The Architecture Lobby is an organization of architectural workers advocating for the value of architectural work and for the needed alignment of our work with construction workers. The “Immigration and Architecture” roundtable discusses the effects that regulating, limiting, and delegitimizing immigrants has on citizenship, architecture, and access to work. Participants investigate architects’ complicity in a systematic whitewashing of US citizenship and its labor force and the economic effects on both construction and architecture.

“Immigration and Architecture” will have two sessions. The morning session, “The Architect as Citizen,” will examine architecture’s complicity and possible amelioration in regimes of population control. The afternoon session, “The Architect as Worker,” will examine the consequences of recent policies on documented and undocumented workers on the construction trades and consequently architectural production.

Participants

• Kamabari Baxi
• Peggy Deamer
• Keefer Dunn
• Ane Gonzalez Lara
• Nathan Friedman
• Ashton Hamm
• James Heard
• Cesar Lopez
• Margie O’Driscoll
• Ron Rael
• Manuel Schvartzberg
• Dexter Walcott
• Mabel Wilson

The Architecture Lobby, Inc. is an organization of architectural workers advocating for the value of architecture in the general public and for architectural work within the discipline. It believes that the work architects do—aesthetic, technical, social, organizational, environmental, administrative, fiduciary—needs structural change to be more rewarding and more socially relevant. As long as architecture tolerates abusive practices in the office and the construction site, it cannot insist on its role in and for the public good. architecture-lobby.org

This program is part of the Citizen Lab programming series and takes place in the US Pavilion courtyard.