically responsible—and the reality of a capitalist construction industry. Instead of a building transition and adaptive reuse, investor-driven logic, time pressure, and routine tasks tend to dominate. The result is frustration, doubt, and a sense of powerlessness.
In this session, we approach these questions from a unions perspective: What professional identity is produced in architectural education—and why does it so rarely materialize in everyday practice? What role do architects actually play within the construction economy? And how can collective perspectives for action be developed that neither reproduce academic illusions nor lapse into resignation?
Drawing on both contemporary and historical debates, we will explore the topic through arpentage—a collective reading method rooted in workers’ self-education. Together, we will read recent texts as well as writings from the 1970s that emerged in the context of the student movement. By dividing the texts, reading them individually, and reconstructing them collectively, we aim to make contradictions visible, demystify theoretical knowledge, and develop concrete starting points for collective and solidarity-driven action.
Reading Recommendations:
Brake, Klaus, und Ernst Ulrich Scheffler, Hrsg. Traumberuf: Architekt: Werkstattberichte aus Beruf und Ausbildung. 1. Aufl. Analysen zum Planen und Bauen 12. VSA-Verl, 1978.
Cortright, Marisa. „Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?“: Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe. First edition. VI PER Gallery, 2021.
Fassbinder, Helga. „Der Architekt - Berufsbild und Berufsrealität“. Arch+, Studienhefte für Planungspraxis und Planungstheorie, Nr. 17 (1972): S. 3-10.
In this session, we approach these questions from a unions perspective: What professional identity is produced in architectural education—and why does it so rarely materialize in everyday practice? What role do architects actually play within the construction economy? And how can collective perspectives for action be developed that neither reproduce academic illusions nor lapse into resignation?
Drawing on both contemporary and historical debates, we will explore the topic through arpentage—a collective reading method rooted in workers’ self-education. Together, we will read recent texts as well as writings from the 1970s that emerged in the context of the student movement. By dividing the texts, reading them individually, and reconstructing them collectively, we aim to make contradictions visible, demystify theoretical knowledge, and develop concrete starting points for collective and solidarity-driven action.
Reading Recommendations:
Brake, Klaus, und Ernst Ulrich Scheffler, Hrsg. Traumberuf: Architekt: Werkstattberichte aus Beruf und Ausbildung. 1. Aufl. Analysen zum Planen und Bauen 12. VSA-Verl, 1978.
Cortright, Marisa. „Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?“: Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe. First edition. VI PER Gallery, 2021.
Fassbinder, Helga. „Der Architekt - Berufsbild und Berufsrealität“. Arch+, Studienhefte für Planungspraxis und Planungstheorie, Nr. 17 (1972): S. 3-10.
The Architects’ Union (in development) is dedicated to fair working conditions, social justice and a commons‐oriented production of cities and spaces within the architecture sector. We oppose the overtime culture, insecure employment contracts, and unpaid labor, representing the interests of all employees and freelancers – especially early‐career professionals, migrant colleagues, and precariously employed workers. We demand better pay, secure employment and a sustainable use of resources. Our goal is an architecture that does not follow profit‐driven logics but serves social, ecological, and cultural needs – solidarity‐based, collective, and just.
This lecture unmasks intimacy as a political and spatial infrastructure, examining how architecture, media, and the body organize visibility, affect, and exposure today. Drawing on theories of intimacy, spectatorship, and political economy, it asks what it means to design for constant visibility in a techno-capitalist world, where private life becomes productive and intimacy is mobilized as labour. Through historical, cinematic, domestic, urban, and platform-based case studies, the lecture traces architectures of exposure—from the home to the city to digital environments—revealing how perception, subjectivity, and architectural work are reshaped by regimes of looking.
The session departs from a central question: what does it mean to design for being seen, when exposure itself operates as infrastructure? In contemporary techno-capitalist contexts, architectural practice is deeply entangled with platforms, metrics, and regimes of spectatorship that convert visibility into value. Intimacy is no longer opposed to work; it is actively mobilized as a spatial, affective, and economic resource, structuring how bodies perform, how interiors function, and how cities circulate attention.
