Tuning the Choir

To start a nonprofit, you need a very specific set of people, documents, and ideas: lawyers to draft articles of incorporation and tax-exempt status; a board of directors; and a document stating the mission, vision, and values of the organization. It can be a lengthy process, but the procedure to follow is clear. There are boxes to be checked and paperwork to be filed. The steps for building a movement—not just a nonprofit with actionable goals, but a means to bring about tangible, systemic change—are significantly less straightforward.

For the past ten years, the Architecture Lobby has functioned as a network of sorts, providing a way for those working in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning to connect around a set of varied concerns, ranging from climate justice to unionization. A member-based organization with nearly 200 dues-paying members today, the Lobby puts forth its vision via a twelve-point manifesto whose declarations are as wide-ranging as the organization’s activities.

In its early days, the Lobby aimed its activities toward consciousness-raising, encouraging its members to lead the conversations that typically happen around the office watercooler or after hours at the bar and address what we all know but maybe haven’t always felt comfortable saying out loud: that architecture is traumatic and exploitative and that it relies on that trauma and exploitation to perpetuate its business practices. Over time, the organization’s ambitions have grown, and now it is attempting to reshape the design professions by popularizing broad goals like unionization, cooperativization, a just transition, and racial and gender equity. Unlike typical nonprofits in the United States, most of which are structured around an overarching mission met by measurable outcomes, the Lobby is dedicated to a process of movement building.

But building a movement that can meaningfully accomplish an array of goals as ambitious as the Lobby’s is tricky. Since 2013, the Lobby has undergone a series of structural changes that have yielded concrete programs, working groups, and pedagogical resources to support Lobby members in their organizing. Consequently, the organization has found itself engaged in two simultaneous battles. The first is plain to see in its mission and manifesto: the organization wants to transform the profession into a more just version of itself. At the same time, the highly hierarchical culture of the profession has embroiled the Lobby in a second, quieter struggle: getting many people to speak with a single, unified voice.

IN 2013, Yale University professor Peggy Deamer attended a program by Who Builds Your Architecture (WBYA), a coalition of architects and educators who “examine the links between labor, architecture, and the global networks that form around building buildings.” Earlier that year, a high-profile report on working conditions at the Guggenheim’s Saadiyat Island outpost in the UAE revealed possible human rights violations, citing extreme worker abuse and exploitation. WBYA had assembled a panel about building in the UAE and China, but according to Deamer, no architects were willing to speak on it, a fact she found “astounding.”

“It made me think how architects are so unconcerned because we don’t identify as workers,” she tells NYRA. “And if we identified as workers, we would identify with the bad labor practices.”

The hits kept coming: at a conference in Washington, DC, she watched panelists speak about architecture as a “calling, not a career”; at Yale’s law school, she saw signs listing the ten most family-friendly firms and wondered why she’d never seen the same at an architecture school. “What kind of ideological work has been done on us?” she recalls wondering.

Deamer began revisiting past conversations with friends and colleagues about labor practices in architecture. They’d all experienced something: poor pay, difficulty finding jobs, and instability in a post–Great Recession economy. In August 2013, she held a meeting in her Brooklyn apartment. Ten individuals, a mix of practitioners and academics, showed up. That night, they gave their group a name—the Architecture Lobby—and agreed to continue meeting regularly to discuss issues within the profession.

For Deamer, the primary role of the group was raising consciousness around labor issues and trying to understand why museum professionals, artists, and journalists had concerned themselves with these issues but architects hadn’t. How exactly it would go about raising such consciousness, among both architects and the public, was a matter of communication. The organization needed a website to direct its messaging around three areas of change: attitudes (of the public, the media, and clients), practice (authorship, contracts, and fees), and labor (compensation, network, and policies). It’s less of a manifesto and more of a flowchart, but it served as the framework for a manifesto.

“The very first website,” explains Deamer, “had those three [groups] that identified who we were addressing—one [section] for each—and each of those three sections had three subcategories of issues involved. Those three-times-three points became what we would call ‘the first nine-point manifesto.’”

The first web presence established in the Lobby’s early years provided an opportunity to raise consciousness through guerrilla activism. The 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale was approaching, so Deamer enlisted the help of Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió and J. Yolande Daniels, who were participants at the Biennale’s US Pavilion. The duo polished the manifesto, adding one last demand to create a ten-point document. The final document reads less like an address to constituencies and more like ten commandments for the architecture profession, including licensure upon degree completion, “demystifying” the solo genius, and implementing democratic alternatives to free-market systems of development. During the Biennale’s vernissage, Shvartzberg Carrió and Daniels grabbed a pair of matching orange megaphones and recited the ten points aloud in an act that seemed to officially mark the birth of the Architecture Lobby. In 2014 and 2015, the group continued to meet online, and in 2015, Deamer convened the first Lobby retreat at her weekend home on Long Island. Around fifteen academics and practitioners from around the country—individuals who had been in Deamer’s orbit and others who had been invested in discussions around labor issues—gathered to begin discussing the next steps to build a movement and the structures to support it.

“We recognized that we should be a nonprofit, and that meant that we should have a board,” Deamer says. “And that was really the point where we decided this was not about raising consciousness. This was not about getting the media to talk about us differently and getting the AIA to have some ethical dimension—we would not wait for that. We were going to be the organization that was going to do that.”

Members in attendance—they included the late editor in chief of The Architect’s Newspaper, Bill Menking; current dean of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Quilian Riano; Shvartzberg Carrió; and Keefer Dunn, who would later become the Lobby’s first national organizer—decided that making structural changes to the profession would require a national organizing effort to establish local chapters in cities and regions. Each chapter would be headed by a steward, and all local chapters would sit under a national organizing committee made up of chapter stewards, staff, and an elected national board, all headed by a national organizer. Working groups driven by members’ interests would be formed at the national level. That structure exists to this day.

“For some of those early discussions, even before the retreat, in making the decision to become a nonprofit, I was probably the most resistant, because I was still focused on guerrilla acts,” says Deamer. “I don’t think that the Guerrilla Girls were a nonprofit. Nonprofit to me smacks of do-goodism. I didn’t think we were do-gooders—we were angry.”

DEAMER EVENTUALLY CAME AROUND, but it took several years to piece together the Lobby’s bureaucratic mechanisms so that they could be used to build research and campaigns and flesh out staffing needs at the national level. Outside events helped coalesce these efforts and bring new leaders into the fold: several people I spoke with cited the 2017 statement issued by former AIA president Robert Ivy, which said that AIA members would be willing to work on President Donald Trump’s “infrastructure” initiatives, including the infamous southern border wall, as a reason for joining the Lobby.

“I was feeling alienated and disaffected by a profession that I didn’t feel understood the world the same way I did,” says Dex Walcott, Lobby national organizer from 2018 to 2020. “I heard that there was this competition for border wall prototypes and brought that to a meeting. This was a route to the first campaign I became involved in after going to a handful of Lobby meetings in person.” Walcott, who was living in the Bay Area, began working with the Lobby on the Not Our Wall campaign, which urged firms to pledge not to submit to the Department of Homeland Security RFP and initiated a walk-out in protest. The campaign was able to stop HDR’s Chicago office from submitting a response to the RFP. Dunn helped lead that effort at HDR; he declined to speak on the record for this story.

“I think in some ways that was probably the most material effect that was felt—that withdrawal of labor,” Walcott says. “Within the discourse of architecture,” he continues, “it had a different effect, which was to serve as an issue campaign that could do political education for people on the level of where your power is: the production, the withholding, and organizing of your labor, rather than in the ideas that you produce.” Energized by this work, Walcott moved into leadership positions, eventually becoming the national organizer. His main task, he believed, was to continue defining the Lobby’s structure. To that end, he helped establish bylaws specific to the needs of organizing and worked with others to draw up organizational diagrams, noting that it was administratively necessary but also important for securing transparency. “Organizations…need to avoid existing in personalities or individuals with comprehensive memories. Also, functionally, you need to have stuff written down,” he says.

But according to longtime Lobby member Valérie Lechêne, the issue of personality—of the singular voice prevailing over the collective voice—remained prominent. “There’s been tension…about a lot of people wanting to get involved with the organization, putting a lot of time and effort into it, but then not necessarily getting the direct nominal credit, because they don’t feel comfortable having their name associated with unionization drives,” she explains. As a result, the people most associated with the work of the Lobby ended up being individuals with greater protections, like academics with tenure or in midcareer.

