F A T H O M
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Y E A R N
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I N N O V A T E
THE EVOLUTION OF LABOR IN TECTONICS
- Ar. Neethu Matthew
To the ones gathered around this article, if you belong to or contribute to any form of tectonic production, as an architect, planner, designer, writer, reader, or layman, you occupy space. If you are an urban dweller, you occupy space with a long evolved and inherited ability to adapt to and absorb from your surroundings, which currently is designed by a single person - an architect or a designer/planner. As architects and designers, we never see ourselves as laborers. We associate ourselves with our client, practice, profit, recognition, and structures. But there is more to this story if we look at us as laborers because we have a short history as architects and a long one as laborers of tectonics who are conditioned socially, politically, culturally and lately globally. Understanding this story is important as, we, the contemporary architects are faced with a certain degree of the political and cultural storm once we step out of the safe walls of schools into both practice and academia. Architectural practices since the beginning have followed the associative path between practice and academia. This has set enough grounds for practitioners and academicians to analyze both these aspects of tectonic sciences standing across each other. In this brief article, we will be looking at practice and academia both as bedfellows of tectonic labor and brush aside the unpopular notion that academia has killed the practitioners’ space or vice versa. The architect as a professional is not entitled in the same era as the origins of architectural practice. But in history notes, we might stumble across a set of skilled laborers such as masons, carpenters, engineers, smiths, etc. or painters, travelers, transient migrants and invaders who can be credited for historic cities and buildings. These people worked for the clergy or the king without referring National Building Codes, followed scale and proportion without reading Form, Space & Order, and no, we as architects never think less of these people. 58
Further traversing through history, we will find that pre-modern builders and architects, owing to the comfort of discovery and innovation that they were born into, worked at their own will to produce built environments. Somewhere in this transition, we must say that the right to build was monopolized by a set of experts who had access to abundant resources. The skilled laborers were reduced as mere ‘consultants’, who facilitated the production of historic landmark buildings. But we never call out the names of laborers while remembering the grandeur of Hagia Sophia or love symbolized in Taj Mahal but the emperors who funded these structures to mark the power of empire and power of love. Recently, the idea to name a builder or civil engineer ‘an architect’ in the West was a need of the global culture of the industrialized world. We seldom say that cities are an outcome of demand for modern and accommodating spaces for the migrants who come to urban areas to compensate for what the outskirts won’t provide them with. So are architects and planners. So are builders and developers. How do we look at the evolution of an architect in this demand? We merely know them as planners and urbanists who coined words like garden cities, utopias, urbs, suburbs, megacities, etc. We know them as fathers of skyscrapers and monumental residential complexes. As academicians and students, we look at these as case studies to frame concepts and theories to add to the existing database. Behind the scenes of city-making lies a vast pool of socio-political and cultural phenomenons that places an architect in the labor pool as a mine worker or a postman. A city is not as simple as an output of mass-produced space. We are fortunate or unfortunate to have studied the origins of built spaces and to still build spaces and structures with thet VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1/ DECEMBER 2019
