Relations between energy and value: proposed alternatives for ecologising events of extraction

This article proposes alternatives for the conceptual scaffolding needed to ecologise architecture production studies. It engages Sérgio Ferro’s seminal work O canteiro e o desenho and expands Ferro’s critique of design’s inherent role in the exploitation the building site by introducing the concept of negative accumulation, the recognition of combined human and nonhuman labour grounding value extraction, and the entropic potential of building technologies. Drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of labour in connection to the transduction of energy, the article reintroduces forms of labour that fall outside the juridical definition of wage work into the calculus of value, and amends Ferro’s original claim for the liberation of construction work with the notions of reparation and restitution. Additionally, it presents the rupture of ecological relations as the grounding action in turning humans and nonhumans into propertied property, as explored by Ferreira da Silva and Kathryn Yusoff. By recognising the combined human and nonhuman labour resulting from mutually exacerbating movements of extraction, the article presents the possibility that design also reassembles previously disaggregated nonhuman labour towards the production of architecture. Finally, it draws on Bernard Stiegler’s work to focus on the entropic tendencies of technics as expressed in the building site and on how the configuration of these sites impacts workers’ style of energy expenditure and individuation. It proposes that the economy of resources in construction should also be understood as an economy of gestures and an economy of energy, and that this perspective can be extended to other sites of production.