Chapter

Dessin/Chantier
An introduction
Sérgio Ferro
(Translation from the original Portuguese: Ricardo Agarez and Silke Kapp)1

1 The building site

The relation of domination and subordination in the [capitalist] production process replaces an earlier
independence in the production process, as e.g. with all self-sustaining peasants, farmers who only had
to pay a rent in kind, whether to the state or to the landlord, with rural-domestic subsidiary industry, or
independent handicrafts. Here, therefore, the loss of a previous independence in the production process
is the situation, and the relation of domination or subordination is itself the product of the introduction
of the capitalist mode of production … a transition accomplished in part by urban manufacture at its
very beginnings.2
(Karl Marx, Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861–1864)

1a – The building site occupies a special position in the sphere of social production, of which it forms a
part. With regard to the method of production it is a manufacture, and clearly distinguishable from both
handicraft and industry. It differs from handicraft in the advanced division of labour; and it differs from
industry in that it does not pass on its essential operations to automatic processes (machinery). It may
occasionally resort to industrial products (materials, components, some non-essential machines), but it is
fundamentally characterised by the essential operational role of the labour power.

1b – There is comparatively more labour power in manufacture than in industry. The organic composition
of capital is characterised, also in relation to industry, by a higher proportion of v (variable capital, i.e.
the cost of labour) when compared to c (constant capital, i.e. the costs of facilities, materials and tools).
Given that only variable capital generates surplus value, that is, additional value relative to the amount
effectively invested in each production cycle, manufacture generally provides capital with a more
generous portion of surplus value, compared – once again – to industry. Although historically backward,
manufacture is economically more profitable than industry. Let us imagine for example an amount of
capital of 100 (in any given currency). In industry, let us suppose, c represents 85 of this amount and v
represents 15. In manufacture this proportion would be 70 and 30 respectively. If we consider an equal
rate of surplus value (the proportion between the time spent by the worker to pay for labour costs and the
time of labour that actually produces the surplus value that adds to capital) of, say, 100%, then industry
would obtain a surplus value of 15 whereas manufacture would obtain 30 (in that given currency).
Therefore, manufacture provides capital with more surplus value than industry. This fundamental
difference goes unnoticed because of the equalisation of the rate of profit: the ‘normal’ profit rate used to
calculate prices is an average of the diverse profit rates found in different sectors. Historically so-called
‘backward’ sectors in fact generally support, with their higher surplus value, the so-called ‘advanced’
sectors of production.

1c – This feature of manufacture has wide-ranging consequences, particularly with regard to construction
(in all its forms: buildings, roads, city streets, bridges, etc.) if we think of the considerable part
construction plays in the composition of gross domestic product (GDP). The extraordinary amount of
surplus value produced in this sector not only supports the general rate of profit, but also serves as a
generous source for the accumulation of capital (many of the greatest fortunes originated directly or
indirectly in construction), and is one of the main devices – together with monopoly, colonialism,
imperialism, etc. – used by capital to fight against its worst nightmare: the inevitable tendency of the rate
of profit to fall with the constant advance of the productive forces.

1d – This macroeconomic framework (simplified here to the extreme) explains why we will hardly ever
witness the industrialisation of construction (which must not be mistaken for any form of pre-fabrication):
it would be an economic disaster.3 I have experienced and taken an active part in the construction of
Brasília, a unique opportunity to promote the industrialisation of construction, which can be compared to
the transformation of Paris in the nineteenth century. The economic forces within government, from all
‘democratic’ tendencies, uncompromisingly opposed any attempt in this direction, despite the fact that
Oscar Niemeyer’s design would have been perfectly suited to test it.4 The same government was then –
and this is only apparently a contradiction – looking to industrialise the country, and was in dire need of
fresh capital.