Reading Recommendations:
Preciado, Paul B. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. First paperback printing. Zone Books, 2019.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger; a Book Made. 37. pr., 1. publ. 1972 by British Broadcasting Corp. and 1977 by Penguin Books. British Broadcasting Corp, 1997.
The session departs from a central question: what does it mean to design for being seen, when exposure itself operates as infrastructure? In contemporary techno-capitalist contexts, architectural practice is deeply entangled with platforms, metrics, and regimes of spectatorship that convert visibility into value. Intimacy is no longer opposed to work; it is actively mobilized as a spatial, affective, and economic resource, structuring how bodies perform, how interiors function, and how cities circulate attention.
Reading Recommendations:
Preciado, Paul B. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. First paperback printing. Zone Books, 2019.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger; a Book Made. 37. pr., 1. publ. 1972 by British Broadcasting Corp. and 1977 by Penguin Books. British Broadcasting Corp, 1997.
Victoria Suárez Romera is a Spanish architect and Fulbright Fellow currently completing a Master in Design Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work operates between architecture, design, and critical research, examining how intimacy, visibility, and social relations are mediated through spatial, visual, and institutional frameworks. She has worked at several architecture studios including MVRDV (Rotterdam) and Dorte Mandrup (Copenhagen), and has held exhibition design and research roles across museums and interdisciplinary cultural projects in Europe and the United States. Most recently, she has worked as an Exhibition Designer at the Brooklyn Museum. Her practice treats exhibition-making as a critical apparatus, one that produces publics, structures modes of spectatorship, and translates theoretical inquiry into spatial form.
Ignacio Lira Montes is a Chilean architect graduated and a candidate for the Master in Design Studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work brings together architecture, curatorial practice, and critical research from a decolonial perspective. His current research focuses on infrastructures and their impact on cultural imaginaries, with a strong engagement with media theory and visual culture. His work has received recognition through open calls and national and international competitions, including Archiprix International (2019), the open calls of the Chilean Architecture Biennial (2022), and the Chile Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023 and 2025). Between 2018 and 2024, he worked as a university professor and thesis advisor in Chile and currently serves as a Teaching Assistant at Harvard GSD.
Ignacio Lira Montes is a Chilean architect graduated and a candidate for the Master in Design Studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work brings together architecture, curatorial practice, and critical research from a decolonial perspective. His current research focuses on infrastructures and their impact on cultural imaginaries, with a strong engagement with media theory and visual culture. His work has received recognition through open calls and national and international competitions, including Archiprix International (2019), the open calls of the Chilean Architecture Biennial (2022), and the Chile Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023 and 2025). Between 2018 and 2024, he worked as a university professor and thesis advisor in Chile and currently serves as a Teaching Assistant at Harvard GSD.
In this non-hierarchical and horizontal workshop, we collectively investigate the links between studio culture and office culture, as we believe it is in the design studio where
architects first learn to view architecture as a call rather than work.
Drawing on our research and knowledge on labor and exploitation in architectural offices and our perspective as architectural workers with a migrant background, we aim to explore and self-reflect with the students how work dynamics are rehearsed, normalized, and internalized within academia and later implemented in professional practice. Indeed, long hours, self-exploitation, and blurred boundaries between learning and overworking are often established during architectural education and framed as commitments and pathways to excellence. We argue that these dynamics shape both students’ work ethics and the unspoken foundation of their future professional practice and roles.
The workshop places the students at the centre and aims to offer them guidance in reflecting their role, agency, and position within learning and working. The outcome is intentionally open, as the students are encouraged to self reflect and present their own findings. No preparatory readings or tasks are required, as the focus is on students’ personal experiences and the thoughts they bring into and unpack during the workshop.
Reading Recommendations:
Cortright, Marisa. “Can this be? Surely this cannot be?” Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe. VI PER Gallery, 2022.
