Join Peggy Deamer and Tessa Forde for a discussion around their co-authored book, 
The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education, followed by a workshop to imagine and organise futures for architecture.

The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education serves as a timely call-to-action for transforming architecture education to meet the monumental environmental and social challenges of our time by embracing strategic cooperative/organisational skills. 

They will describe the book’s division into various scales of academic organising: small (studio), medium (curriculum), large (university), and Xlarge (the nation-state/professionalism). The workshop, led by members of pre:fab—an experimental architectural organization—will enact live-action organising to imagine other possible futures for the architecture discipline.

To prompt engagement, they ask participants to bring one object to the workshop that has meant something to them through their architecture practice. All welcome. 

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Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale School of Architecture, a founding member of the Architecture Lobby, and principle of the firm Deamer Studio. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design and the author of Architecture and Labor.  Her theory work explores the relationship between subjectivity, design, and labour in the current economy.

Tessa Forde (she/they) is an architecture researcher, teacher and practitioner currently undertaking a PhD in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. They are a co-director of Groupwork Aotearoa, co-organised the Free School of Architecture, founded The Night School, and are a core member of pre:fab platform. Tessa’s research interests center on how experimental gathering platforms provide spaces in which new realities can be imagined, performed, and deployed to disrupt and reshape the architecture discipline.

pre:fab platform gather in different ways to explore, generate, and organise for the cultural production of architecture. pre:fab is a collaborator, educator, researcher, producer, promoter, publisher, and (not-for-profit) practice; a collective of collectives; a framework to aggregate, cultivate and support alternative practices in Aotearoa New Zealand; a space to create and share resources, make stuff, produce research, be the audience for that stuff and that research, and generally create a collaborative, generative and convivial space for new and different modes of architectural practice. pre:fab uses discord to organise online and gathers regularly around shared food.