1e – Building manufacture tends therefore to remain a manufacture, with marginal improvements, such as
those made possible by information technology. The features of this method of production inexorably
determine the professional practice of architects and other agents in charge of the prescriptions,
particularly those related to design. Such determinations are structural and, in our capitalist regime,
mostly not dependent on the will and position of these professionals.
1f – The different labourers in this manufacture are allotted to specialised teams (bricklayers, painters,
electricians, etc.), neatly separated from one another. Each is commonly made up of a qualified worker,
some semi-qualified attendants and several other labourers with no specific qualification. These
specialised teams, hired in isolation, do not make up any kind of totality. Totalisation, that is, their
integration as elements in forming the common product (e.g. the building or the bridge), is the exclusive
function of the capital that acquired the diverse labour powers allotted to the teams. Distractedly watching
the building site, one might think that the totalising function of capital is a consequence of the
pulverisation of teams and labourers. But this assumption is historically false: it was only because the
material means of production were taken away from the immediate producers – the workers – and
concentrated in the hands of capital that its mediating role became ‘necessary’. This expropriation –
which began together with the primitive accumulation of capital and continuously reproduces itself due to
the expropriation of surplus value and the compulsory sale of the labour power – makes us believe in the
evidence of such an assumption. But the totalising function of capital derives from the interdiction against
any totalising attempt made by the productive body, and not from its ‘natural’ incapacity or from any
technical reason. In the stage of simple cooperation that precedes that of manufacture, in which we can
still find, today, those rare workers’ cooperatives that resist the pressure from capital, totalisation does
not require any external power. In a way, it is the workers’ collective (the collective worker, the
productive body) that takes up that function for itself.5

1g – One of the main (if not the main) foundations of the totalising design is the assumed inability of the
productive body to self-determination, an inability which in truth stems from the fact that capital obstructs
any possibility of self-determination.

1h – There are two main forms of manufacture; the serial one, in which the intervention of various
specialised teams is assembled on the building site; and the heterogeneous one, where components
produced off site (pre-fabricated) are gathered on the building site. Serial manufacture predominates in
underdeveloped countries; heterogeneous manufacture, in developed countries. This difference is of little
relevance for the matter that concerns us here.

2 Design
The transformation of labour into capital is in itself the result of the act of exchange between capital
and labour. This transformation is posited only in the production process itself.6
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic
exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the
result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human
existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of
wage labour and capital.7
(Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy)

2a – The complete separation between construction labourers and the ‘inorganic’ (material, instrumental,
etc.) conditions of their labour was concretely posited by manufacture – the first typical form of
productive capital – since the end of the Middle Ages. The sale of labour power to capital (forced upon
and unavoidable for those who have been disowned of their means of production) presupposes this
separation, but the separation itself is made effective only when real production takes place. While before
it is merely a possibility (labour power in a latent, potential state), in real production the separation
becomes the objective basis of the relations of production, being renewed, strengthened and guaranteed
by their ceaseless reinforcement. It is the evolution of these relations of production, determined by the
global evolution of productive capital, which makes the history of construction much more than the
marginal evolution of productive forces. The history of construction, therefore, draws a route that is
almost the opposite of a simplistic credo carried by a questionable Marxism: it states that the evolution of
productive forces would compel the relations of production to change, or that the immanent evolution of
technology would no longer be compatible with such relations. But Marx himself indicates numerous
contrary examples, such as ‘strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and application of new
machines. Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of
specialised labour.’8 There are many other similar examples in several texts by Marx.

2b – The foremost, essential function of the design is to ‘re-unite’ on the building site the labour that has
previously been dispersed by capital itself. Labour, in diaspora, having lost its material means of
production, encounters them again, regrouped and concentrated under the power of capital – yet now these
have become a weapon for exploitation, allowing capital to seize the surplus value. The unity of labour as
a productive body is heteronomous. Its productive articulations depend on an external, hostile force. The
collective labourer that stems from this integration follows exogenous orders and lacks the reasoning
behind his own work – which turns it into a conglomerate that is neither free nor autonomous. Design is
the main instrument to bring about this integration. Conceived away from the building site, at a distance
from this productive body, the architectural design lends consistency, and artificial cohesion, to the
workmen’s dispersed skills. In this light, the design can be any design – as long as it allows for dispersed
labour to be re-united. It is, as Lévi-Strauss put it, a form of ‘zero value’:

It would not be the first time that research would lead us to institutional forms which one might
characterise by a zero value. These institutions have no intrinsic property other than that of establishing
the necessary preconditions for the existence of the social system to which they belong; their presence –
in itself devoid of significance – enables the social system to exist as a whole.9

The design of the finished product affects only – and only relatively – the circulation and consumption
stages. Until the finishing of the product, design is a means (and not a neutral mediator, as we will see) to
channel the fragmented work of the labourers into this stage at which it is ready to be marketed. At the
level of the building site, the design is the mould into which ‘idiotised’ labour (in André Gorz’s
expression) is poured.10 The shape and purpose of this crystallisation are irrelevant, for the time being;
all that matters is the depositing of broken-down tasks in the one same object being formed. The product’s
design is mostly aimed at the heteronomous production – and this not so apparent function is the
predominant one.