Deamer, Peggy, ed. The Architect as Worker. Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte, ed. On Architecture and Work. Vol. 3: The Political Economy of Space. Hatje Cantz, 2025.
architects first learn to view architecture as a call rather than work.
Drawing on our research and knowledge on labor and exploitation in architectural offices and our perspective as architectural workers with a migrant background, we aim to explore and self-reflect with the students how work dynamics are rehearsed, normalized, and internalized within academia and later implemented in professional practice. Indeed, long hours, self-exploitation, and blurred boundaries between learning and overworking are often established during architectural education and framed as commitments and pathways to excellence. We argue that these dynamics shape both students’ work ethics and the unspoken foundation of their future professional practice and roles.
The workshop places the students at the centre and aims to offer them guidance in reflecting their role, agency, and position within learning and working. The outcome is intentionally open, as the students are encouraged to self reflect and present their own findings. No preparatory readings or tasks are required, as the focus is on students’ personal experiences and the thoughts they bring into and unpack during the workshop.
Reading Recommendations:
Cortright, Marisa. “Can this be? Surely this cannot be?” Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe. VI PER Gallery, 2022.
Deamer, Peggy, ed. The Architect as Worker. Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Malterre-Barthes, Charlotte, ed. On Architecture and Work. Vol. 3: The Political Economy of Space. Hatje Cantz, 2025.
(non-)Swiss Architects is a collective of workers with a migrant background advocating for fair working conditions in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and planning in Switzerland. Founded in 2021, the group emerged from shared experiences of workplace discrimination. By disseminating knowledge and creating solidarity, (non-)Swiss Architects raises awareness about exploitation in architectural offices and academic departments, promote solidarity, and provide tools for self-organization. Collaborating with advocacy groups across Switzerland and Europe, the collective works to build a support network and promote structural changes in spatial practices, grounded in political awareness and social responsibility.
session 07 - 16.04.2026
Toward a Labor-Centered Architecture : Challenging design politics, from the construction site.
Capital generated by ongoing intense construction activities in Switzerland has reached unprecedented levels through the extraction of labour on construction sites, which pursues craft devaluation and deteriorating site conditions. According to Peggy Deamer, “we can only have a more fulfilling, less passive, and more disruptive role in capitalism if we don’t think of construction and labour as conceptual ‘others’ of architecture, and, I would add, embrace its production chains.”
In this session, Lalie and Carolina will present their diploma work examining labour processes on Swiss construction sites and advocating for labour to be recentered within architectural practices. It aims to offer new imaginaries of solidarity within the construction industry by tackling construction site working conditions and beyond.
Through field research, including voices collected from interviews and discussions, as well as observations and situations experienced on site visits, this work reveals hidden narratives from the construction industry. The work deploys SIA Ordinance 112 as a transformative device for true collaboration. What would architecture be if workers from the construction industry carried it out as a collaborative project, labour truly impacting our design choices? Using a case study, the project proposes new approaches where functionality, assembly logic, and coordination become fundamental design components.
Reading Recommendations:
Dharia, Namita Vijay. The industrial ephemeral: labor and love in Indian architecture and construction. Atelier : Ethnographic inquiry in the twenty-first century 7. University of California Press, 2022.
Ferro, Sérgio. Architecture from below: An Anthology. First edition. Edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura. Translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa. MACK, 2024.
Gosh, Swarnabh. ‘Toward a Critique of Labor in Construction’. In Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion, Space Caviar, vol. 1. Sternberg Press, 2021
In this session, Lalie and Carolina will present their diploma work examining labour processes on Swiss construction sites and advocating for labour to be recentered within architectural practices. It aims to offer new imaginaries of solidarity within the construction industry by tackling construction site working conditions and beyond.
Through field research, including voices collected from interviews and discussions, as well as observations and situations experienced on site visits, this work reveals hidden narratives from the construction industry. The work deploys SIA Ordinance 112 as a transformative device for true collaboration. What would architecture be if workers from the construction industry carried it out as a collaborative project, labour truly impacting our design choices? Using a case study, the project proposes new approaches where functionality, assembly logic, and coordination become fundamental design components.
