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The anthropology of a smoke-
filled room: Ethnography and 
the human at oma
  

Graham Owen

INTRODUCTION

This paper examines ethnographic studies 
of  design processes within the celebrated Dutch 
architectural practice OMA, studies undertaken 
from an Actor Network Theory perspective as 
promulgated by the anthropologist-philosopher 
Bruno Latour. Considering the participant-
observation work of  Yaneva, the article contrasts 
the relative absence of  discussion of  issues of  labour 
and working conditions with their prominence in 
recent work by observers of  architectural education 
and by activist academics such as Deamer, Tombesi 
and Wilson. Why might this ethnographic study 
have overlooked or de-emphasised these aspects 
of  human relations at OMA? With critiques of  
Latourian and ANT-based approaches in mind, 
the paper asks if  this is an aversion characteristic 
of  such perspectives, with their defining self-
distinction from critical theory. This paper argues 
for at least four reasons that these studies of  OMA 
do not tackle the issues of  architectural “labour 
in the making,” reasons that are respectively 
ethnographic, methodological, epistemological, and 
ontological. The article draws upon the reflections 
of  Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie on the evolution 
of  “Studio Studies” from Latour et al.’s laboratory 
studies. From a philosophical point of  view, it 
proposes potential extensions of  studio studies to 
foreground labour conditions, which can be seen as 
central to design processes in studios such as OMA.



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IN MEDIAS RES

The year is 1991. The scene is a two-bedroom apartment in 
Rotterdam. I am visiting former classmates working at Rem Koolhaas’s 
Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Five OMA employees share the 
flat. My friends, a couple with some means, have one of  the bedrooms. 
The rest are, in effect, camping. One, from the States, has a thin mattress 
on the floor. All his possessions are scattered around it, like those of  a 
homeless person under a bridge. I have come to visit OMA, but also to see 
significant Modernist works in Rotterdam. But my friends do not know 
where those are. All they know is the route between the apartment and the 
office, and the cafes where they eat breakfast and dinner when they can.

When I arrive, trouble is brewing. No one, other than Rem and the 
three associates, has been paid for two months, say the junior architectural 
staff. Simply, no cheques have appeared. A letter of  protest is being 
drafted: the staff, after all, do have bills of  their own to pay. And the pay, 
when it has come, is not great: 14,000 pounds a year, or a dollar figure in 
the 20,000s. A typical work week consists of  70 to 100 hours. The average 
time to burnout and departure for a staff  person at their level, they report, 
is two to three months, although my classmates, with more personal 
resources at their disposal, have lasted longer. The staff  are international, 
but many have come to Rotterdam without work permits, under the radar; 
they receive no employment benefits.1

Over time, did success change OMA? Did the practice become able to 
offer working conditions befitting trained professionals, recognizing that 
they too have lives to lead outside the office, obligations to others to fulfil? 
Anecdotal but firsthand web reports from 2015 suggest otherwise. One 
former employee of  less than a year describes a spirit of  camaraderie on 
all-nighters, but nonetheless acknowledges “Extremely long hours–Below 
market pay–Very high turnover rate,” and remarks that “if  everyone is 
going to be there for 15-18 hours a day, maybe include more than just a 
coffee machine and microwave in the kitchen”.

Another former staff  member recognizes the attraction of  an OMA 
stint on one’s resume, and reports receiving benefits, but confirms a 

“[r]uthless working environment. Management really doesn’t care if  
you don’t sleep for days in a row as long as deadlines are met. Working 
hours are ridiculously long. You basically never stop working, specially 
[sic] if  you are an intern or junior architect. Forget about having anything 
resembling a life outside of  the office, the office is open 24/7. Office 
culture is bad. Lots of  dissatisfied employees. Incredibly disorganized 



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project environment. Very high rate of  turnover 
[…] most employees who [have been] here for 
a long time have been raised in these types of  
environments so they ‘don’t know any better’ and 
have little ‘real world’ experience.” A third former 
staff  member observes more succinctly: “No sleep 
ever. Tense environment. And no sleep ever. Ever. 
Ever.”2

While the review comments on OMA are 
among the more extreme, such concerns are not 
unfamiliar among architectural firms that seek 
celebrity status within the discipline, indicating a 
set of  labour issues endemic to culturally ambitious 
“starchitect” practices and certainly worthy of  
investigation.

ANT AND ARCHITECTURE, LABORATORY AND LABOUR

To think back today to the mattress of  the 1991 
OMA employee, to his belongings scattered on the 
floor around him, is to be reminded all too easily 
of  other more recent sleeping accommodations 
associated with 
the production of  
culturally ambitious 
architecture. Those 
in the Rotterdam 
apartment were 
admittedly less 
dire and more self-
chosen than those 
of  migrant workers 
with which we are 
now familiar in 
the Emirates, as 
evidenced by the 
work of  investigative journalists and activist groups,3  
but as those activists have argued, the two instances 
are connected by a disciplinary complex of  issues as 
regards architectural labour. These issues, however, 

FIGURE 1: DUBAI MIGRANT 

WORKERS’ SLEEPING 

ACCOMMODATIONS



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do not appear to have surfaced in the ethnographic studies of  OMA’s 
practice, despite their focus on the daily practices of  design as a necessary 
component in the understanding of  architecture.

Trained as a philosopher and anthropologist, Bruno Latour has 
brought influential attention to design in the more recent decades of  his 
career.4 Drawing upon his applications of  Actor Network Theory and the 
concept of  the Thing in studies of  science and technology, Latour seeks, 
as Ariane Lourie Harrison observes, to challenge architecture

to revise its conception of  buildings as static objects, to understand that 
buildings develop agency as sociotechnical systems, through negotiations among 
people, institutions, and technologies. […] Any entity (human or non-human, 
individual or organization, architecture) can be conceptualized as both an actor 
and a network, in actor-network theory, its constitutive actions redistributed 
accordingly. […] By this approach, it becomes more difficult (and less productive) 
to refer to an entity as a discrete or isolated object. […] All phenomena are 
networked assemblages of  actors, each capable of  reconfiguring the network, 
affecting each of  its constituents. Latour proposes the term Thing to describe 
these socio-technical assemblages that make up the bulk of  our environment and 
experience, and to distinguish his hybrid schema from the more rigid, modernist 
categorization of  phenomena into subject and object. An ANT approach to 
architecture highlights the discrepancy between the manifest Thingness of  
a building (multiple constituencies, overlapping material, technological and 
discursive systems, inherent spaces of  controversy) and its representation as a 
rendered object (static, set serenely in Cartesian space). […] [A]n ANT’s view 
would suggest that buildings be represented as dynamic ‘spaces of  controversy’.5

Latour and Yaneva remark that, “It is paradoxical to say that a building 
is always a ‘thing’ that is, etymologically, a contested gathering of  many 
conflicting demands and yet, having said that, to be utterly unable to draw 
those conflicting claims in the same space as what they are conflicting 
about.”6 Latour himself  asserts that, “What is needed instead are tools 
that capture what have always been the hidden practices of  modernist 
innovations: objects have always been projects.”7 Particularly through 
his students and collaborators, he has encouraged close studies of  the 
processes of  the studio. Transposing their techniques from Latour’s earlier 
studies of  laboratory life, and seeking to understand “architecture in the 
making,” his colleagues have undertaken ethnographic enquiries into the 
process by which architecture comes into being, and have challenged 
conventional interpretations. In philosophical terms, these studies 
constitute a search for, if  not “truth,” a more accurate understanding of  
the construction of  knowledge and the relationship between architecture 



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and the social. In examining the respective roles 
of  human and non-human actors, this work alters 
normative assumptions about the extent of  human 
agency.

