Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium: Labor Un:Imagined
9:00am-5:00pm
Milstein Auditorium, Milstein Hall, and via Zoom.
Closing remarks by Mabel. O. Wilson, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell
Open to all.

PROGRAM

9:00am: Introduction, Milstein Auditorium

9:15am: Speaker panels, Milstein Auditorium

12:30pm: Lunch and gallery walk

1:30pm: Speaker panels, Milstein Auditorium

3:30-5:00pm: Closing discussion, Bibliowicz Family Gallery

“Labor Un:imagined” brings together scholars whose research delves into the experiences, actors, and technologies of construction labor and that, in so doing, pushes against the over-imagination and under-representation of building workers in architecture and in the writing of its histories. In a series of panels and conversations, historians of architecture, technology, and neighboring fields will share current work in episodes spanning constructions of freedom and unfreedom in 1800s US and 1950s Brazil; the aspirations and migrations of workers in the building industry in 20th-century Mumbai and 21st-century Mexico; and the ingenuity of female workers in interwar UK and of freed Black workers in colonial Sierra Leone. These and other instances of building labor will shed light on the racial and gender implications of conceptions of skill and technology; on the political economies of manual and mechanical production; and on the adjudication and extraction of architectural value, among other issues. In offering historical nuance and a global perspective to the ever-changing relations of labor on site, speakers will push the debate beyond the better-known relations of oppression to show how, in the ongoing history of architecture at work, a lot more than utopias and exploitations are often at stake. More fundamentally, in sharing the historians’ work and critically pushing its boundaries, the symposium will call for an act of historiographical un-imagination as well—that is, for a reflection on the archives, categories, narratives, and perspectives that have helped write labor out of architectural history to begin with, all the while hiding building stories and building workers in plain sight.

Organized by María González Pendás, Assistant Professor, Architecture History and Urban Development and &Lab codirector, Cornell Architecture.

Coordinated by Emma Silverblatt, Visiting Critic, Cornell University.

In collaboration with the curatorial and design team for the accompanying exhibition Who Built Cornell?