Reading Recommendations:
Dharia, Namita Vijay. The industrial ephemeral: labor and love in Indian architecture and construction. Atelier : Ethnographic inquiry in the twenty-first century 7. University of California Press, 2022.
Ferro, Sérgio. Architecture from below: An Anthology. First edition. Edited by Silke Kapp and Mariana Moura. Translated by Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi de Sousa. MACK, 2024.
Gosh, Swarnabh. ‘Toward a Critique of Labor in Construction’. In Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion, Space Caviar, vol. 1. Sternberg Press, 2021
Carolina Pichler (she/her) is an architect with a bachelor and a master degree from the EPFL. She has been a student assistant at the RIOT laboratory as well as an active member in university politics, addressing working conditions and architectural diversity. Through internships, rammed earth construction and studio projects, Carolina explores decarbonization, material extraction and labor value in design practices.
Lalie Porteret (she/her) is an architect. She graduated in 2025 with a Master of Architecture from EPFL. Active in university politics, she contributed to TNT and Drag Lab associations, addressing working conditions and diversity in architectural education. She co-teaches DRAG(UE): Performativity and the Built Environment at EPFL, a format that critically analyses the built environment through the lens of social structures and norms.
Lalie Porteret (she/her) is an architect. She graduated in 2025 with a Master of Architecture from EPFL. Active in university politics, she contributed to TNT and Drag Lab associations, addressing working conditions and diversity in architectural education. She co-teaches DRAG(UE): Performativity and the Built Environment at EPFL, a format that critically analyses the built environment through the lens of social structures and norms.
session 08 - 23.04.2026
Inside the wall, someone is working
This proposal activates our recently released publication They Asked Me to Design a House, I Asked Them to Design a Home as a counter-pedagogical tool. The book frames domesticity as an ongoing site of architectural labour: care, maintenance, negotiation, adaptation, and emotional work. These forms of labour are essential to how space is produced and sustained, yet they remain systematically excluded from architectural education, authorship, and professional value systems.
Structured in two parts — Reflections and Exercises — the book bridges critical analysis and practice. Reflections gathers essays and conversations examining how domestic labour mirrors broader working conditions in architecture, where collaborative and care-based work is essential yet undervalued. Exercises offer participatory tools that redistribute authorship and make visible the collective labour architecture depends on.
The session inverts the conventional model of designing for inhabitants by recognising inhabitants as co-producers of domestic space. Through collective drawing and storytelling, participants explore lived experience as architectural knowledge, challenging the myth of the solitary designer and the dominance of abstraction, efficiency, and individual genius.
Reading Recommendations:
Birkby, Phillys. “Herspace” in Making Room: Women and Architecture, Heresies 11, Vol.3, No 3, 1981, 28-9.
Chee, Lilian. “Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 253-269.
Federici, Silvia. Wages against housework. Power of Women Collective / Falling Wall Press, 1975.
Structured in two parts — Reflections and Exercises — the book bridges critical analysis and practice. Reflections gathers essays and conversations examining how domestic labour mirrors broader working conditions in architecture, where collaborative and care-based work is essential yet undervalued. Exercises offer participatory tools that redistribute authorship and make visible the collective labour architecture depends on.
The session inverts the conventional model of designing for inhabitants by recognising inhabitants as co-producers of domestic space. Through collective drawing and storytelling, participants explore lived experience as architectural knowledge, challenging the myth of the solitary designer and the dominance of abstraction, efficiency, and individual genius.
Reading Recommendations:
Birkby, Phillys. “Herspace” in Making Room: Women and Architecture, Heresies 11, Vol.3, No 3, 1981, 28-9.
Chee, Lilian. “Domesticity, Gender, and Architecture” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 253-269.
Federici, Silvia. Wages against housework. Power of Women Collective / Falling Wall Press, 1975.
