Of the many images that accompany the 32 essays compiled in Industries of Architecture, a blurry and ill-composed photograph, taken on a construction site, best illustrates the field of inquiry that this book unlocks. The photo shows a piece of plywood; in the lower right corner is a hastily drawn sketch in marker by an unnamed worker (Fig. 28.1, 308). Any architect engaged in construction administration has seen such evidence of real-time problem-solving by workers on site—a calculation on a 2-by-4, a detail sketch on raw gypsum board—that becomes embedded within the body of work itself and erased from view. The unprepossessing photograph of one laborer’s contribution to a single building project begs a larger question: could we write a history of architecture that takes these hidden scraps of the construction process as its source material? (Certainly there are now scanning techniques that make this type of inquiry possible.) Might such a project finally lay bare the constant negotiation required by laborers on site to bridge the gaps between design concept and materialization? The fact that I have never given a second thought to these on-site scribbles, and yet now can imagine a new genre of architectural history, is testament to the intellectual potential embedded in Industries of Architecture.

The introduction to his book Dessin/Chantier (Design/Construction Site, originally published in Portuguese in 1979), translated for inclusion in Industries of Architecture, argues that the goal of design must be to reunite labor dispersed by capital, and that the locus of politically agitational collective work, undertaken by laborer-architect and laborer-builder, will be the construction site itself (98).4 One cannot help but recall Zaha Hadid’s response to questions about migrant worker deaths on construction sites in Qatar, where her World Cup stadium project was the prominent focus of a government architectural program, to understand how far we have come, as a profession, from viewing ourselves in a sympathetic, never mind comradely, relationship with the men and women who construct the buildings that we design.5

A number of authors in Industries of Architecture speak to this fact by introducing a complex cast of characters (engineers, construction workers, clients, lawyers, planners, financiers, politicians, among others) whose impact on a given building project is elucidated only through the inclusion of technical literature as source material. Texts and diagrams of AEG factories by German electrical engineer Oskar Lasche, for example, demonstrate convincingly that the flexible open floor plan we associate with modern industry was largely a function of the transition from mechanical to electrical power (Fig. 24.3, 263). Or consider the impact on early twentieth-century governmental architecture in Brussels by high-ranking civil servant Louis Camu, whose obsession with scientific management resulted in reports filled with cryptic charts and graphs that architects had to decipher and grapple with in their designs (Fig. 25.3, 275). Make no mistake: scholarship that takes account of the collaborative nature of building is more complex to research and resists neat narratives. But it is faithful to the stubbornly nonlinear, dialogic process of building.

Industries of Architecture is a book that dares to mix genres. Many of the essays written by scholars are heavy on theory and would be relatively opaque to a lay reader, while some of those contributed by practitioners (especially in the final section on contemporary questions) are straightforward, if dry, reports of ongoing programs in practice. In other words, Industries of Architecture is a bit uneven—a quality in keeping, nevertheless, with its aspirations to inclusivity.6 This is an edited volume that has utility for numerous audiences: from practitioners to historians to enlightened clients. The great benefit of the book is that, once they have cracked the binding, Industries of Architecture invites these typically siloed actors to consider the ways in which their work is mutually constituted.