At the outset of my guest editorship, I was preoccupied with the limits and possibilities of the “open call.” More specifically, I was interested in how I might craft a call whose procedural elements—its intended audiences, channels, formats—would merit as much attention as the call’s content and eventual commissioned essays. I hoped to address “unlikely essayists through unlikely means”; to reach people, groups of people in particular, organizing (as) architectural workers, whose usual ways of communicating and working might not take the essay form; and to recast the notion of an author away from individuals and toward collectives.
Ultimately, the call became an “invitation,” an email sent to a number of young organizations; organizations still formulating what and how they communicate; organizations whose work, constructively addressing the harms of architectural production, would advance a set of timely concerns into an additional site—the pages of the journal. The invitation asked these groups to propose an object of review—be it a piece of writing, a set of regulations, a building, etc.—that would not only expand the journal’s existing repertoire of objects of review further into the realm of architectural labor but also advance, through critical analysis, the organization’s understanding of their own purpose and methodologies.
The invitation suggested that this object might help them ruminate on the query, “What are the words you do not have yet?,” from “The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself,” alongside other possible questions like: What is the significance of the object for your organization’s formation and direction? What absence or potential does it identify?
Centering dialogue, in/through an “unlikely” collaboration, between workers in the field—be they writers, editors, practitioners, collectives—the initial project intended to pair each organization with someone else to respond and review their chosen object. And yet, as it tends to, the dialogue unfolded unexpectedly. The Alternative Building Industry (ABI) Collective responded to the invitation, proposing to both select their object of review—the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians’ Bulletin—and write the essay themselves as a group. Through writing collectively as technical workers, across time and across the similarities and differences of a former technical worker-led coalition, the members of the ABI Collective hoped to process the political possibilities of their work.
This project remains unfinished, in part because it intends to not only produce an essay but to spur further unanticipated encounters between architectural workers. I entreat other organizations and other writers to adapt this model, as did the ABI Collective, towards your own objects of review and towards the words that you do not yet have. Inviting an interlocutor into the process of that review may well be what brings the words out.
Marisa Cortright is an architectural worker based in Zagreb, Croatia. She was the Avery Review’s 2023 Guest Editor. In 2021, she published a book of essays, “‘Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?’ Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe” with VIPER Gallery and in 2019, she published the article “Death to the Calling: A Job in Architecture is Still a Job” in Failed Architecture. She holds degrees in architectural and urban history from the Bartlett School of Architecture and Barnard College.