Ilaria Palmieri is a spatial designer and PhD candidate at Roma Tre University in the Faculty of Architecture, City and Landscape. Based between Italy and the Netherlands, she explores dwelling practices, in particular in contexts of migration, and participatory spatial politics through an intersectional feminist lens. Her research combines architectural analysis, ethnography, and participatory mapping to foreground migrants’ agency and inform housing policy. Her work has been exhibited at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and Dutch Design Week, among others. In 2022, Ilaria co-founded the research and design duo Common Ground Practice. She co-edited They Asked Me to Design a House, I Asked Them to Design a Home (Set Margins’, 2025) and is a 2025 Graham Foundation Grantee.
Georgina Pantazopoulou is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, and researcher, currently based between Antwerp and Athens. As a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp in the Faculty of Design Sciences, she is also a member of the Henry van de Velde Research Group. Her work critically examines the contemporary role of domesticity, challenging the legacy of modernism through an intersectional feminist lens. In 2022, Georgina co-founded the research and design duo Common Ground Practice. She co-edited They Asked Me to Design a House, I Asked Them to Design a Home (Set Margins’, 2025) and is a 2025 Graham Foundation Grantee. Her practice spans text, drawings, illustrations, and performances.
Georgina Pantazopoulou is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, and researcher, currently based between Antwerp and Athens. As a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp in the Faculty of Design Sciences, she is also a member of the Henry van de Velde Research Group. Her work critically examines the contemporary role of domesticity, challenging the legacy of modernism through an intersectional feminist lens. In 2022, Georgina co-founded the research and design duo Common Ground Practice. She co-edited They Asked Me to Design a House, I Asked Them to Design a Home (Set Margins’, 2025) and is a 2025 Graham Foundation Grantee. Her practice spans text, drawings, illustrations, and performances.
session 09 - 30.04.2026
A Collective Endeavor
Architectural education and practice continue to promote a narrow figure of the ideal architect: an autonomous author who engages in an idealized form of architectural work and produces ideal architectural products. This figure—implicitly wealthy, white, male, able-bodied natural-born citizen—remains neither realistic nor desirable. Yet it continues to shape how architectural labor is defined.
This session starts from the premise that an increasing number of people who study architecture will achieve none of these ideals, for they are workers, not authors. They own nothing. Much of their labor is unpaid. Their contributions go uncredited. They barely design, let alone build. And yet they work and work and work.
Through collective mapping, role-play, and institutional critique, participants will document and reflect on forms of architectural labour that are typically unmentioned, unrecorded, and unappreciated in academic and professional settings. By collaboratively producing alternative documents—unseen CVs, timesheets, and codes of conduct—the session challenges individual productivity and competition as dominant educational values. Instead, it foregrounds lived experience and collective knowledge production. The session concludes with a shared analysis of the gathered materials, inviting critical reflection on how architectural education produces, normalises, and depends on invisible labor.
Reading Recommendations:
Refusal after Refusal, Adjustments Agency, Harvard Design Magazine #46, 2018
(esp. these lines in part 19: “We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean.”)
Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still a Job, Marisa Cortright, Failed Architecture, 15 August 2019
Can this be? Surely this cannot be? Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe, Marisa Cortright, VI PER Gallery, 2021. pp. 14-30
This session starts from the premise that an increasing number of people who study architecture will achieve none of these ideals, for they are workers, not authors. They own nothing. Much of their labor is unpaid. Their contributions go uncredited. They barely design, let alone build. And yet they work and work and work.
Through collective mapping, role-play, and institutional critique, participants will document and reflect on forms of architectural labour that are typically unmentioned, unrecorded, and unappreciated in academic and professional settings. By collaboratively producing alternative documents—unseen CVs, timesheets, and codes of conduct—the session challenges individual productivity and competition as dominant educational values. Instead, it foregrounds lived experience and collective knowledge production. The session concludes with a shared analysis of the gathered materials, inviting critical reflection on how architectural education produces, normalises, and depends on invisible labor.
Reading Recommendations:
Refusal after Refusal, Adjustments Agency, Harvard Design Magazine #46, 2018
(esp. these lines in part 19: “We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean.”)
Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still a Job, Marisa Cortright, Failed Architecture, 15 August 2019
Can this be? Surely this cannot be? Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe, Marisa Cortright, VI PER Gallery, 2021. pp. 14-30
Marisa Cortright is an independent architectural worker in Zagreb. At EPFL, she gave the talk “For Solidaristic Practices in Architectural Work.” Her selected writing includes “‘Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?’ Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe" with VI PER Gallery and “Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still a Job” with Failed Architecture.
Ena Kukić works in architecture through research, practice, and teaching, exploring spatial frameworks of collectivity. Her design projects and recently completed PhD identify and reinterpret underrecognized architectural typologies, cultivating spaces of shared engagement. Ena has presented her work at Princeton University, Royal Danish Academy, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, UC Chile, Syracuse University, TU Vienna, and Kosovo Architecture Festival, among others.
Ena Kukić works in architecture through research, practice, and teaching, exploring spatial frameworks of collectivity. Her design projects and recently completed PhD identify and reinterpret underrecognized architectural typologies, cultivating spaces of shared engagement. Ena has presented her work at Princeton University, Royal Danish Academy, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, UC Chile, Syracuse University, TU Vienna, and Kosovo Architecture Festival, among others.
Breaking with the academic tradition of looking to the West, the girlscanscan collective first traveled to Eastern Europe in 2021 to collect best practices to help save (post)modern heritage from demolition. The Tripping on Modernist Monuments research project, initiated in 2020 by girlscanscan, explores how monuments—whether intentionally or unintentionally—make societal conflicts visible and how expertise from monument preservation, activism, art, and engineering can be integrated. It’s interested in built environmental heritage not in its clear, visually pleasing representation, but rather in its raw reality, its current use, and its entanglement in postsocialist politics.
As children of postsocialism with personal stories of the working conditions of women in the field, they aim to reflect on the collective experience of many: being under the glass ceiling and on this side of the former Iron Curtain in Central and Eastern Europe. In this lecture, "POV: you start a feminist spatial practice in CEE," besides presenting their projects, Lilla Kammermann (she/her) and Lilla Luca Varga (she/her) would like to open a discussion on queer-feminist perspectives in architecture and related spatial studies, and think about how these perspectives could be integrated into the architecture curriculum, working culture, and practiced on a daily basis.
Recommended Readings:
HYPE&HYPER: Girls, scan the city fabric! | Tripping on Modernist Monuments. Interview by Lilla Gollob.
girlscanscan: Lilla Luca Varga, Lilla Kammermann: We Are of Our Childhood as We Are from a Country in Planet Krvavica: Ana Dana Beroš and Mika Savela with Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera (Ed.) DAI-SAI and dpr-barcelona 2026.
Wettbewerben, dass ...? | Hürden in den Berufseinstieg
Jungen Architekt:innen wird der Berufseinstieg nicht leicht gemacht. Formale Kriterien und erforderliche Referenzprojekte sind oft unüberwindbare Hürden. Doch es gibt Abhilfe. Eine Reise nach Brüssel, Budapest und in die Steiermark. Losgelöst vom Alten| Next Generation. architektur.aktuell 7-8/2025.
As children of postsocialism with personal stories of the working conditions of women in the field, they aim to reflect on the collective experience of many: being under the glass ceiling and on this side of the former Iron Curtain in Central and Eastern Europe. In this lecture, "POV: you start a feminist spatial practice in CEE," besides presenting their projects, Lilla Kammermann (she/her) and Lilla Luca Varga (she/her) would like to open a discussion on queer-feminist perspectives in architecture and related spatial studies, and think about how these perspectives could be integrated into the architecture curriculum, working culture, and practiced on a daily basis.
Recommended Readings:
HYPE&HYPER: Girls, scan the city fabric! | Tripping on Modernist Monuments. Interview by Lilla Gollob.
girlscanscan: Lilla Luca Varga, Lilla Kammermann: We Are of Our Childhood as We Are from a Country in Planet Krvavica: Ana Dana Beroš and Mika Savela with Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera (Ed.) DAI-SAI and dpr-barcelona 2026.
