Sérgio Ferro — Architecture from Below: An Anthology

Ten essays by Sérgio Ferro, the architect, painter and theorist born in Brazil and long based in France, collected in English for the first time.

Ferro looks at architecture from the building site upwards, starting from the workers and the labour that architectural history and theory mostly pass over. He argues that this neglect is no accident but a need of capitalist development: it conceals that value comes from labour and keeps the architect's authority over the site intact. Dating from 1967 to 2019, the essays bring Marx and later critical thinkers to bear on cases ranging from Strasbourg to Brasília and Dubai, and follow how capitalist production has changed architecture and its ties to painting and sculpture.

Born in Curitiba in 1938, Ferro co-founded the Arquitetura Nova group, with Flávio Império and Rodrigo Lefèvre. After a year in prison under Brazil's military dictatorship he went into exile in 1972, settling in Grenoble, where he taught at the architecture school until 2003.

Mariana Moura and Silke Kapp edited the selection, and Ana Naomi de Sousa and Ellen Heyward translated it. It opens a series of three Ferro books from MACK, translated under TF/TK, a project run by João Marcos Lopes and Katie Lloyd Thomas.

MACK, 2024. 320 pages, silkscreened hardcover, 16.5 x 22.5 cm.