2c – In order to further elaborate on my last statement I will briefly return to production by manufacture.
In manufacture (unlike the case of industry) operational know-how has not yet been transferred to
machinery. Labourers are still the holders of this knowledge and responsible for the concrete progress of
the operations. They sell their labour power to capital, but do so on the understanding that they will make
their knowledge and know-how available to capital, without which manufacture cannot produce.
Therefore the labourer’s subordination to capital is merely formal. In terms of concrete work output,
except for grave deformations due to the excessive fragmentation of the tasks, the workman would
proceed (almost) in the same way in forms of production that are not subsumed to capital.
This feature of labour in manufacture has numerous important consequences. For capital, its merely
formal subordination is a precarious form of subordination. The domination capital exerts, based on the
appropriation of all the material means of production, has a flaw: it does not include the subjective means
of production, knowledge and know-how. (We will see further on how the transfer from formal to real
subordination, in the sphere of construction, is a simulacrum of transfer.) This flaw tends to weaken the
domination, and the most extravagant devices are consequently employed to remedy such a flaw.

2d – According to Marx, ‘since handicraft skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism
of manufacture as a whole possesses no framework, apart from the labourers themselves, capital is
constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workmen.’11 If in formal subordination,
the subjective means of production are still held by the labourer, incorporated in his knowledge, in his
know-how and skills, they can be used as a weapon of resistance in his fight against capital. I repeat:
without these means manufacture does not work, especially in the case of fundamental crafts up to the
nineteenth century such as masonry and carpentry. Construction history is full of important strikes that
paralysed construction activity for long periods and were organised by workmen from those crafts.
(Friedrich Engels recounts in detail a long strike by carpenters of Manchester supported by the other
building crafts, and insists on the employers’ difficulties replacing strikers.)12 David Harvey notes that
these crafts can be monopolised and are as powerful as those tools of capital – but obviously in the
opposite direction.13 We will see further on how this flaw in subordination contributed to the emergence
of modernism in architecture.
Since the beginning of the history of our post-medieval architecture, building sites have been favoured
grounds for bouts of insubordination by workmen from these monopolisable crafts. Capital’s devices
against this insubordination – inseparable from formal subordination – are diverse, numerous and, as I
said before, extravagant; unexplainable if we ignore the intricacies of manufacture, amongst which we
must include design.
The implicit logic of the crafts, as created by the workmen’s own tradition, has a certain range of forms
compatible with this logic. Roughly, this range can be illustrated by Romanesque and Early Gothic
architecture. Now, as Manfredo Tafuri noted, one of the concerns of the first architects was to ridicule
and disqualify this range of forms and impose on buildings an ersatz classicism, masking the real
construction that corresponds to such a range in a typical instance of symbolic violence.14 Since then and
to this day, even as manufacture is disfigured with side-products of real subordination, it is difficult to
find works of a symbolic ambition in which design does not go against construction logic. I will return to
this matter further on.
