This is a vertical studio combining students in their second and third year of the MArch program with students in the MAAD program, and those in the final semesters of the undergraduate architecture program. The students may choose from a diverse range of options of study proposed by different faculty members. In general the studio options are grounded in a conceptual basis that invites theoretical and/or programmatic innovation. These studio options may vary from year to year.The world of work has changed a lot recently. As the American economy has shifted from industrial to service and knowledge economies, we’ve seen stable, salaried jobs give way to more flexible employment, often as freelance or gig labor. This new economy offers its workers creativity, mobility, and self-determination, but with the added burden of financial precarity, exhaustion, and anxiety. The pandemic brought this all into sharp relief, exposing the public’s dependence on essential (but undercompensated) labor and raising questions about work/life balance as remote work brought mixed results and millions voluntarily left the workforce in the “Great Resignation.” As new as these dynamics are, however, they also resonate with long-standing questions about work. How might work restructure class hierarchy, resist normative gender roles, and legitimize informal labor? How can workers be empowered through ownership of the means of production? How can knowledge and the products of our labor be shared, and what kinds of communities form in the process?Students in this studio will be asked to rethink the meaning, ethics, and culture of work. We will focus on one industry–the baking, distribution, and enjoyment of bread. From vendor stalls to GrubHub and the Bimbo bread empire, this industry will allow us to explore diverse forms of ownership; creative forms of solidarity around class, race, and gender; worker creativity and agency; and community formation. How can we rethink work? This studio is based on the belief that we can only meaningfully alter work by addressing systemic economic and social conditions that unfold in urban spaces. Working individually or in pairs, students will conduct cultural research, urban analysis and design at the scale of one urban block in San Francisco, ultimately to design diverse spaces across the bread industry. For example, to rethink work-life balance, you might design a new kind of threshold between housing and retail, extending private kitchens into a community kitchen. To amplify social bonds across a neighborhood, you might reorient privately-owned buildings around a new “third space” centered around a communal bread oven. Or to create a worker-owned cooperative, you might flatten hierarchies and distinctions between management, service, and manufacturing facilities. In other words: to rethink work, we will rework cities. This semester, we will adopt retrofitting and adaptive reuse techniques to alter, subtract from, and add to multiple, existing buildings across each urban block. We will edit existing urban fabric instead of building anew. Retrofitting and adaptive reuse are often celebrated for their preservation of cultural heritage and their reduced environmental footprint. Additionally, and most importantly for our studio, they allow us, as designers, to consider how society changes. We will focus on sites across San Francisco with significant legacies of labor and work from of their previous use. In 1890’s Haight Street, for example, small businesses clustered around ornate homes where domestic workers performed housework in the basement. In the 1900’s Tenderloin, residents of single-room occupancy buildings used diners and saloons as their living rooms. In 1950s South San Francisco, a large-span warehouse next to suburban worker’s housing supported mass-scale production. And in 1990s SOMA, open-office floor plans fostered collaboration among marketing creatives. Today, these spaces host artisanal bakeries, malls, restaurant incubators, tech company headquarters, and multinational corporations. What can they support in the future? By employing very tangible architectural moves–by subdividing, encasing, or recombining these spaces–we can envision inventive program typologies and alternate narratives, and thus enable a new ethic of work to emerge.

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