▲ Residue as Resistance
designed with Katie Colford for Frida Escobedo’s studio at Yale University (2022)
Our project seeks to validate forms of domesticity, or “unproductive labor,”
that already takes place on construction sites. We do this by choreographing a
sequence of interventions at construction sites, centering care for bodies at work
and rest as acts of resistance.
The area around our site was
rezoned to accommodate tall
buildings for residential and
commercial use. But the specific zoning of the site - NCT-3
- has a particular benefit for what’s called neighborhood serving
businesses**, of which a
laundromat is one. This rezoning has led to a
construction boom in this neighborhood. This changes the
landscape of the city, not justbecause of the new buildings
but because of the temporary
structures that reshape the
experience of the city while they
are under construction.We took inspiration from
these structures - apparently temporary constructions that
nevertheless maintain a constant presence in the city - to use
their architectural language to generate new structures that
can support the domesticity of
construction sites.
**A neighborhood-serving business is one that by definition must remain small, serving the immediate neighborhood. We are interested in the way that this counters the tendency towards growth in this area.
The vulnerability of racialized, laboring bodies is heightened on construction sites, where such bodies are only considered an asset when laboring and become a liability at rest. Our project seeks to validate the forms of domesticity and unproductive labor—such as food, care, and maintenance—that take place on construction sites. We aim to do so by choreographing a sequence of interventions at construction sites in The Hub, in San Francisco, centering care for bodies at work and rest as acts of resistance. These interventions have several phases corresponding with phases of construction; the ambition is that this seemingly temporary project has a permanent “residue”—remaining on the site and attracting a new public after construction is finished.
We propose a workers’ center using the language of Gantt Charts, CD sets, and scaffolding that can occupy and move across construction sites, taking advantage of productive adjacencies of the specific site conditions to co-develop neighborhood-serving businesses.
“Workers absorb exceptional emotional and physical stress every day and, because they are undocumented, they’re on their own, with no workplace protections, no regulations,
and no collective bargaining. This is where worker centers come in. Worker centers were
established to formalize this very informal sector of day laboring.”
- Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
During the initial phase, the scaffolding used for the site excavation can extend to house places of repose for construction workers.
In the second phase, as the level 1 slab is placed, additional scaffolding is used to occupy the first floor and create several domestic zones. These zones each contain one wet wall and one dry wall, which anticipate the future plumbing walls in the building.
The third phase is what we are calling “residue,” which is the ambition that the project is not just temporary to serve the laborers on the site, but actually remains and attracts a new public after construction is finished, consisting of residents, people from the immediate neighborhood, and day laborers. So, in this case study, the residue is a laundromat and a union hall and lunch cafe, both of which qualify as neighborhood-serving businesses, tapping into the zoning privileges of NCT-3. So the washing machines from phase 2 remain and are extended to become a laundromat, which occupies part of the building’s commercial space. And the kitchen remains, becoming a cafe with lunch takeaway service delivered from the storefront window, with rest space for the adjacent union as well.