Another device, equally originated at that early stage, is art. Art (ars) used to be the name of all
qualified crafts, without distinction. Since the early Renaissance, the drive of the fine arts to be admitted
as liberal arts made the material labour of those artists a problematic one. It cannot be avoided, for
without such a labour (at least until post-modernism) there is no work of art, and therefore there is no
artist (also until post-modernism). But in order to become liberal artists, these artists should not work
with their hands, which would be inadmissible in the field of liberal arts. Painting and sculpture struggled
to find a way out of this impasse (a point that is dealt with in my recent book Fine Arts and Free
Labour).15 Architects, in turn, had less problems: they hadn’t laid their hands on building since the high
Gothic period … They drew and had models made for them – things that were not incompatible with their
progress up the social ladder. Meanwhile, they obviously could not remain grounded in, and continue to
reproduce, the same range of forms as manual labourers: they would risk glorifying precisely what
manufacture sought to hide, its structural dependency on the labourers. Design therefore proceeds to seek
in itself or in its history, forms that were external to the labourers’ range of forms. But this range stems
from the technique, the knowledge and the know-how that building manufacture employs to assure its own
operation. An impasse still – which has not yet been solved by architecture as separated from the building
site. To this day, design and (correct) construction are antagonists – contemporary architecture is
testimony to this. The persistence of this contradiction should not come as a surprise to us: ‘what has
fallen out [in the sense of a quarrel] from a sole principle does not henceforth follow independent routes
… instead the two never occur separated [Adorno uses the Ancient Greek word choris here].’16 The split
between design and building site, formerly integrated, leaves in each of these the void of its other. From
then on ‘the two never occur separated’. Two opposites, they become contradictory as they are the
attributes of distinct, contradictory social groups: one linked to command, the other expected to obey.
Design combines operational prescription (which we will suppose technically justified) and elements of
the technique of domination (yet it is almost impossible to separate them). The positive regard for the
building activity becomes infused with a negative one, the one which reacts to the potential
insubordination that underlies the merely formal subordination – a reaction that we find disguised, in the
dominant discourse, as labour’s incompetence or bluntness. Complaints against the productive body are a
constant in the history of architecture. The same techniques and range of forms that are praised in the
literature on ‘les bâtisseurs des cathédrales’ become the acts of barbarians and ‘tedeschi’ (Goths) once
manufacture makes way for the architecture of capitalist production. To be sure, manufacture corrodes the
technique and range of forms of the bâtisseurs by subdividing their crafts into minuscule subparts. This is
just one of capital’s givens: that of rendering its foundations effective through its own operational
dynamics. Arguments for accusing and downplaying labour have varied through the ages, but never
disappear. There is an anecdote that nicely illustrates this continuous tension: when the monastery at La
Tourette was built, a small window turned out to be crooked because of a flaw when the concrete was
poured. Le Corbusier did not want it straightened, but made a point in writing next to it, ‘Man’s hand was
here’. As if all the rest of the building, the entire monastery, was not wholly the result of many human
hands working under the pressure of manufacture.