Albena Yaneva has made notable contributions 
to this 
e n d e a v o u r . 
She claims that 
a r c h i t e c t u r e 
cannot be 
understood by 
conven t iona l 
narratives of  its 
production and 
reception. In 
essays such as 
“Give Me a Gun 
and I will Make 
All Buildings 
Move,” of  2008, 
by Latour and 
Yaneva, they seek to reverse Etienne Jules Marey’s 
ambition to build a “photographic gun” that would 
freeze the stages of  a bird’s action in flight.  Instead, 
they seek a theoretical device to reveal “that a 
building is not a static object but a moving project, 
and that even once it is has been built, it ages, it is 
transformed by its users, modified by all of  what 
happens inside and outside, and that it will pass or 
be renovated, adulterated and transformed beyond 
recognition.”8

In the process of  this argument’s elaboration, 
theorists as notable as George Baird, Neil Leach, 
Ian Borden, and Jane Rendell are set aside as 
representative of  superseded paradigms of  
interpretation:  

Everyone knows that a building is a contested territory 
and that it cannot be reduced to what is and what it 
means, as architectural theory has traditionally done. 
[…] As long as we have not found a way to do for 

FIGURE 2: BRUNO LATOUR 

LECTURING AT HARVARD 

UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL 

OF DESIGN.  2009. 



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buildings the reverse of  what Marey managed to do for the flights of  birds and 
the gaits of  horses, architectural theory will be a rather parasitical endeavor that 
adds historical, philosophical, stylistic, and semiotic ‘dimensions’ to a conception 
of  buildings that has not moved an inch.9

In writing of  her observations of  OMA, Yaneva insists that, “You can still 
appreciate a building, like or dislike it, praise or dismiss it, without knowing 
anything about the design experience that made it happen; but you cannot 
understand a building without taking these design experiences into account.”10 
Thus Yaneva asserts that there is a deep and wide knowledge (attainable 
by both outsiders and, ultimately, by those involved in its production) of  
a work of  architecture that takes into account the extensive processes 
and controversies through which it has come into physical being; and, 
indeed, she is asserting that the work of  architecture is that assemblage 
of  processes, controversies, actors… Without that recognition, Yaneva 
is claiming, there is no adequate knowledge of  architecture; rather, only 
a superficial appreciation or casual evaluation. But given these substantial 
epistemological claims, it is surprising—even though Yaneva picks up 
clues in the texts under consideration here—that issues of  employment 
ethics, conditions of  work, and their rationalization by staff  members, do 
not surface as foregrounded parts of  the assemblage.

Yaneva’s work opens up in detail the day-to-day working practices 
in an ambitious and influential practice such as OMA. Her painstaking 
observation of  the role of  physical models and digital representations 
in their process of  design undoubtedly offers valuable insights. Years 
of  fieldwork, the demanding tasks of  collation of  notes, transcripts 
and correspondence, and the continued research enterprise through the 
University of  Manchester are worthy of  respect, and the writings of  both 
Yaneva and Latour have become increasingly evident in architectural 
discourse in recent years. But as others have observed,11 Latour’s 
aggressive promotion of  paradigm shifts and his inclination to use the 
language of  warfare in seeking to colonize and dominate intellectual fields 
suggest that some circumspection is warranted in assessing these claims 
regarding the formation and adequacy of  knowledge (at least scholarly and 
practitioners’ knowledge) of  architecture. And in this particular instance, 
that circumspection needs to address the downplaying of  those aspects of  
studio life that pertain to the ethics of  architectural labour.



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THE VOLUNTARY PRISONERS OF OMA

In the early 2000s, Yaneva undertook research 
as a participant observer within OMA. The results 
of  this ethnographic observation were published 
as Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An 
Ethnography of  Design (2009), hereafter Made by 
OMA, and The Making of  a Building:  A Pragmatist 
Approach to Architecture, also of  2009. In her 
interviews excerpted in Made by OMA, in particular, 
she confirms that there is an “overproduction” of  
design ideas in blue foam model form; hears of  staff  
being asked to 
“put a [design] 
p r o p o s a l 
on the table 
overnight;”12 and 
hears another say, 
“[S]ometimes I 
don’t have dinner 
for like two 
days, because I 
work during the 
evenings. [AY:] 
[T]hat’s how 
everybody works 
here? [Abji:] Yes, 
we even work in 
the weekends, 
but it’s OK, it’s 
a good atmosphere.”13 In The Making of  a Building, 
Yaneva observes that:

at the end of  the ordinary working day (around six 
o’clock), computer music announces the beginning 
of  ‘the evening shift’. Architects start buzzing 
with excitement following the departure of  all the 
administrative staff. They find themselves alone with 
specific design tasks to complete surrounded by the 
sounds of  the same music they have listened to during 
the day in the privacy of  their earphones. Now the 
music is given the opportunity to contribute to the office 

FIGURE 3: OMA “NEWHITNEY” 

SELECTED STUDY MODELS



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hubbub, and to amplify the excitement. The architects share a pizza around the 
table of  models […] [S]ometimes a new model arrives with the sunrise, more 
updated drawings are printed out and set up on the table just as the city of  
Rotterdam is about to wake up.14

The young architects recover from their nocturnal labours with “one of  
those strong OMA coffees that really wake you up even if  you have only 
slept for a couple of  hours.”15

Yaneva remarks that, because designs for terminated projects are 
sometimes resurrected in later commissions, “the sleepless nights spent 
in the company of  a foam-cutter, a computer and a couple of  fellow 
architects from the same [project team] have not been in vain.”16 The 
blue foam “smells,” she notes, when cut on the hot-wire cutter17—and it 
does so because it is releasing toxic fumes—but no one, we might note, 
seems concerned with the health risks to the staff. Indeed, the demands of  
OMA’s working conditions seem to serve Yaneva’s larger claims regarding 
knowledge and reality:

“The fact that there is no urban life ‘out there’, far from the studio, has been 
demonstrated by all those who never visited the Whitney [Museum] site in 
Manhattan but kept on designing for it, by all those who never learned Spanish 
but built in Cordoba, and by those who never borrowed a book from the Seattle 
Library but reinvented the library typology. Designers never go ‘outside’; there is 
no outside. […] The studio constitutes their world. […] OMA and Koolhaas 
treat the studio as the world.”18

One may well ask whether these descriptions and assessments constitute 
an apologia for the conditions observed, or whether they serve instead to 
expose the conditions of  labour without direct accusation or criticism? 
The tone of  the description of  the musical all-nighter is positive, even 
approbatory, conveying the student-like “excitement” of  the participants 
without evident irony; generally speaking, irony is by no means absent 
from the Latourian rhetorical repertoire, but conspicuous by its absence 
in this instance.

