Since the 1960s Brazilian architect, painter, and theorist Sérgio Ferro has been developing the single most sustained enquiry into design, labour and the construction site, yet his work remains little known outside the Brazilian and French contexts where it was developed. Like many prominent artists and architects, including João Vilanova Artigas and Oscar Niemeyer, Ferro joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1959. But it was when he had the opportunity to design and build in Brasilia that he was exposed to the violent reality of the construction site, in direct contradiction to the humanist and emancipatory aims of modernist architects. Ferro began to look for an answer in Marxist theory for the conditions of architecture’s mode of production. 

During his studies at FAU-USP Ferro formed a collective with collaborators Rodrigo Lefèvre and Flávio Império who became known as the Arquitetura Nova group and they began an intense period of creative activity of painting, theatre, theoretical studies and architecture. Together they would go on to produce a remarkable series of houses and buildings marked in particular by the use of rudimentary materials and the catenary vault. The group was recognized with an entire issue of the architecture journal Acropole in 1965. And in 2018 Ferro’s work with Arquitetura Nova was the centrepiece of the Orléans Architecture Biennale in 2019. The group is the subject of a dual language special issue of the Brazilian architecture journal arq.urb (2020), which includes articles by many members of the TF/TK team. https://revistaarqurb.com.br/arqurb/issue/view/30. 

In 1967, during the military dictatorship, Ferro left the Communist Party and joined armed resistance groups. He published his first texts analysing the production of mass housing and contemporary Brazilian architecture before being arrested and dismissed from the university. In the following year, Ferro took exile in France, where he taught at the Grenoble School of Architecture until his retirement in 2000 and founded with colleagues the Dessin/Chantier research and teaching lab. During this time and at a distance from Brazil, he published the first version of his most important architectural text O Canteiro e o Desenho, latter published as in French as Dessin/Chantier (2005) amongst many other works studying for example the consequences for construction and labour of Le Corbusier’s sculptural designs intentions La Tourette, the meanings of labour in Michelangelo’s sculpture and architecture, and developing the monograph on the emergence and uses of classical design in the extraction of surplus value from building labour.  In 2006 Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre, a collection of Ferro’s essays edited by TF/TK Co-I Pedro Arantes was published in Brazil to great acclaim, influencing historians, theorists and activists working with grassroots movements, and two further monographs have followed Artes Plásticas e Trabalho Livre (2015) and Construção do desenho clássico (2021) edited by TF/TK Co-I Silke Kapp.  

Sérgio Ferro’s works demonstrate that since design was separated from the building site it has been complicit in the expropriation of labour power on the building site, a mere service provider in the process of capitalist production of value. And conversely he points to the reinvention of a mode ‘design immersed in the return of productive autonomy’ that would be ‘the contradictory opposite of the indignity of enslaving design at the service of capital.’ Led by Co-I Silke Kapp, with post-doctoral researcher Marianna Moura and translators Ellen Heyward and Ana Naomi da Sousa, TF/TK is editing and translating a 3 volumes of Sergio Ferro’s work into English: 

• Architecture Seen From Below: a Reader which showcases the full methodological, theoretical and historical breadth of Ferro’s work.
• Dessin / Chantier – Critical Edition will be the first English translation of Ferro’s seminal text, first published in Portuguese (1976, 1979), then in French (2005), and in Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre (2006). The publication is funded by the University of Grenoble.
• The Construction of Classical Design – Ferro’s most recent monograph first published in Portuguese in 2021 as Construção do desenho clássico.

Our aim in translating Ferro’s work is first to provide a common critical, theoretical and methodological ground for Production Studies, and direct it towards social action and to make it finally available to the English-speaking world. 

Throughout 2021 we are reading these texts as they are translated and debating them in monthly Portuguese and English reading groups, involving a growing body of international practitioners, activists and academics.  We have been compiling some of the questions Ferro’s work raises across disciplines and practices.