ABSTRACT
The Subject of this Object
[A]rchitectural work is performed by people who shape and are shaped by their labor. As such, the essays emphasize work as a function of subjectivity. In starting with architectural labor-as-design essays and moving to those of architecture-as-institutionalized-labor, it pulls design-oriented readers into realms that might initially seem ‘too professional’ but actually speak to their personal everyday lives.
In this afterword, I aim to exit this book, as near as possible, to where its author began, with “Detail: The Subject of the Object.” This was the title of the first essay, here called “Craft and Design,” when it was first published in 2000. It is the only essay in this book to have been written prior to 2014, and it is an important one because it sets out—prefigures—by some time, a project that has quite clearly occupied Deamer’s thought and being in these intervening years, and about which she has continued to write sometime after that anticipatory essay.