REFLEXIVITY 

Yet Yaneva’s observations, undertaken in the early 2000s, overlap 
with a period of  notable reflexivity within architectural practice and 
education, particularly within the North American context. Brought to 
professional attention in the publication Progressive Architecture in the early 
1990s,19 given intensity by the accidental deaths of  several students after 



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multiple all-night work sessions, exposed to the 
wider academy and the public at large through 
further journalistic exposés,20 concerns with the 
adverse effects of  the traditions of  the design 
discipline and profession were confronted in The 
Redesign of  Studio Culture, of  2002.21 In these and 
subsequent reports, the reproductive cycle between 
the architectural academy’s tradition of  do-or-
die work practices and a similar culture in the 
profession, particularly among its most culturally 
ambitious members—with all the implications for 
work-life balance, health, and the perceived value 
of  architects’ time—was indicted. But traditions 
die hard, bound up as they are with identity, and 
debates over such concerns and indictments have 
continued internationally to the present day.22

Philipp Oswalt and Matthias Hollwich, who 
between them had experienced working at OMA 
from 1996 to at least 2000, published in that latter 
year “OMA at work,” an account of  that experience. 
Oswalt, editor of  the journal Arch+ from 1988 
to 1994, evidently brought a critic’s eye to that 
endeavour. They describe and explicate in detail 
the processes of  the office, and it is worth quoting 
these accounts at some length for comparison 
with Yaneva’s observations and the more recent 
ex-employee reports online:  

An important precondition is that the majority of  
the employees are quite inexperienced and young. Not 
only do they work unbelievably hard for relatively 
little money and thereby make it possible to pursue 
thousands of  ideas, to try them out and reject them, 
which no client would ever want or be able to pay 
for, but more importantly, it is the naivety with which 
they approach the tasks they are set. Ignorant of  
how the problem would normally be solved, they can 
experiment with a childlike lack of  inhibitions and 
thus develop new ideas. […]

Rem’s instructions are mostly so vague, his presence 
over long periods only intermittent and his distance 



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to the design team so great that some employees opine that he is not really a 
designer at all, it is his staff  who produce the architecture. […] [But t]he 
distance between the team of  designers and Rem leads to great flexibility: at any 
time, the direction can be changed unexpectedly, and the more doggedly the design 
team sticks to a solution or a problem, the likelier it is that this will happen. 
The work of  days or weeks can be discarded in the space of  a minute without 
much discussion. […] [O]ther members of  staff  are occasionally drawn in at 
short notice. […] Less in awe of  that which has already been achieved, the staff  
who have been uninvolved until then foil the intentions of  their colleagues, which 
makes it at the same time much easier to develop substantial new ideas.

Basically, almost any form of  destabilization appears to be welcome. It is rather 
unlikely that the team that has begun a project takes it through to realization. 
It may happen that a team, having worked through the night and an interim 
presentation, comes into the office to find that the workplaces have been seized 
by colleagues and the team has to find new ones. The concept of  private property 
does not exist in the office anyway: every drafting pen, every adhesive film, every 
geodesic triangle that you have with difficulty acquired for yourself  can disappear 
again within days or hours. And it would not surprise anyone in the office if  he or 
she were told that they had to fly that very day to Hanoi for several days because 
of  a project. One hundred per cent availability is implicitly demanded–24 hours 
a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with the exception of  Christmas. […]

It can happen that just a few hours before a presentation or a deadline Rem 
wants to change the design, the model, the drawings or collages. Then arguments 
of  time or costs are of  no import, to the despair of  the financial director and the 
curses of  the staff  who have to change everything at the last moment.23

As Oswalt and Hollwich suggest, these accounts describe, by comparison 
with conventional professional practices, a deliberately unstable and 
chaotic situation, one in which “human resources management” evidently 
occurs in part by placing staff  and their design ideas in a quasi-Darwinian 
struggle for recognition, with status, approval, and reliable communication 
and decision-making constantly undermined; the possibility of  predatory 
internal competition apparently tacitly condoned. Billable hours (those 
hours of  work charged to the fee that the client has agreed to pay) are 
clearly far exceeded by actual hours expended and, from that conventional 
professional perspective, the financial viability of  such an office is enabled 
only by the absence of  overtime pay, an intense stigma attached to 
time-in-lieu (paid time off  equivalent to unpaid overtime worked), and 
significantly below-par compensation for the majority of  staff.24 Drawn in, 
it seems, by the cachet of  being known to have worked for OMA, and by 
its apparent value—if  not in monetary terms—in one’s portfolio and CV 



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(especially given Koolhaas’s international renown 
and influence), young staff  in particular appear 
to find themselves in an exploitative situation.  
Mutinies, by the time that Oswalt and Hollwich are 
working there (and Yaneva is about to undertake 
her observations), seem less likely, as some of  the 
“voluntary prisoners”25 turn out to be the warders 
of  their co-workers: in a passage of  sharply ironic 
tone, Oswalt and Hollwich note that, “The office is 
characterized more by an American mentality than 
a European one: produce, criticize and don’t ask for 
reasons, don’t argue, show unlimited commitment, 
don’t expect any solidarity from your colleagues – 
don’t worry, be happy. It is not by chance that almost 
all the project leaders come from the USA.”26

Yaneva cites Oswalt and Hollwich’s article in The 
Making of  a Building, but takes pains to distinguish 
her intentions from theirs: “My aim is not to 
present the habits of  the office and the general 
rules of  their design philosophy […] but to make 
the reader hear the architects’ voices, to follow the 
reactions and discussions of  architects, engineers, 
stage designers, cost evaluators, curators and artists, 
to see them draw, build models, negotiate the costs 
of  a building, and design the NEWhitney.”27

RESISTANCE

In her participant observations, Yaneva adheres 
to Latour’s exhortation to “follow the actors” (both 
human and non-human), and to describe rather than 
seek to explain, in order to observe “architecture 
in the making.” Such an approach contrasts with 
recent investigations into attitudes in the discipline 
and profession to work and labour, regarding the 
fabrication of  buildings but also regarding the 
production of  design. These include the studies 
undertaken by Peggy Deamer, Paolo Tombesi et 
al.;28 by the artists’ activist group Gulf  Labor with 
Andrew Ross on the exploitation of  migrant labour 

produce, 
criticize and 

don’t ask 
for reasons, 
don’t argue, 

show unlimited 
commitment, 

don’t expect 
any solidarity 

from your 
colleagues – 

don’t worry, be 
happy.