Douglas Spencer, a professor of architecture at Iowa State University, became a Lobby member in 2016 and shortly thereafter observed another side to this issue: individuals could use the work of the Lobby to build their professional credentials. “Research is obviously central to academia; if you want to get tenure you need to have a research record,” he says. Spencer, author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism, was initially excited by the group’s willingness to address the issues he had studied. But when he was elected as the Lobby’s national research coordinator in 2019, he realized that for individual members the Lobby’s purpose varied widely.

“The tension,” Spencer says, “was around what the is Lobby for and what your membership in the Lobby is for: Is it to address the issues and working conditions of the architect? Is it a more political one, to use unionization within the architectural profession to effect larger political goals?” Those, to him, were the only options. Using the work of the organization to further one’s career did not fit within his conception of the Lobby: “The idea of the Lobby—and I would certainly hope of any activist organization that’s based on solidarity—is you are not working for your own interest. You’re working for everyone’s interests.”

Without a “clear, agreed-upon political agenda,” solidarity cannot happen, he contends. “What I see is tension for people who are only experienced in academia, or in the architectural profession, and the frankly relatively affluent nature of that, not having an experience of solidarity,” he continues. Spencer attempted to address this lack of cohesion around the Lobby’s purpose, but he eventually ended up stepping down from his position a year later, citing, among other things, a hateful email he received from a Lobby member, insulting him “for being a Marxist.”

THE LOBBY is not an explicitly Marxist organization, nor is it explicitly a leftist one. The 2016 manifesto’s tenth and final point, the one added by Shvartzberg Carrió and Daniels—“Implement democratic alternatives to the free market system of development”—is perhaps the clearest positional statement throughout the document’s evolution, now in its third iteration. At the most recent Lobby congress (a biannual gathering open to all Lobby members) in 2021, the manifesto evolved to a twelvepoint document to include antiracist and climate-forward statements. The document provides guiding light, says Porath. “It’s not a direct translation between working groups and manifesto points. These are ideas that we strive for, that are important to us, whether we practice them collectively as part of the organization or individually in our personal and practice lives.”

According to Spencer, the manifesto isn’t necessarily a political agenda, either. “If you have a political agenda, if you are explicitly trying to change something, you have to say what those politics are,” he says. This is a problem with the “big-tent” methodology that the Lobby has espoused from the beginning: a series of broad values can attract a large number of individuals to an organization, but then the politics around which they coalesce remain unclear. Clarity only ends up being built through campaigns and actions led by the most active members, meaning that the Lobby’s apparent priorities might differ from those of even the majority of its members.

“It’s not a failing of the Lobby; it’s just a problem within an organization where they will attract people who have very strong political agendas, people who just think it’s nice to be involved in activism, and people who want to do something about the fact that they feel increasingly exploited,” explains Spencer. Without an overarching political agenda to unite this spectrum of members, developing actionable goals to effect change becomes overly difficult.

Zooming out, however, Lechêne and many others I spoke with expressed that the Lobby exists more generally as a solidaristic place for design professionals who have experienced exploitative work environments. “The point of the Lobby is more so to provide a safe space to have these conversations about topics that are difficult. I think architects all have traumatic experiences working and even just attending school,” she says. Those conversations are important to have, but they are the precursor to organizing, which requires solidarity, not just storytelling.

Jess Myers, an assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, grew from a reading-group member when she joined in 2017 to the New York City chapter co-steward in 2020. She keenly felt this misalignment in why different individuals join the Lobby. “Let’s say my goal is to get back at my boss for being rude to me or for not respecting me, for taking me for granted or overworking me. That desire can at times be in conflict with effective organizing because you might not see the work that you’re doing [in the Lobby] as a one-to-one; ‘this is gonna get back at my boss,’” Myers explains. For the Lobby to function as a true movement, members’ desired individual outcomes—which, though they can activate one’s readiness to organize, are often specific to their personal workplaces—would need to take a back seat to the collective activities that could lead to longterm systemic change. Figuring out how to execute that latter task—particularly in a field like architecture that, as Spencer says, is shaped by proximity to affluence—requires political education.

LIKE WALCOTT, Porath joined the Lobby in 2017. Having finished her education at Columbia University’s GSAPP program, she was exploring her employment options. She quickly moved from member to New York City chapter co-steward, then was elected to the national organizer position in early 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. Amid the flurry of moving everything to new online platforms and ensuring chapters could easily continue their organizing work, the Lobby saw a growth in membership corresponding to the Black lives and racial justice campaigns that emerged in the summer of 2020.