2e – There is more to this. The difficulties, as well as the range of forms that a designer has before
her/him when elaborating the design, do not only concern the object to be built and how to execute it.
His/her tools are those of design, whether on the drawing board or on the computer. Charles Peirce has
taught us to consider the essential role of phenomenological components (qualisigns, sinsigns and
legisigns) in his semiotics.17 Ferdinand de Saussure taught us the role of the signifier18 (which Jacques
Lacan places at the root of our collective psyche).19 The specific logic of signs greatly over-determines
that which is represented and its representation. That much is known. We have noted above how the
designer who works for manufacture tends to propose a formal system that is different from what would
be normal for the technique employed by its direct builders and we have suggested the reason behind such
irrationality. At least up until post-modernism, the designer makes up an architecture that does not match
construction technique. Reyner Banham has made this clear in his book about design in the first machine
age20 and our late research laboratory at the School of Architecture in Grenoble (Laboratoire
Dessin/Chantier) made a number of analyses of classicist and modernist buildings, highlighting this
persistent incoherence.21 Such incoherence is frequently translated, in plastic terms, into a semiotic
inversion: it is not that the drawing is an image and diagram of the object to be built, but rather that the
built object is made as the image and diagram of the drawing. Nowadays we can easily read the
computer-made drawing that lies underneath the building. Works are instances of representation in general
terms, and of their own representation in particular. I repeat: the substance immediately facing the
designer is that of design, of its signs, and only with mediation does it take into account the work’s
material substance. In principle, this occurs with any representation. But the separation between design
and building site impedes any confrontation in a mutual, autonomous training process, in which design and
building site might be able to dialogue, and so correct the proclivity for autism in separated design.
(Because of these analyses I have been accused of despising design, which is a crime of lèse-majesté
among architects. My books, as well as my professional practice attest to the contrary, and I have always
drawn more than most architects. But the accusation had another target – my thesis that architects,
whatever their intentions and when acting within the profession’s usual terms, are courtiers of capital. I
understand this reaction. As soon as I elaborated the analyses summarised here I had to abandon, at least
partly, the ‘normal’ practice of architecture out of ethical duty both to myself and to my students. I went
out and tried to change the regime of capital with weapons, and obviously I failed. I recommend such a
professional suicide to no one. As to the fighting …)
2f – Architecture is building plus ‘something else’: this is a common assumption. The statement would be
correct if this ‘something else’ were nothing but the attention to functionality. Yet what is understood as
the ‘something else’ is the aesthetic dimension. The built object should follow formal criteria such as
harmony, rhythm, modularity, ‘the masterly play of masses’, etc. In other words: it should follow criteria
of instant perception, since aesthetics is generally seen as the gauging of subjective affects provoked by
the finished work on the spectator. Phenomenology has tried to overcome this restriction by including in
the aesthetic analysis the movement of the observer in or around the object. But such a correction remains
confined to the field of contemplation. Building, however, is a dynamic process and, as we have seen, it
is only within such a process that the worker’s subordination becomes effective. Therefore the aesthetic
dimension, as proposed by the design and perceived by the observer, depending on criteria such as those
mentioned above, has an essential subterraneous function for capital: it deviates attention from the place
and the moment where the dramatic extortion of surplus value occurs. Moreover: it imposes the
superficial aesthetics of consumption, which feeds the fetishism of the object (forgetting its production).
The true artistic dimension of architectural form should be the exteriorisation of its foundations; for what
concerns us here, it should be the expression of the intrinsic logic of the process of non-subordinated
manufacture. But I repeat: this is precisely the kind of artistic manifestation that separated design tries to
avoid. Adolf Loos’s horror of ornament stems from this censorship: authentic ornament is a formal by-
product that extends and exalts the correct technical gesture, in the joy of correct, necessary work.
What we call art in architecture is therefore simultaneously the design’s self-exhibition, which impedes
the perception of its authoritarian character (in the sense suggested by Theodor Adorno: subsumption to
power and transmission of its dictates to subaltern subjects) and inculcates a penchant for a tranquillising
fetishisation in our rapine society. Seen from the underside, the artistic dimension of architecture and its
mystifying aura – generally little more than the application of Gestalt laws (or the contemporary post-
modernist disobedience to such laws) – acquires the features of a region that is forbidden to them – the
workers – who must not give opinions about its superior mysteries, located beyond the reach of their
competence. A shoemaker must stick to the business of making shoes, so goes the old teaching instilled in
the children of my generation … It is the opposite of William Morris’s definition that ‘Art is man’s
expression of his joy in labour’22 – a definition that obviously implies freedom in work, the non-
subordination of the worker. Rigorously speaking, our architecture of capital is incompatible with the
very concept of art, and so follows, I repeat, our phobia of ornament – the song of free labour. Our hasty
theoreticians, sighing dumbly before the supposed fraternity of architecture, painting and sculpture, fail to
understand the contradiction. Since the Renaissance our good painting and sculpture live with the
contradiction between, initially, their defence of freedom in labour and the arrogance of princes, and later,
the voracity of the luxury market. They desperately struggle to keep their freedom – even though they
depend on one and on the other, and this poisons their fight. The architect, in turn, even with the best of
intentions, cannot find a way to avoid being the undertaker who completes the abduction of freedom that is
inherent to capital’s operation. (You can see that the architects hate me for a reason. But because I employ
here the term ‘design’ in a wider sense and include in it all the prescriptive apparatus, many others have
equal right to hate me!)