“

”



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for cultural projects in the Gulf  States;29 and by Mabel Wilson and others 
of  the academic activist group Who Builds Your Architecture,30 who have 
argued that the conditions under which architecture is produced are an 
integral part of  its ethical dimension. It might be asserted that such studies 
revisit Marxist concerns characteristic of  the 1970s, and indeed Deamer’s 
edited collection The Architect as Worker opens its “Foreword” with a 
quotation from Marx distinguishing between mental and material labour. 
Nonetheless, the contributors are at pains to identify the differences at 
play in our times: Joan Ockman, in that same “Foreword,” acknowledges 
that:

intellectual labor has become increasingly arduous and stressful today by virtue 
of  the expansion of  the workday to the 24/7 cycle, ‘flexible’ hiring and firing 
policies, insecurity with respect to healthcare and other social benefits, and–
in the particular case of  young, highly educated architects–low compensation 
and unpaid internships. […] These problems are compounded today in the 
context of  a disorganized global ‘precariat’ that has to market its own skills as 
‘entrepreneur of  itself.’ 31

To these formulations we might add other dimensions of  the neoliberal 
dispensation: the virtuous social roles ascribed to “creativity” as 
“innovation,” construed as bringing economic liberation to cities (through 
the creative class itself; the Bilbao Guggenheim, etc.) and individuals 
(liberated, by means of  digital platforms, from the need of  nanny-
employer conditions such as benefits, unions, workplace rights) alike. 
And, indeed, in her online summary of  Made by OMA, Yaneva declares 
her intention to show “how innovation permeates design practice, how 
everyday techniques and workaday choices set new standards for buildings 
and urban phenomena.”32 In contrast, as Manuel Shvartzberg confirms, 
under that neoliberal dispensation, “In material terms, creativity is the 
measure by which workers will cannibalize themselves for the sake of  the 
company – extreme work hours, no parallel commitments (love, friendship, 
community, etcetera).”33

OMA’s location in this complex of  concerns has in part to do with 
the firm’s status as an acknowledged generator of  innovation in those 
terms (the Seattle Public Library’s impact on library usage and the city’s 
economy, for example), and in part with its principals’ and former staff ’s 
status in the world of  architectural education (Koolhaas’s appointment at 
the Harvard Graduate School of  Design, for instance). If  the university—
in spite of  the ongoing attempts to reconstruct it in the image of  
neoliberal values—is still expected by some to engage in challenges to 
the ideological conventions of  its time, then the prominent architectural 



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practitioner-teacher might well be expected to use 
their affiliation with the academy not simply as a 
source of  clients and junior staff, but rather as a 
venue to be openly reflexive about the conditions 
of  their own professional practices. As Dariel Cobb 
observes:

Academics now need to do more: examine the 
labor rights of  architecture workers and the labor 
practices of  architecture offices within a larger 
social history. Having personally experienced the 
unmitigated drudgery of  long hours and low pay 
within a purportedly elite professional architecture 
setting, I think it’s time to move workers’ whispers 
and complaints from blogs and trade publications to 
the arena of  sustained critical discourse. Generations 
have passed during which such engagement would 
have been vilified, only to arrive at this ripe political 
moment for reexamination.34

With such initiatives in mind, could one suggest that 
an additional path of  observation might have been 
undertaken in the ethnography of  OMA; namely, 
Who Builds Your Foam Models?

THE METHODS OF SISYPHUS

A further objection might be raised, however, 
that many culturally ambitious architects have 
obtained from their staff, by one means or another, 
long hours at low pay, and that this is indicative 
of  the low value placed by society at large upon 
architectural work. Quality of  ideas and execution 
takes more time (so the argument goes) and 
therefore costs more than most clients are willing 
to pay; thus, in this noble shared cause, the shortfall 
in income has to be passed on to staff. In other 
words, inadequacy of  compensation is a condition 
forced upon the practice as a whole for those who 
set their ambitions high; and (by implication of  this 
argument) the moral issue is shifted to the societal 
level. Might this constitute a rationale for Yaneva’s 

Who Builds 
Your Foam 

Models?
“

”



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overlooking of  the labour issues at OMA? It seems unlikely, given this 
invocation of  Latour in Making: “society has to be composed, made up, 
constructed, established, maintained, and assembled. It is no longer to 
be taken as the hidden source of  causality which could be mobilized 
so as to account for the existence and stability of  some other action or 
behaviour.”35

Oswalt and Hollwich, though, in their laconic recounting of  the 
particularities of  OMA’s design method, offer apologias for some of  its 
more extreme demands:

Settling on a solution, or to put it more precisely, filtering out a solution from the 
pool of  ideas, takes place very late; the alternatives are developed in parallel over 
a long period. The decision is postponed as long as possible, because it always 
implies the loss of  other possibilities, limitation. […]

When you are involved in this process, you can sometimes despair over the 
inefficiency and the absence of  conventional professionalism. But in the end, 
you are obliged to concede that the non-linearity of  the design process, the lack 
of  routine or an established canon of  methods or solutions are the basis for the 
quality of  the office’s work. […] It is characteristic that Rem assesses a project 
sceptically precisely when it has developed continuously without conflicts, crises 
and interruptions. […] It is the ambition of  the office to structure the design 
process in such a way that the maximum number of  influences, criteria and ideas 
are included. […]

It is indicative that innumerable alternatives will also be investigated when an 
obviously brilliant idea has already been come up with: although Rem had already 
had the basic idea at the beginning of  the IIT project [the McCormick Tribune 
Campus Center of  1997-2003], all the same he kept the team investigating and 
developing completely different ideas for weeks. As none of  the newly developed 
options was any more convincing, though, the idea that was there from the start 
was taken up again.

This Sisyphus-like way of  proceeding may appear totally inefficient, but it proves 
to be extremely fruitful.36

RATIONALISATION

Sisyphean indeed; yet as Yaneva’s interviewees demonstrate, OMA’s 
young staff  nonetheless rationalise their intense and difficult working 
conditions. In the OMA publication Content (cited by Yaneva as one of  her 
guides to the office’s practice),37 staff  chosen to collaborate with Herzog 
and de Meuron at their Basel office comment ironically but disparagingly 



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on the more civilised and relaxed conditions they 
see there: “We don’t have time for long weekends, 
lunches, coffee breaks, and short workdays. We 
want to work hard, do things fast, have no free 
time, learn, and move on. In Basel, people do not 
move on; they have good lives.”38 Contrary to the 
Studio Culture studies’ alarm at inadequate rest and 
poor eating habits, the OMA staff  writing in Content 
“dread the hour lunch break, during which we have 
to roam the boring streets of  Basel in search of  
expensive, tasteless food. Thank God for globalism, 
Mr Wong and McDonald’s.”39

Angela McRobbie, in her studies of  the 
individualization of  precarious labour in the culture 
industries, observes that:

One of  the most perplexing issues facing social 
scientists and policy-makers is the sheer enthusiasm 
on the part of  young people for ‘creative’ jobs they 
know in advance will require long stints of  working, 
often through the night, for relatively low pay. Such 
enthusiasm is unabated even for those who are well-
versed in the politics of  precaritie, and this opens 
up important questions for the future of  work.  In 
particular, does this ethos confirm Michel Foucault’s 
oft-quoted insight that power works most effectively 
when it is tied to the promise of  pleasure and self-
reward, in this case through ‘creative enterprise’ or 
‘passionate work’?40

In the example from Content, there is an 
identification of  the working conditions as a kind 
of  rite of  passage, indicative of  the seriousness 
and substance of  the endeavour. Some might 
suggest that there is an internalization of  abuse as 
a badge of  courage, as a confirmation of  the most 
serious commitment to the field; but also that this 
internalization constitutes an essential mechanism 
of  social reproduction, a process by which a prized 
identity is handed down from one generation to 
another.



