Looking at architecture from below means putting the building site and the people who build at the centre of architectural inquiry. The phrase has a longer history than its catchphrase form suggests, and the new English-language anthology is the first time the foundational essays of one strand of that history are gathered in one volume in translation.<\/p>\n\n\n
What the anthology gives the English-speaking reader is, first, a vocabulary. Words like desenho<\/em> \u2014 design, drawing, but also command \u2014 do real conceptual work in the original Portuguese. Translation strains them, and the introduction lays out, with care, where the strain is productive and where the reader has to take a footnote on faith.<\/p>\n\n\n What it does not give the reader is a closed canon. The volume frames itself explicitly as an opening \u2014 an attempt to put a set of texts into the same room as anglophone debates on labour, vernacular building, and the political economy of construction, and to see what conversations follow.<\/p>\n\n\n For first-time readers, the editors recommend the second essay in the volume \u2014 short, programmatic, and the cleanest statement of the field’s wager about labour and form. The longer historical essays at the back of the book are the most demanding; they reward, but they are not the entry point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A foundational set of mid-twentieth-century essays on architecture and the labour of building has just appeared in English for the first time. A short note on what is, and is not, in the volume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"subgroup":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"subgroup","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productionstudies.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subgroup?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Where to start<\/h3>\n\n\n