Central Void Against Endless Interior

Abstract

In this lecture we will look at the relation between architecture and labour through three case studies, the global headquarters of the leading-edge technology corporations Apple, Google (now under Alphabet), and Facebook (rebranded as Meta Platforms). The thesis puts forward these projects as critical paradigms to learn how a deeply rooted dialectic continues to recurs and return as an instrument of centralised power: the excitement of a territory without previous history, a frontier to conquer and to move into, against the yearning for a cohesive, and stable, settled world, both seem to find emphatic productive force when compressed in today’s most central places of corporate power and knowledge work. We will explore how in this context a labour subject par excellence, is one that is formed by the intersection of what are effectively distinct forms of production and life, a subject that the thesis puts forward, rather than knowledge worker, or affective worker, is best characterised with the word pioneer, on one hand because it enables us to frame its labour as fundamentally nothing new, not a consequence of post-industrial society, andtherfore to expose the conditions seen in Silicon Valley, rather than as a site of novelty, as a site of history. To help us narrate how this historical subject as it strives in the ‘pursuit to found a new world’, seems to be a foremost agent for the deepening of no new worlds to fundamentally congeal. A process that is economic, political, and crucially, architectural.