Architecture Beyond Capitalism School

The Architecture Beyond Capitalism School (ABC School) is a six-week-long virtual summer school launched 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 address inequity and inaccess to architectural education, burdens of debt on students, the precarious labor of students, faculty, and staff, and it prepares 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 towards larger change.

 

The virtual summer program is open to students, faculty, practitioners, and members of various publics in all parts of the world. The content is 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.

​

​