Wettbewerben, dass ...? | Hürden in den Berufseinstieg
Jungen Architekt:innen wird der Berufseinstieg nicht leicht gemacht. Formale Kriterien und erforderliche Referenzprojekte sind oft unüberwindbare Hürden. Doch es gibt Abhilfe. Eine Reise nach Brüssel, Budapest und in die Steiermark. Losgelöst vom Alten| Next Generation. architektur.aktuell 7-8/2025.
girlscanscan is a research-led critical spatial practice focusing on the 20th and 21st century architectural heritage in Central and Eastern Europe through a feminist approach. The collective was founded in 2020 in Budapest, Hungary by young practitioners in the field of architecture, urbanism and cultural heritage. Since then, it approaches the (in)tangible heritage by scanning and mapping the invisible dimensions of the built environment. While exploring the socialist urban fabric, it seeks to connect these experiences with the post-socialist reality of the former Eastern Bloc and today’s heritage discourse.
Lilla Luca Varga (she/her), an architect, and Lilla Kammermann (she/her), an urbanist—both researchers at Bauhaus University Weimar— co-taught the seminar on the matter.
Lilla Luca Varga (she/her), an architect, and Lilla Kammermann (she/her), an urbanist—both researchers at Bauhaus University Weimar— co-taught the seminar on the matter.
Here we will cultivate the references we wish to grow, in order to become the architect we will be proud to look in the mirror one day. Floating on the stormy architectural sea, will be possible only if we are holding to our core values. This workshop which can be viewed as an empowering ritual will help us define them. It will be articulated in the following steps:
1. EXPRESS
2. MERGE
3. RELAX
4. EXPEL
5. DESTROY
6. BREATHE
With new seeds that passionate us we will slowly regain trust in our values which will bring us closer to a more human, respectful and courageous architecture. We will create a safe space to talk or debate in a constructive way to unfold problems at every scale. If on one hand we learn to ground ourselves, on the other hand to efficiently confront the downsides, we will bring architecture to a whole new chapter from which we will be the main characters. First, we want to define our core values and understand who we are. Before the class, everyone will need to think of one person they admire who they will never hear about in an architecture class, with whom they share a common vision. Secondly, we want to acknowledge what is bringing us down and to fight it. We will bring an image, a text, a plan, a model, an object that is inspiring us hate. During the workshop, we will challenge these references and objects through the prism of our values. Each voice gives a different approach to a profession so we will be ourselves for once, bring references we want, talk about our passions, gain the confidence to think that we can say no.
1. EXPRESS
2. MERGE
3. RELAX
4. EXPEL
5. DESTROY
6. BREATHE
With new seeds that passionate us we will slowly regain trust in our values which will bring us closer to a more human, respectful and courageous architecture. We will create a safe space to talk or debate in a constructive way to unfold problems at every scale. If on one hand we learn to ground ourselves, on the other hand to efficiently confront the downsides, we will bring architecture to a whole new chapter from which we will be the main characters. First, we want to define our core values and understand who we are. Before the class, everyone will need to think of one person they admire who they will never hear about in an architecture class, with whom they share a common vision. Secondly, we want to acknowledge what is bringing us down and to fight it. We will bring an image, a text, a plan, a model, an object that is inspiring us hate. During the workshop, we will challenge these references and objects through the prism of our values. Each voice gives a different approach to a profession so we will be ourselves for once, bring references we want, talk about our passions, gain the confidence to think that we can say no.
Anna Diallo is a French-Senegalese architect based in Zurich. Born in Montluçon in 1991, she studied in Strasbourg but has also lived in Berlin, Taipei, Shanghai and Brussels. As long as she can remember, she has always wanted to be an architect. She obtained her Master of Architecture in 2015 followed by her HMONP in 2017. She believes that the field needs to reinvent itself to finally give a voice to those who have been silenced for centuries. In short, Anna Diallo is fed up with the present but hopeful for the future.