2g –

Because of this reciprocity, the substantial and causal process acquires a new sense: no longer that of
the immediate adhesion to itself by exclusion of the being-other, no longer that of the reflexive
relationship of the exclusion of itself by itself, since after all each one of them is not what it is on
 condition of positioning itself as that which it is not.23
(Joël Biard, Introduction à la lecture de la ‘Science de la Logique’ de Hegel)

Although the determinations of reflection have the form of self-equality, and are therefore unconnected
to an other and without opposition, they are in fact determinate against one another, as it will result on
closer examination – or is immediately evident in them in the case of identity, diversity and opposition
– and are therefore not exempt from transition and contradiction because of their reflective form.
Therefore, on closer examination, the several propositions that are set up as absolute laws of thought
are opposed to each other: they contradict each other and mutually sublate each other.24
(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic)

Architecture’s separated design is intrinsically contradictory. Originally, design was of the building site,
produced on the building site as a preparation for construction, usually at full scale (except for simple
preliminary or models), but it becomes separated and quickly turns into the essential support for the
domination of productive capital. Its immediate aim is to depict the form of the object to be built, so as to
ensure its future use value. Its dynamic aim, however, is another: to dictate from an external position the
constitution of the collective labourer, the re-union of labour dispersed through the destruction of the
simple cooperation of labourers, a consequence of the appropriation of the material means of production
by capital. To this end, design can be of any given form, a zero-value form, as long as it forces this re-
union. But this re-union must remain heteronomous, and in no way can it come close to what would be the
spontaneous and rational reunion of labour in simple cooperation. If that were the case, the collective
labourer would have his fundamental reason within himself, i.e. he would be autonomous in principle,
resisting or impeding domination by capital.
We have also seen how this re-union leads to the substitution of the range of forms of simple
cooperation by some other range. However, since the dynamic principle in formal subordination (now in
the economic sense of the word) is labour power, and since design cannot correspond to what would be
the logic of its spontaneous and rational cooperation, the design that is convenient for the exploitation of
the building site by capital will be necessarily heteronomous and irrational, in terms of production. A
fine-grained, careful analysis of production techniques in construction shows that in most cases they
become inextricably mixed with techniques of domination, consistently leading to technical aberrations
(although not aberrant for domination). Even then, the design that replaces what would be the appropriate
design for ideal (non-subordinated) manufacture is worn like a mask, as an architectural fiction
underneath which the real production is hidden.
Design therefore has a double aim: to be the image of an acceptable, relatively solid use value, and to
be the image of a construction fiction that lies about its true formation process. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
incessantly criticised this practice, and Antoni Gaudí who built with utter correction, comes across as a
fool amidst the usual masquerade. By distancing itself from the adequate design for a non-subordinated
manufacture, the dominant form of architectural design reaches a dead end. By abandoning the logic of a
building site where there is technically self-determined simple cooperation, but still having to resort to
this logic and to disguise it, design pushes away and rejects what would guarantee its autonomy, its
truthfulness as design for rational production. It uses empty formal cunning to create the illusion of plastic
totality, while in fact it generates incompatibilities and incoherencies. And since subordination only really
becomes effective in the production process, design enacts the obsession of capital, its desire to transform
the worker into Chimera, half mechanism (mechanism: as that which has its reason outside of itself), half
subject, responsible for a knowledge and a know-how; the monstrous concubinage between heteronomy
and autonomy, autonomy as to the means, heteronomy as to the end. Because the final goal of this
imbroglio is solely, or predominantly, to extract a substantial amount of surplus value. Whether we want it
or not, the built object, whatever it may be, is a commodity whose exchange value stems from production
– and only from production. And our architectural design has been part of the foundations of commodity
production ever since it betrayed its origins by separating from the building site.