“There was an eruption of interest during that time, interest of people in general and of members… in having conversations within the organization about what racial justice meant and how the Lobby was reckoning with that internally. It’s a majority white organization,” she explains.

Chris Daemmrich, an architect in New Orleans, joined the Lobby in 2020 amid the organization’s attempts to reckon with racial justice and found those early efforts lackluster. “Within the Lobby, there were conversations about what we do about this as architects, but very little conversation about what our position is” as an organization with mostly white members. In our interview, Myers attributed the organization’s whiteness to its direct reflection of architecture’s demographics. The newfound zeal for racial justice only highlighted the ways that architects needed to gain distance from architecture’s corporate ideologies: “Initially, I found an ironic focus on what could be described as a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, where people were proposing [that the Lobby] should do these same kinds of things that everyone’s office was doing at the time,” explains Daemmrich. “But there were also some wise people who pointed out, aren’t we supposed to be challenging the norms of corporate capitalism?”

Daemmrich helped assemble the Racial Justice working group, whose focus was to push local chapters toward solidarity with existing movements against carceral systems. Members of the Boston Chapter made inroads with organizers in Massachusetts working to stop the construction of the new women’s prison. Rather than focusing on the Lobby’s own internal politicking, the working group embraced coalition building—a step away from “architects-as-leaders” and an example of using a racial equity agenda to support existing initiatives. Through this solidarity, Lobby members involved could, finally, speak with one voice.

But this isn’t an easy task. “We’re coming into this type of organizing already with the beliefs and ideals of our own sector,” Myers says. “Some of those beliefs and ideals may come into conflict with effective organizing. There is an action of having to unlearn those things or having to find the proper place for those things.”

Architects traditionally are taught that they are leaders, she says. “There’s a skill to finding where to step back and where to follow. Being able to identify what is good leadership, stepping back and finding ways of supporting it, rather than putting yourself in front of it. That is an organizing skill that has to be taught and that can be in direct conflict with beliefs and ideals that we’re bringing with us from architecture.”

Walcott confronted these problems as well, noting that “a lot of people don’t come from a union household. A lot of people didn’t necessarily have experience with other kinds of radical politics.” These problems aren’t unsolvable, but they do highlight the fundamental tension within the Lobby’s pluralistic vision and its ability to carry it out: its ability to build a movement around labor, climate justice, and racial justice depends on the political education of its members. The organization must carry out that education while executing campaigns through its working groups (whose focuses include unionization, academia, climate, and cooperativization, to name a few), which are led by individuals with different understandings of those central issues and how to solve them. And while the Lobby could measure its impact based on the efficacy of its education efforts and success of its campaigns, the organization instead opts for a more inward-focused metric, says Lechêne.

“The way the Lobby moves forward is through the monthly organizing committee meetings, where important decisions happen. Generally, the Lobby doesn’t really espouse more capitalistic and standard key performance indicators,” she explains. “Meetings are the real impact mechanism. It’s internal.” By this metric, the impact of the Lobby’s activities is only visible to those participating in its internal processes.

The Lobby practices radical democracy in order to challenge the hierarchical decision-making that many of its members, most of them design professionals, are used to. At the same time, the organization’s working groups have to deemphasize the design profession, as well as its practices, in order to build solidarity with other groups, particularly outside of architecture. This balancing act raises the question the Lobby’s purpose: Is the organization for educating members about building a movement—that is, to make members into effective organizers? Or is it a movement in and of itself?

AS THE MANIFESTO HAS EVOLVED, so has the organization, particularly through the Covid-19 pandemic. Isolation brought a swell of new members—nearly doubling the organization’s numbers, according to Porath—as well as the shift in priorities demonstrated by the ratification of the twelve-point manifesto. Annual memberships for professionals are equal to two-tenths of one percent of a member’s annual salary; for students and the unemployed, it’s $25 per year. The Lobby also launched Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School, a summer intensive that, according to coordinator Will Martin teaches “the role that architectural thinking and knowledge could play in a much more applied way to the broader systemic transition that we need to make.”

Martin, an architect in Denver, has been involved in the Lobby throughout its ten-year life span. He notes that he maintains a low profile, focusing now mainly on the ABC School. But over the past year, he and his team of Lobby collaborators, some of whom are in New Zealand, have been amassing resources like readings, syllabi, assignments, and interviews in an effort to build an open-source “hub” of information about topics covered in the ABC School, including perspectives on power, co-operative firms, and activism in studio practices.

