Design and the extended building site: Ecologies of production and the production of ecologies

The architect and theorist Srgio Ferro has made a profound contribution to architectural theory and practice by reimagining the building site not merely as a place of construction, but as a site of radical political and social possibility.His work connects Marxian theory, practice, and working class struggle in relation to architecture and building construction.In his essay Design and the Building Site, 1 Ferro posits the construction site as both a primary site of conflict and labour exploitation, but also as a potential space for organising construction workers through experiments in free, selfmanaged and unalienated labour and working-class solidarity.He sees the building site as a potential kind of 'temporary autonomous zone' or 'enclave' 2 where communist organising could develop and evolve through lived practice and experience.An experience that Ferro hoped would be so radically different to a conventional capitalist building site (reflecting often on his traumatic experience as a young architect on Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia construction site), that communists could organise and be produced through it.Ferro's early housing designs were characterised by elegant but simple catenary shells, whose first role was to provide an initially undifferentiated protected space under which builders themselves could organise and work protected perspective