Editorial

Building Assemblages is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Art Omi within the context of its exhibition “Staging Area: A Barn Raising in Two Parts.” It features contributions by Erin Besler, Chandra Laborde, Jesse LeCavalier, Ann Lui, DK Osseo-Asare, and Luuk Smits.

A building is an assemblage. It’s held together by the hidden forces of capitalism that organize the world through commodity logics and ideologies of progress; by labor, parceled out into specialized tasks that underwrite architecture’s authority; by pedagogy, moving between the classroom and the construction site; and by bureaucratic devices—contracts, codes, permits—prescribing what can be built, how, and by whom.  

If, as Anna Tsing describes, assemblage is “an open-ended entanglement”—a fragile and precarious alignment of life, matter, and practice that is provisionally held together—then the types of assemblage that architecture typically acknowledges have too often remained superficial: aesthetic compositions of parts, fragments collaged into coherent wholes, narratives that perpetuate the myth of the single author and consolidate many into one.1  

The more consequential kinds of architectural assemblage aren’t as immediate, but are what actually sustains building. They operate across vast technical landscapes that are increasingly distributed and collective, like the gathering of trades maintained across oceans, the time between the quarry and the factory, or the negotiation between global supply chains and local activities. Yet architecture relegates these social and systemic dimensions to the realms of practice and industry.

Architecture often turns to invited forms of participation for validation and justification: charettes, public presentations, stakeholder input, participatory design, and community engagement. But invitation can often be mistaken for inclusion. Participatory processes may acknowledge people, but credit is often displaced and recognition is short lived. Visibility in decision-making tends to follow capital, not labor. Those whose work physically holds a building together are rarely recognized in its making. Architecture is continuously dependent on collaborations it dissociates from.

In the current political context, participation can feel like a contested ideal. When voter suppression bills move forward while civic engagement is championed, and when protest is constitutionally protected but increasingly criminalized, the invitation to participate is less an open call than the management of roles that are already in place. As Janet Kraynak has argued, participation in a technocratic society is always “dependent,” structured by predefined conditions and constraints. In this way, the participant is not autonomous but a subject in a tightly regulated environment.2 They’re not liberated but produced. 

Digital platforms have further reconfigured our participatory terrain. What was once imagined as open collaboration is now defined by data capture, algorithmic sorting, engagement accounting, and monetized feedback. Collective input has become structured, extracted, and surveilled—whether we choose to opt in or not. Within this context, collective forms of production must work in the increasingly narrow space between control and collaboration, between the logistical demands of getting things built and the social ideal of building together. 

If buildings are contingent and relational, perhaps we should be more interested in how they’re held together (or how they come apart), and what’s revealed in the process. Assemblages confront what ideas of totality usually eclipse: not just the forest but the trees. Seeing a building as an assemblage reveals the many dependencies behind its construction, and prompts architects to take responsibility for their consequences. And if we can attend to what holds a building together, we might just keep the world from falling apart even further.