Notes
1 Dessin/Chantier is the title of the French edition (Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2005) of Sérgio Ferro’s book originally published in
Portuguese as O Canteiro e o Desenho (São Paulo: Projeto Editores, 1979) or in English as The Construction Site and the Design.
This chapter summarises the key arguments of that book but we retain the French title because it is difficult to find a precise translation in
English. In Latin languages the term desenho/dessin has a double meaning: design and ‘drawing’ that relates it to the planning of a
project as well as to design. The slash indicates that it is ‘Design over the Construction Site’ or ‘The Construction Site under Design’. See
also Felipe Contier’s introduction in Chapter 8.
2 Karl Marx, Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861–1864, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW) Vol. 34 (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), p. 475.
3 The tendency of the rate of profit to fall results from the ‘progressive [and unavoidable] relative decrease of the variable capital as
compared to the constant capital’. See ch. 13, Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, MECW Vol. 38 (1998). Maintaining productive sectors with
an organic composition of capital characterised by a high proportion of variable capital is essential to delay this fall, see Marx, ibid., ch. 9.
Construction is one of the largest sectors of production with this attribute: it is still a pre-industrial form of manufacture. To industrialise it
would therefore be a disaster with regard to the rate of profit: its constant capital would grow in relation to its variable capital. As a result
of its so-called technological backwardness and its economic significance, construction supplies a substantial amount of surplus value, and
thus fits in developmentalist plans in two complementary ways: allowing the accumulation of new capital and slowing the fall of the
average profit rate caused by the economic development. Therefore the developmentalism of President Juscelino Kubitschek was
accompanied by the construction of Brasilia, and the so-called economic miracle of the military dictatorship went together with the
National Bank for Social Housing (BNH). Delfim Neto, the minister responsible for the miracle, was well aware of this relationship: he
advocated huge labour-absorbing sectors, meaning ‘backward’ sectors or, in other words, manufacture.
4 Alberto Xavier and Júlio Katinsky (eds), Brasília, Antologia Crítica (São Paulo: Cosacnaify, 2012).
5 The literature on architecture in the period of simple cooperation is enormous and, notably, it is the only one to embrace the building site in
an extensive and positive manner. To mention just a few titles: André Scobeltzine, L’art féodal et son enjeu social (Paris: Gallimard,
1973); Roland Recht (ed.), Les bâtisseurs des cathédrales gothiques (Strasbourg: Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, 1989); Pierre du
Colombier, Les chantiers des cathédrales (Paris: Picard, 1953); J.M. Savignat, Dessin et architecture du Moyen-Age au XVIII siècle
(Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1980). As for the workers’ cooperatives, I had acquaintance with some of them in
Grenoble in the 1970s. I did not keep any record. Nowadays I follow (from a distance) the cooperatives organised by Usina. See Usina:
entre o projeto e o canteiro, to be published in July 2015, especially the collective paper ‘Arquitetura, política e autogestão, comentário
sobre os mutirões habitacionais’; Flávio Higuchi Hirao, Kaya Lazarini and Pedro Fiori Arantes, ‘A experiência recente da Usina junto aos
movimentos populares de Sem-Teto (UMM) e Sem-Terra (MST)’; Isadora Guerreiro and Kaya Lazarini, ‘Processos de projeto como
construção de autonomia’; and João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, ‘Assentamento Ireno Alves dos Santos’.
6 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, MECW Vol. 30 (1988), p. 161.
7 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus
(London/Harmondsworth: New Left Review/Penguin, 1973), p. 489.
8 Karl Marx. The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW Vol. 6 (1976), p. 207. See also Notebooks I to V of Marx’s Manuscript from 1861–
1863, MECW Vol. 30 (1988).
9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Do Dual Organizations Exist?’ in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf
(London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1968), p. 159.
10 André Gorz, Critique de la division du travail (Paris: Seuil, 1973).
11 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production Vol. 1, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1887), p. 318.
12 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, MECW Vol. 4 (1975).
13 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
14 Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
15 Sérgio Ferro, Artes Plásticas e Trabalho Livre (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2015).
16 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Postscriptum’ (1966) to ‘Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychology’ (1955), in Gesammelte Schriften in
Zwanzig Bänden. Band 8: Soziologische Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), p. 91. Translated from the German by Silke
Kapp.
17 Charles S. Peirce, Écrits sur le signe (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
18 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Générale (Paris: Payot, 1973).
19 Jacques Lacan, ‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’ in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
20 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960).
21 From the research and studies of the Laboratoire Dessin/Chantier. See: Sérgio Ferro, ‘Le palimpseste du Palais Thiène’, Revue
Dessin/Chantier, number 1 (no date); Sérgio Ferro, ‘Un dessin pour la Porta Pia’, Revue Dessin/Chantier, number 2 (March 1983);
Sérgio Ferro, ‘La fonction modelisante du dessin à la Renaissance’ in L’idée constructive en architecture (Picard, 1987). Sérgio Ferro,
C. Kebbal, P. Potié and C. Simonnet, Le Corbusier, Le Couvent de la Tourette (Marseille: Parenthèses, 1987); Sérgio Ferro, Michel-
Ange, architecte et sculpteur de la Chapelle Medicis (Lyon: Plan Fixe, 1998).
22 William Morris, ‘Art Under Plutocracy’ in May Morris (ed.), Collected Works of William Morris, Vol. 23 (London: Longmans, Green,
1910–1915).
23 Joël Biard, Introduction à la lecture de la ‘Science de la Logique’ de Hegel, Book 2, La doctrine de l’essence (Paris: Aubier
Montaigne, 1983), p. 89. Translated into English from Sérgio Ferro’s own translation of the French into Portuguese.
24 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Book 2: The Doctrine of Essence. Trans. and edited by George di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 355–356.