Formats of Care

“Thinking about the work we do as architects in relation to the visible and invisible forms of labor that buttress and circumscribe architecture is a thought indebted to feminist theory, to their noticing and troubling of labor as it relates to gender. Recentering our thinking around care ethics—and thinking about care itself as a form of labor deserving inquiry—allows us to attend to the questions of representation, labor, and ethics in architecture. Feminist theories of care ask how we can bring the values behind reproductive labor, such as caring, maintaining, repairing, and other forms of nontransactional exchange, into our frameworks of thought to be transported into action, to generate as well as encapsulate new relations in architecture.”
— Jia Yi Gu, essay contribution “Formats of Care” to Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice.