Architecture of Immaterial Labour

The book takes up the (post-)operaist concept of immaterial labour (cf. Maurizio Lazzarato: 1998, Toni Negri, Michael Hardt: 2000) and relates it to spatial processes and architectural projects from the 1960s. The book`s title is the hypotheses of its investigation. It allows to be exemplified with the following questions: Do we find, parallel to a dominant cultural practice of immaterial labour new forms and orders of architecture? Which forms does it take on? Or does workplace architecture disappear at all parallel to the blurring of the formerly clearly marked spaces of the factory? In doing so I understand architecture as a means of subjectivation and as a part of the organization and representation of production processes. Architecture is directly connected to the disparate forms of capitalism. In its outstanding examples, dominant discourse formations crystallize: the idea how people shall assemble, how people are being made productive and how such an assembly can be controlled and steered. In the book I discuss significant examples of a workplace architecture of the 1960s. All of which are embedded in a field of discourse around automation and leisure society. The examples allow to discuss the contours of an architecture, that makes exemplary visible a tendency of changing modes of production and its condition for labourers. In the first part I write about effects of mobilization of formerly closed and static spaces of production. With the first ever built office-landscape Buch und Ton for the media corporation Bertelsmann (1960/61) its architectonic antithesis, the office-building Centraal Beheer (1968-71), as well as the emancipatory spare time project Fun Palace (1962-66). I show the necessity, after the Second World War, to give form to a new social and economic model namely cybernetics. In the second part of the book I will discuss strategies of furnishing (einrichten): I refer to the experimental project Mobile Office (1969) by Hans Hollein, a project by Haus-Rucker- Co., and finally to the performance Bed-In. All three frame miscellaneous strategies to deal with a new concept of life and work. Simultaneously, the projects I discuss formulate a variety of architectonic practices that comply with a concept of labour, a labour that converges with life and diffuse into society. As hybrid examples, that happen parallel to and linked with movements of emancipation in the 1960s, every sample encloses in its peculiar mode, an assembly of people, constitutes an order and controls its interior, organizes and marks a space for production.