The hub isn’t just for Lobby members; it’s also for what Martin calls “a hopefully broadening” group that can include people who are “looking to engage in some sort of participatory design practice or method within [their] community.” This is an unorthodox practice: while most organizations faced with a lack of cohesion—and ensuing questions about why members might join, what the ultimate vision or goals might be, or who they might keep in their orbit—would opt to narrow their practices, the Lobby chose to broaden them.

Kaede Polkinghorne, the Lobby’s current national organizer, sees this evolution as a process of continued “horizontalizing” of its leadership. Unlike many Lobby leaders who graduated from elite coastal institutions, Polkinghorne got her start within the organization while a student at the University of Houston. “I think the Lobby still carries a reputation with some people of being more of an academic or discursive organization that’s rooted more in theory than in practice,” she says. “During the pandemic, I joined, and I was a third- or fourth-year student at a public university in the South. I think that speaks to the way that that period further democratized the Lobby.”

“The strength of the Lobby is really that it’s a platform,” she adds. Her role as national organizer, she believes, is to ensure that the national leadership provides resources to members who want to organize or participate in campaigns or discussions. Porath expresses the same set of convictions when speaking of her own responsibilities.

“I see the Lobby as a space of skill building and making space for solidarity and developing political agendas. The Lobby is there as an infrastructure of support for all of these things,” she says. This rings true when looking at member acitivites. Multiple members have taken the skills and interests garnered from their Lobby memberships into outside organizing or scholarly practices. Walcott notes that he has taken part in strikes at the University of California; Lobby member Sben Korsh helped organize the recent University of Michigan graduate student strikes; Andrew Daley, another Lobby member, left the architecture profession and went to work as an organizer for Architectural Workers United.

Training and equipping members to organize outside of the Lobby (perhaps less a platform, more a springboard) seems to be one of its greatest strengths, but internally, Lobby communications coordinator Daham Marapane locates, as does Lechêne, the organization’s effectiveness in its ability to mobilize members (or potential members) through storytelling—individuals coalescing around those watercooler conversations—at the local level.

“There are national efforts, like the Green New Deal campaign, and a unionization group that does meaningful organizer training [for people who want to organize their workplace]. Ultimately, I think anything tangible that the Lobby does—like facilitate social relationships between people—that creates the base conditions for anybody to become politically active or conscious of themselves as a worker happens on a local scale,” he explains. But while each piece of the Lobby puzzle might be defined this way, it is still unclear what each piece is building toward, what the final image on the top of the puzzle box is.

The lack of a clear mission and vision has resulted from protecting the Lobby’s ability to quickly change its activities depending on the values or priorities of its members. “The Lobby is conceived of for people to find a sense of agency in the organization. That’s why everything is a living document: the members that are organizing the Lobby are invited to make it their own,” explains Lechêne.

But this doesn’t particularly clarify what the Lobby does—it speaks instead to why the Lobby does. “We realize that there’s a lot of questions about the Lobby, and those questions take a long time to answer and require clicking around the web, attending some obscure Zoom meetings, and being introspective with one’s experience and asking the right questions,” says Lechêne. In September 2021, she began working with Daley on a long-term project to help clarify the Lobby’s positions and its history through video interviews with members. Titled “What’s Your Story,” the campaign, which will be completed in 2024, is designed to capture the organization’s pluralistic essence: many faces, many voices, many priorities.

It seems telling that a thirty-six-month endeavor is required to fully tell the Lobby’s story and illuminate its purpose and significance. It might be that the Lobby’s greatest weakness isn’t its irresolute focus between educating members and making actionable change. After all, individual members and working groups have managed to participate in public discussions about climate change, support movements for racial justice, and continue the long and difficult process of educating members in solidarity and organizing. Instead, its fallibility might be that knowing the Lobby requires being a part of the Lobby: participating in its democratic processes, shaping its next manifesto, adding to or subtracting from its myriad areas of concern. Thus, knowing the Lobby means changing its trajectory, making the future—not just of the organization, but of the profession itself—subject to uncertainty. Performing political work, including organizing individuals within a democratic ecosystem, requires a clear ideology undergirding all of its actions—not merely one voice, but one banner under which members can organize. Without a united ideology, many faces, many voices, and many priorities could sound less like a powerful chorus and more like cacophony.