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William Wiles, reporting in 2011, assembles a further set of  telling 
rationalisations by the firm’s managers themselves:

OMA’s breakneck internal pace comes at a cost – the company has an extremely 
high turnover of  staff, as implied by the number of  independent practices that 
spin out of  it; high numbers of  burnouts are also rumoured. Incredibly, this high 
turnover is company policy. ‘We want to refresh and renew our organisation on a 
permanent basis,’ says [Victor] Van der Chijs [managing partner]. ‘We really 
want every year at least 25 percent of  our people to be new. And we want them 
to be young, bright people. The idea [is] [...] that we really need those people to 
feed in new ideas, make sure that OMA stays relevant and really understands 
what is going on.’

Many companies would balk at this kind of  turnover. A high churn rate 
of  staff  is very costly–time is tied up training, knowledge and experience is 
continually leaking away, good practices can be hard to maintain.  […] ‘Most 
people know that when they join OMA, that they work on average for three 
years here and after that, they leave,’ says Van der Chijs. ‘It’s already in their 
minds.’ […]

Looked at with these expectations in mind–people join OMA knowing they are 
in for an intensive but short and valuable experience that will leave them ready 
to start up on their own–and the office starts to look more like an elite college 
than an architecture and research firm. ‘The environment that is generated from 
the projects here is an incredibly strong learning experience, a fast-track learning 
experience,’ says [project architect Mark] Veldman. ‘You learn much more here 
in a year than you would learn in a university.’ 41

In these passages, the upper echelons of  OMA invoke familiar neoliberal 
shibboleths as justifications of  the office’s work practices: the casualisation 
of  labour;42 employment as a springboard to personal entrepreneurship 
(every short-term employee is, regardless of  their prior socio-economic 
status, potentially the next Bjarke Ingels, Jeanne Gang, or Joshua Prince-
Ramus); and the value of  experience in the firm as a form of  education 
(implicitly justifying low compensation). The nature of  OMA’s design 
method, in which many non-linear directions are explored and physical-
model options generated—almost as if  a process of  emergence were 
being set in motion out of  multiplicity—is evidently inextricably tied 
to high demands on low-cost labour (of  which there has been a reliable 
supply, given the practice’s ties to academies). Thus an understanding of  
OMA’s approach to design would seem to necessitate attention to this 
relationship to labour. Such a situation might even have been considered 
from the Actor Network Theory (ANT) perspective as worthy of  study 



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as a controversy in itself: “Design,” after all, “has 
a proactive power to incite public controversies 
over thorny issues and generate social effects.”43 
But in the case of  OMA’s labour practices, these 
opportunities appear not to have been taken up.

ETHICS AND AGENCY, CRITIQUE AND DESCRIPTION

Why might this ethnographic study have 
overlooked or de-emphasised these aspects of  
human relations at OMA? What are the constraints 
on this project of  philosophical anthropology? Is the 
Latourian approach inherently unable to tackle such 
a topic, or are there affordances 
that could adjust its scope? 
Variations in interpretations 
of  that method’s assumptions 
suggest that it has versions that 
are more or less circumscribed. 
Greater circumscription does not 
appear to result from an inherent 
limitation of  pragmatist ethics 
per se, which after all seeks to 
adapt its practices on the basis 
of  experience, unless one equates 
pragmatism in this instance with a 
cynical realism, in the Sloterdijkian 
sense,44 on Koolhaas’ part (a 
valid concern, given Latour’s 
enthusiasm for Sloterdijk as a 
philosopher of  design).45 Latour’s 
ethics, construed by Gabriel 
Hankins in the context of  
literature, occurs in the “nonmodern” condition, 
where nature, society and culture no longer exhibit 
the categorical distinctions presumed in the 
Modern. “Action,” observes Hankins, “becomes 
distributed between actants [human and non-
human] that coproduce the action rather than 
figured as a subject acting on its object.”46 He quotes 
Latour:  “An ‘actor’ in the hyphenated expression 

FIGURE 4: WBYA PROPOSED REVI-

SIONS TO AIA CODE OF ETHICS P.1



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actor-network is not the source of  an action but the moving target of  
a vast array of  entities swarming towards it.”47 “A Latourian account,” 
continues Hankins, “remains uncertain as to location of  agency.”48

Such a situation, and the emphasis on description over explanation, 
has led to the charge for ANT of  descriptivism. Whittle and Spicer assert 
that:

by producing descriptions of  existing networks of  actors in an apparently neutral, 
apolitical manner, ANT actually reinforces the state of  affairs that it describes. 
Indeed, Law (2003) recognizes the possibility that ANT simply reproduces 
rather than challenges the hegemony of  the networks they describe. […] ANT 
remains indifferent about the specific means through which power is established 
(Amsterdamska, 1990).  For instance, coercion, corruption and intimidation 
are not distinguished on any normative basis from persuasion, negotiation and 
reward. […] ANT brings with it a tendency to legitimize hegemonic power 
relations, ignore relations of  oppression, and sidestep any normative assessment 
of  existing organizational forms.49

In an essay published in 2004, Latour famously asked, “Why Has Critique 
Run out of  Steam?”50 His purpose was to distinguish the methods he 
was propounding from those of  critical theory, which he felt had fallen 
prey to popularization and misapplication. Extending this position in a 
debate of  2011 with Neil Brenner and others over the methods of  urban 
studies, Ignacio Farías emphasizes inquiry as ANT’s “style of  cognitive 
engagement,” as distinct from critique. He acknowledges Brenner et al.’s 
charge that assemblage-based urban studies risk a “naïve positivism” 
and ideological affirmation of  current conditions, but seeks to argue 
against that charge. “Three methodological principles,” observes Farías, 
“summarize [ANT’s] commitment to the empirical: ‘follow the actors, 
forget the contexts’, ‘describe, don’t explain’ and ‘do not switch conceptual 
repertoires when you describe’.”51 

The world is not all in, […] it is in the making. […] The most obvious 
consequence of  this ontology is that it involves accounting for all actual entities 
involved in such processes of  construction, whether human or nonhuman, their 
interactions and transformations. The most important consequence […] is that 
the notion of  assemblage involves no outside, no exteriority. […] Assemblages 
are self-contained processes of  heterogeneous associations calling for a positive 
description of  their becoming, not external explanations.52

Here, journalist Sander Pleij’s interviews in his 2014 article “Who is Rem 
Koolhaas” affirm the connections. Koolhaas remarks: “But being critical 
is the basis of  it all, I think that in the last 25 years the critical from outside 



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is no longer existent. Just like Žižek, Latour and all 
those other ones are declaring. You can’t look at it 
from the outside.”53

Farías, however, continues:  “Precisely 
because asymmetry is not presumed and explained 
structurally or contextually, the study of  urban 
assemblages involves unveiling the actual practices, 
processes, sociomaterial orderings, reproducing 
asymmetries in the distribution of  resources, of  
power and of  agency capacities, opening up black-
boxed arrangements.”54

By contrast with Farías’ qualification, Yaneva 
asserts that her “intentions were humble: I did 
not try to explain the OMA practice or Koolhaas’s 
approach […] [I had] the pure purpose of  generating 
infra-reflexive descriptions of  invention which 
would keep the freshness of  design experiences […] 
far from the reach of  the prevailing meta-reflexive 
theories of  design. […] I simply described various 
design practices without sticking to references 
outside architecture.”55

ARCHITECTURAL “LABOUR IN THE MAKING”: CONCLUSIONS AND OPENINGS

In her “Introduction” to The Making of  a Building, 
Yaneva notes that “I have deliberately chosen not to 
discuss Koolhaas’s early works and his theoretical 
and philosophical thinking […] as this can bias 
my description of  the design process at OMA.”56 
This is in keeping with Yaneva’s interpretation of  
the descriptive approach, but carries certain risks. 
In its 1978 project for the extension of  the Dutch 
Parliament in the Hague, OMA had proposed a 
generously equipped chamber for what they saw 
as the characteristic “orgies of  speech” of  Dutch 
politics, but down the hall had also provided a 
“smoke-filled room”—Miesian in its aesthetic—
where the actual decisions would be made. The 
ironic tone of  this contrast occurs innumerable 
times in OMA’s work, suggestive of  Koolhaas’s 

“Why Has 
Critique Run out 

of Steam?”

