The Labor Party Party #001
Sunday, November 10, 2019 | 3PM | 75 Stewart Ave | RSVP
an afternoon of conversation about coworking
when it’s good, when it’s bad, and how to make it better
Architecture has always been social. As the legend goes, according to Vitruvius, “The beginning of association among human beings, their meeting and living together, thus came into being because of the discovery of fire.” One can speculate from this that the first act of building was not the construction of a personal dwelling, but a fire around which a community could grow, and from which the history of creative labor emerged. A constructed fire and a huddle of beings around it might demonstrate the first collaborative environment.
But what is often forgotten across the many millennia between that first act of community building and the Downtown towers and suburban office parks that make up the “creative workspace” landscape is that a good fire takes stoking. Architecture at its origins was not just an event of assembly but a continuous process of maintenance. Today, most architects do little to engage the afterlife of their projects, and this practice of maintenance is generally left either to cultish companies or indifferent landlords who ply us with free tap beer and rooftop yoga to keep us ignorant of the space and its discontents.
We at Labor Party would like to re-examine how designers build and stoke the fire. Instead of working top-down, We propose Labor Party as a bottom-up, ongoing series of workshops and community office hours -- an ad hoc co-working project that is organized provisionally to best cater to its participants as their needs arise and change.
But first, we plan, all together. It is with this reframing we convene our first event, an open conversation on how to co-work. Some questions we’re bringing, from the material to the conceptual:
If we think about the production of collaborative workspace less as a dropship deployment of “cool” spaces and more in terms of an ongoing process of support and development, how does that change our role as designer?
As a participant in the Labor Party, what would you want to “cook” on our fire? What do we need to bring to help you cook?
What rules do you set for yourself in your own labor to stay positive/productive and how might those reflect the community’s rules?
Where do existing models of co-working fall short?
What kinds of events/workshops/aid would actually be productive? What if a co-working space helped you edit your grants and proposals? Hosted pecha kuchas & crits? Ran group shows? Published work? Taught new skills? Just gave you some good old-fashioned encouragement?
How do we dance between community, an act of boundary-drawing that inherently others, and inclusivity?
What are our own blindspots in drafting these questions that we need our attention called to?
INSTRUCTIONS/SUGGESTIONS
We will meet 11/10 at 3 PM at 75 Stewart Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237
Send us your thoughts at a.wheekim@gmail.com if you have any!