Architecture Beyond Capitalism Summer School
The Architecture Beyond Capitalism School (ABC School) is a six-week-long virtual summer school launching in June 2021 by The Architecture Lobby. The school stems from a desire within the Lobby to critically interrogate the structures and systems of power that have made change difficult within design professions and institutions, as well as from a belief that architecture schools do not teach what and how they could. The ABC School is open to anyone wanting to better understand how architecture is part of larger class, race, gender, and extraction-based capitalist economies. Sessions will address inequity and inaccess to architectural education, burdens of debt on students, the precarious labor of students, faculty, and staff, and it will prepare participants for a post-developer-driven mode of practice.
The Lobby is committed to long-term structural change, including the prototyping of new curricular structures and content, developing new modes of co-producing, and sharing knowledge equitably. More specific than comprehensive, the ABC School represents a small first step toward larger change.
The virtual summer program is open to students, faculty, practitioners, and members of various publics in all parts of the world, and it will span six weeks beginning Saturday June 19, 2021 with a culminating think-in session on July 31. The content will be presented and discussed in three thematic sections: Capitalism, Labor, and Collective Practice. Each theme has two components: debates stimulated by lessons from people whose work is central to the week’s theme and salons for discussing the outcomes of design assignments pertinent to that theme.
Type of Project: Educational
Location: Online
Status: Completed (July 31, 2021)

Organizers
C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M coordinators:
Peggy Deamer, Priyanka Shah
C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M saloners:
Daniel Barber, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Kirsten Day, Peggy Deamer, Sharon Haar, Priyanka Shah
L-A-B-O-R coordinators:
Kadambari Baxi, Aaron Cayer
L-A-B-O-R saloners:
Kadambari Baxi, Aaron Cayer, Charlie Edmonds, Daniel Jacobs, Natalie Leonard
C-O-L-L-E-C-T-I-V-E-S coordinators:
Palmyra Geraki, Quilian Riano
C-O-L-L-E-C-T-I-V-E-S saloners:
Kaitlyn Boniecki, Frank Burridge, Will Martin (coordinators); Kirsten Day, Palmyra Geraki, Daniel Jacobs, Matthew Okazaki, Quilian Riano

At large:
Valérie Lechêne, Xinyi Xie