“
”



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cynical realism about transparency and democracy and, later, of  his 
equivocal embrace of  authoritarian clients (for example, China’s CCTV). In 
the context of  this paper, metaphorically the Hague Parliament’s debating 
chamber embodies the public presentation of  OMA’s intentions and 
values; the smoke-filled room, its actual internal practices. In the latter we 
find the “black-boxed arrangements” of  Farías’s analysis. In this instance, 
has the smoke prevented the black box of  labour ethics from being 
opened up? “Give Me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move,” wrote 
Latour and Yaneva in 2008; for all the benefits of  this idea, one would not 
want to think that the gun was adding to the smoke in the metaphorical 
room. OMA, after all, in its daily practices had been able to implement, by 
the early 2000s, the neoliberal corporation’s wildest dreams: an unending 
supply of  short-term contract labour, entirely flexible, eager to work up to 
24 hours a day, seven days a week for minimal fixed salary, self-unorganised 
and self-policing, readily pitched into predatory competition, abnegating 
any expectations of  structured career advancement, enthusiastic about 
unrelenting stress as the normal state of  affairs, with work-life balance a 
non-issue, and conveniently departing when burnt out, before the right 
to an unlimited contract would kick in. Are not the staff ’s acceptance of  
this situation—its relationship to their sense of  disciplinary belonging and 
“chops”—and its fundamental role in OMA’s disciplinary reputation and 
success also vital circulating components of  the actor network in play?

There may be at least four reasons that these studies of  OMA do 
not tackle the issues of  architectural “labour in the making.” First, in the 
ethnographic project, the studies may have encountered a twin hazard for 
anthropologists: becoming too close to their subjects and yet, in other 
respects, not close enough. There is a sense of  identification with the 
practice, and not only through the daily intimacy with their studio activities 
and thoughts: the design of  the book Made by OMA (presumably the work 
of  an actor network of  which the author was a part) also pays a conspicuous 
homage, in its use of  a sequence of  quasi-cinematic images on its opening 
pages, to those of  SMLXL, the 1995 bible of  OMA’s practice to that date. 
Latour was a contributor to the 2006 Domus d’Autore volume on “AMO 
Post-Occupancy,” edited by Koolhaas and AMO, the research arm of  
OMA.57 OMA was a participant in the 2005 exhibition “Making Things 
Public,” curated by Latour (with Peter Weibel) at the ZKM Karlsruhe, and 
Latour has been an apologist, enthusiast, and kindred intellectual spirit for 
Koolhaas in interviews.58

Farías and Wilkie, in their Introduction to Studio Studies, make a series 
of  observations relevant to the larger implications of  this first reason and 



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those that follow. The intimacy of  studio life, they 
assert, means that ethnographers “almost inevitably 
cannot restrain themselves from becoming ‘native’ 
members of  studio collectives and thus actively 
involved in creation processes.”59 We may observe 
that the countervailing need to “come home” 
periodically is thus made more difficult, in spite 
of—or perhaps also because of—the fact that the 
researcher’s grant, academic contract, or salary 
enables them to maintain a certain immunity to 
the coercions of  studio employment. If  we may 
propose here a possible extension of  the OMA 
study, what might be needed is a periodic process 
of  more sustained auto-ethnographic reflection on 
the researcher’s own enthusiasm for the culture of  
the studio.

Second, in the methodological project, there is 
the resistance to “external” perspectives and values, 
in which labour ethics may have been implicitly 
and a priori defined as outside. Yaneva takes pains, 
particularly in The Making of  a Building, to distinguish 
her pragmatist approach from that of  critical 
sociology and theory, which would be “to mobilize 
and evoke ideas from outside architecture to interpret 
design and reveal a myriad of  hidden meanings and 
mechanisms of  architectural practices.”60

Here, Farías and Wilkie’s remarks indicate that 
this resistance is indeed characteristic of  the larger 
Latourian and ANT projects. In their literature 
review, Farías and Wilkie touch on the issue of  
labour, but appear to distance their research program 
from it, both as a concern of  “critical” scholars and 
as a condition (they imply) not manifested in the 
day-to-day practices of  the studio itself:

In examining the political economy of  creative 
labour, critical scholars (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 
2010) have pointed to the market and institutional 
arrangements that allow firms in the media and 
cultural sector to extract the surplus value of  creative 
work, such as exploiting unpaid labour time. […] 



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As such, the social and cultural sciences overlook the very settings where the 
products of  the creative industries are brought into being by focusing on the … 
inter-institutional conditions in which creativity is achieved.61

Earlier sociologists such as Richard Petersons, Pierre Bourdieu and 
Howard Becker dwelt, Farías and Wilkie note, on the “broader’ social, 
industrial and institutional contexts” of  cultural production. Against this 
approach, they invoke Antoine Hennion’s charge that it “only attempted 
the study of  milieu, professions, institutions, markets, policies–that is, 
everything ‘around’ the object itself.”62 This categorical exclusion of  
“institutional contexts” from studio studies63 seems, however, at odds with 
Farías’ own earlier confidence (cited above) that ANT-derived methods do 
enable foregrounding of  “the asymmetries of  distribution […] of  power 
and of  agency capacities [and] opening up black-boxed arrangements,” 
which seem entirely worthy goals.64

Third, in the epistemological project, there is an evident parallel 
exclusion of  the context of  the socialization of  architects into 
generationally reproductive labour practices. Yet as Yaneva herself  
observes, “For me, the ‘apprentice’ in architecture […] [t]he rhythm of  
the office tamed me at the end to the extent that I became ‘trained by the 
field’ and began, up to a certain point, to think and act like an architect.”65  
But “[t]he protagonists of  my story were always quicker than me […] 
and always spent more time working overnight.”66 Even so, “[my] routine 
of  interview and observations followed by transcription was loading my 
fieldwork weeks in such an intensive way that I was literally living in the 
office.”67 Thus in her own “apprenticeship,” Yaneva herself  reproduces, 
albeit initially by choice, the labour practices of  her subjects. Her overall 
approach is “inspired by William James’s project of  radical empiricism. 
[…] Empirical would mean to be faithful to what is given to experience and 
the numerous connections that are revealed in it. […] Such an approach 
to architecture consists in investigating the architectural culture and the 
practices of  designers rather than their theories and their ideologies.”68 
However, reflexive analysis of  that experienced process of  reproduction 
does not appear to figure in this empirical investigation of  OMA’s culture 
of  “voluntary prisoners of  architecture” and the connections potentially 
revealed within. Could we then imagine the project being extended such 
that the researcher arranges to “follow the actors” further, to accompany 
the staff  home (when they do go home); when they quit, are terminated 
or their contracts expire; or when they attempt to deal with the rest of  
life? Farías and Wilkie acknowledge, after all, that in the laboratory studies 
that they take as initial inspiration for studio ethnography, “equal attention 



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is paid to all the activities undertaken by scientists 
and lab technicians, whether routine informal talk, 
strategic career decisions, or fact-making efforts. All 
such practices are considered part of  knowledge-
making processes.”69

Fourth, in the ontological project,70 the drive to 
ascribe agency to non-human actors (in this case, 
the blue foam models) may diminish perception 
of  the agency of  human actors. The junior staff, 
though identified in the “Acknowledgements” 
of  The Making of  a Building, appear by first name 
only in the “short stories” that form the chapters 
of  Made by OMA (an exemplification of  Latour’s 
early advocacy of  story-telling as an alternative to 
explanation); some of  the female architectural staff  
are there described as “girls”; and design is presented 
as a form of  play that generates its own rewards. 
This can have the unfortunate effect of  a kind of  
infantilisation of  those most affected by the firm’s 
working conditions. Again, the broad ambition to 
describe “distributed creation processes” in the 
studio ensemble is shared by others coming from 
a similar intellectual formation: Farías and Wilkie 
assert that “the notion of  studio life […] designates 
a vitality: a generative capacity that inheres in the 
human-material arrangements and circulations 
taking place in studios and converging in the 
creation of  new cultural artefacts.”71 Such a vitalist 
narrative of  creativity can sometimes obscure, 
though, the possibility that the studio organism is 
self-devouring.

“a kind of 
infantilisation 
of those most 

affected by 
the firm’s 

working 
conditions”

“

”



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the organizers of  the original conference “The Human in 
Architecture and Philosophy” for the invaluable opportunity to develop this 
paper in the context of  that event, and for their patience; and the editors, 
reviewers and my fellow conference participants for their constructive 
comments. I also thank my graduate research assistants Bahareh Javadi 
and particularly Kekeli Dawes and Jonathan House for their enthusiastic 
contributions to the primary documentary research for this paper.

ENDNOTES

[1] Observations by the author.

[2] “OMA*AMO ARCHITECTURE Reviews,” Glassdoor, https://
www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/OMA-AMO-ARCHITECTURE-
Reviews-E429120.htm, accessed January 31, 2016. From an informal 
survey of  employee reviews published on Glassdoor of  practices such 
as Zaha Hadid Architects, ShoP, Foster + Partners, Bjarke Ingels Group, 
Heatherwick, DS+A, Mecanoo, MVRDV, Asymptote, Steven Holl, Gehry 
Partners, Morphosis, Jean Nouvel, etc. Recurring complaints include long 
hours, chronic understaffing of  projects, poor pay, unpaid overtime, poor 
work-life balance, inadequate professional development or advancement 
opportunities, junior staff  treated as replaceable, limited technical depth 
among the long-term staff, predatory internal competition promoted 
by the firm’s culture, unskilled and bullying but inequitably rewarded 
management.

[3] See, for example, “Migrant Workers’ Rights on Saadiyat Island in the 
United Arab Emirates,” Human Rights Watch, published 2015, accessed 
February 18, 2015, hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/uae0215_
ForUploadR.pdf. See also “What can architects do about workers’ rights 
in the Gulf?,” Icon, published March 26, 2015, accessed May 21, 2015, 
iconeye.com/architecture/features/item/11715-what.

[4] See, for example, Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few 
Steps Toward a Philosophy of  Design (with Special Attention to Peter 
Sloterdijk),” keynote lecture for the Networks of  Design meeting of  the Design 
History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008, http://www.
bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf.

[5] Ariane Lourie Harrison, “Latour and Yaneva: an ANT’s view of  
Architecture,” in Architectural Theories of  the Environment: Posthuman Territories, 
ed. Harrison (New York: Routledge, 2013), 107-8.



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[6] Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “‘Give Me A Gun and I Will Make 
All Buildings Move’: An ANT’s View of  Architecture,” in Explorations in 
Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 
2008), 86.

[7] Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?,” 13.

[8] Latour and Yaneva, “‘Give Me A Gun,’” 80.

[9] Ibid., 86-88.

[10] Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An 
Ethnography of  Design (Rotterdam:  010, 2009), 104. Indeed, Latour comments 
disparagingly on architectural theory in general in Rania Ghosn, El Hadi 
Jazairy, and Stephen Ramos, “The Space of  Controversies: An Interview 
with Bruno Latour,” New Geographies 0 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard GSD, 
2008), 122–135.

[11] Olga Amsterdamska, “Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!,” Science, 
Technology, and Human Values 15, 4 (Autumn 1990), 495-504; Sal Restivo, 
“Politics of  Latour,” review essay, Organization and Environment 8, 1 (March 
2005), 111-115.

[12] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 72.

[13] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 43.

[14] Albena Yaneva, The Making of  a Building:  A Pragmatist Approach to 
Architecture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 38.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 89.

[17] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 58.

[18] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 84-85.

[19] Thomas Fisher, “Patterns of  Exploitation,” Progressive Architecture (May 
1991), 9.

[20] Patrick Monaghan, “The ‘Insane Little Bubble of  Nonreality’ That Is 
Life for Architecture Students,” The Chronicle of  Higher Education (June 2001); 
and Jody Temkin, “For would-be architects, grad school like boot camp,” The 
Chicago Tribune, January 6, 2002.

[21] Aaron Koch et al., The Redesign of  Studio Culture: A Report of  the AIAS 
Studio Culture Task Force (Washington, DC: American Institute of  Architecture 
Students, 2002).

[22] See, for example, “Mental Health Reports 2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16,” 



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Graduate Architecture Landscape and Design Student Union, University of  
Toronto, http://www.galdsu.ca/Mental-Health-Report-2013-2014. See 
also, Richard Waite and Ella Braidwood, “Mental health problems exposed 
by AJ Student Survey 2016,” Architects’ Journal 243, 16 (July 28, 2016), n.p. 
See also, Leah Sottile, “The AEC Industry’s Deadly Problem,” Architecture, 
August 31, 2016.

[23] Philipp Oswalt and Matthias Hollwich, “OMA at work,” trans. Fiona 
Greenwood, Archis 7 (1998), n.p. Also available at Philipp Oswalt and 
Matthias Hollwich, “OMA at work,” trans. Fiona Greenwood, Volume 
Project, http://volumeproject.org/oma-at-work/. Also available at Philipp 
Oswalt and Matthias Hollwich, “OMA at work,” trans. Fiona Greenwood, 
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/wolke/
eng/Subjects/991/Oswalt/oswalt.html.

[24] And perhaps, given the hindsight now available, Koolhaas’s reported 
semi-retirement to Switzerland; which would tend to confirm that the 
strictures of  inadequate fees have not been evenly distributed across the 
hierarchy of  the office.

[25] The phrase is Koolhaas’s, from his widely published Architectural 
Association student thesis project Exodus. See Rem Koolhaas and Elia 
Zenghelis, “Exodus: or the Voluntary Prisoners of  Architecture,” The 
White Slave, 1972, https://thewhiteslave.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/
exodus-or-the-voluntary-prisoners-of-architecture/#jp-carousel-333.

[26] Oswalt and Hollwich, “OMA at work,” n.p.

[27] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 24.

[28] Peggy Deamer, ed., The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative 
Class and the Politics of  Design (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

[29] Andrew Ross, ed. [for Gulf  Labor], The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor 
(New York: OR Books, 2015).

[30] Who Builds Your Architecture?, http://whobuilds.org/.

[31] Joan Ockman, “Foreword”, in The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, 
the Creative Class and the Politics of  Design, ed. Deamer (London: Bloomsbury 
Academic, 2015), xxi-xxii.

[32] Albena Yaneva, “Abstract,” for Made by the Office for Metropolitan 
Architecture: An Ethnography of  Design (Rotterdam:  010, 2009), the University 
of  Manchester Library, available at https://www.escholar.manchester.
ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:87450.

[33] Manuel Schvartzberg, “Foucault’s ‘Environmental’ Power: Architecture 



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and Neoliberal Subjectivization,” in The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, 
the Creative Class and the Politics of  Design, ed. Deamer (London: Bloomsbury 
Academic, 2015), 189-90.

[34] Dariel Cobb, “Dispatches from MIT: Becoming Political,” in Asymmetric 
Labors: The Economy of  Architecture in Theory and Practice, eds. Aaron Cayer, 
Peggy Deamer et al. (Brooklyn, NY: The Architecture Lobby, 2016), 147.

[35] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 198 n. 4, from Bruno Latour, “When 
Things Strike Back: a Possible Contribution of  Science Studies to the Social 
Sciences,” British Journal of  Sociology 51, 105-23.

[36] Oswalt and Hollwich, “OMA at work,” n.p.

[37] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 32 n. 34.

[38] Fenna Haakma Wagenaar, “Astorology: Protect us from what we want,” 
in Content, ed. Rem Koolhaas et al. (Köln: Taschen, 2004), 204.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Angela McRobbie, “Is Passionate Work a Neoliberal Delusion?,” 
Transformation, published April 22, 2015, accessed July 19, 2016, https://
www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/angela-mcrobbie/is-passionate-
work-neoliberal-delusion. See also Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a 
Living in the New Culture Industries (London: Polity Press, 2015).

[41] William Wiles, “Inside OMA,” Icon, published September 30, 2011, 
https://www.iconeye.com/architecture/features/item/9554-inside-oma.

[42] In Dutch employment law, three years has been the maximum total 
duration of  fixed-term employment contracts, beyond which further 
employment would automatically be for an unlimited term. See Expat Survival 
Guide 2014 (Haarlem: Expatica, 2013), 60.

[43] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 199.  But see also Albena Yaneva, 
Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Farnham, UK:  Ashgate, 2012).

[44] See Kazys Varnelis, “‘We Cannot Not Know History’: Philip Johnson’s 
Politics and Cynical Survival,” Journal of  Architectural Education 49:2 (November 
1995), 92-104. As Varnelis observes, “The modern cynic understands what 
false consciousness is, Sloterdijk explains, but uses that knowledge to pull a 
fast one. Acting fundamentally in their own self-interest, cynics ‘see to it that 
they are not taken for suckers.’” Quotation from Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of  
Cynical Reason (Minneapolis:  University of  Minnesota Press, 1987), 5, quoted 
in Varnelis, “‘We Cannot Not Know History,’” 101.

[45] See Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?” See also Bruno Latour, “Spheres 



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and Networks: Two Ways to Interpret Globalization,” Harvard Design 
Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009), 138-44.

[46] Gabriel Hankins, “The Objects of  Ethics: Rilke and Woolf  with 
Latour,” Twentieth-Century Literature 61:3 (September 2015), 333.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid. Latour, ever the agile guru in his “On Recalling ANT” essay of  
1999, acknowledged concerns about moral issues, while not appearing to 
respond fully to them. See Bruno Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” in Actor-
Network Theory and After, eds. J. Law and J. Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 
1999), 15-25.

[49] Andrea Whittle and André Spicer, “Is Actor Network Theory 
Critique?,” Organization Studies 29:04 (2008), 622-623.

[50] Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of  Steam? From Matters 
of  Fact to Matters of  Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), 225-248.

[51] Ignacio Farías, “The politics of  urban assemblages,” CITY 15:3-4 
(June-August 2011), 367.

[52] Farías, “The politics of  urban assemblages,” 369-70.

[53] Sander Pleij, “I hate being an architect,” Medium, published June 8, 
2014, accessed December 1, 2015, https://medium.com/@pleij/i-hate-
being-an-architect-7c42abbcd6d#.b7v4rvms2.

[54] Farías, “The Politics of  Urban Assemblages,” 369-370.

[55] Yaneva, Made by OMA, 100-101.

[56] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 26 n. 29.

[57] Rem Koolhaas and AMO, “AMO Post-Occupancy,” Domus d’Autore 
series, 2006.

[58] María J. Prieto and Elise S. Youn, “Interview with Bruno Latour: 
Decoding the Collective Experiment,” agglutinations, published July 5, 2004, 
accessed October 30, 2016, http://agglutinations.com/archives/000040.
html.

[59] Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie, “Studio Studies: Notes for a Research 
Program,” Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies, Displacements (Abingdon:  
Routledge, 2015), 9.

[60] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 25-26.

[61] Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 3. The internal reference is to 
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative labour: Media Work in three 



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Cultural Industries (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2010).

[62] Antoine Hennion, “An Intermediary Between Production and 
Consumption: The Producer of  Popular Music,” Science, Technology and Human 
Values 14:4 (1989), 401, cited in Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies.”

[63] As a further example, the ethnographic studies by Sophie Houdart of  
image production in the architectural studio of  Kengo Kuma also appear 
to eschew the topic of  labour conditions. See Sophie Houdart, “Copying, 
Cutting and Pasting Social Spheres: Computer Designers’ Participation in 
Architectural Projects,” Science Studies 21:1 (2008), 47-63.

[64] Sophie Houdart, “Multiple Ways of  Being Real: The Representations in 
Perspective in the Architectural Project,” Land 46 (2006), 107-122.

[65] Yaneva, The Making of  a Building, 34-35.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., 196-197.

[69] Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 4. As a further possibility for future 
research, one might also propose a comparative ethnographic study of  at least 
Herzog & de Meuron’s practice, whose design techniques have resembled 
OMA’s (including blue foam models), but whose working environment is 
seen—at least by their OMA collaborators in Content—as quite different.

[70] Here I refer to the Latourian concern, in propounding the notion of  
the complex and contested Thing, to move beyond distinctions between 
objective and subjective agencies in order to acknowledge the active role of  
inanimate entities in actor networks. See also, for a more extended discussion 
of  the topic, Pauline Lefebvre, “From Autonomy to Pragmatism: Objects 
Made Moral,” ArchitecturePhilosophy 2:1 (2016), 23-37.

[71] Farías and Wilkie, “Studio Studies,” 6.




