The Architecture Lobby Annual Newsletter
Happy New Year Lobbsters!
It is with great appreciation that we present to you the 2024 Architecture Lobby Annual Newsletter. This year has been a transformative one for TAL, and we are excited to share our progress with you.
Last year, we turned ten years old, launched a new website, and gathered for an in-person Members Congress in Cambridge, MA. We organized in our workplaces, marched on New York calling for an end to fossil fuels, and facilitated the fourth iteration of the Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School.
We celebrated the voluntary recognition of the Sage and Coombe Architects union, wins for the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), and Snøhetta’s historic union bid – and read thoughtful, critical pieces about our labor. We also reassessed our role as a grassroots, volunteer-based organization of architectural workers. As unions are established, how can TAL continue to provide the space, tools, and solidarity necessary to envision what we’ll create with our collective agency?
We hope that this newsletter will serve as a valuable resource for you to stay informed about the work that we are doing together. Whether you are a current member, a past member, or just a co-conspirator, we thank you for your continued involvement in TAL and wish you the best for the coming year.
In 2024…
We launched a new website.
This year we launched a new website! Check it out at https://architecture-lobby.org/. Thank you to our web developer, Common Knowledge, and everyone in the Lobby who has contributed to this years-long project. The website provides a public face for the Lobby’s membership and work, a record of past Lobby actions, and resources for anyone interested in joining TAL.
Throughout 2024, we’d like to onboard more membership into publishing material on the website. We’re also quite excited for a second phase of our digital platforms overhaul in 2024. We plan on moving the Lobby’s internal communications to Discord and we could not be more excited to create a vibrant and inclusive online community of architectural workers.
We celebrated our 10th anniversary with an in-person Members Congress in Cambridge.
Every two years, members of TAL come together as a congress to make decisions about the organization’s priorities and direction. We revisit our goals, strategies, and internal governing structure to make sure we are on the right path to achieving our vision. This August, 30+ members of The Architecture Lobby met in Boston (with a couple of additional friends joining through Zoom) for our 2023 Members Congress – making it the largest Members Congress in our organization's history!
Now, the Congress Planning Committee (CPC) is working to create the Post-Congress Report, a document that will summarize what was said, done, and learned at Congress. The report is critical to informing how we plan and execute our 2025 Members Congress -- and to making sure that what we discussed in Boston stays top of mind. If you were involved with congress in any capacity (attended one or more days in person, joined from zoom, saw the instagram promo and had opinions, etc.) the CPC would love to read your reflections via the 2023 TAL Members Congress Feedback Form and incorporate them (anonymously) into the Post-Congress Report.
We rethought our structure.
One of the major takeaways from Members Congress was that we need to foster a culture within TAL that is in direct contrast to that of our offices and schools. Addressing perceived and real hierarchies inherent to our structure, inequitable distributions of (usually) unpaid labor, and unrealistic expectations of individual members all need to be priorities in 2024. At congress, a resolution was passed that puts the power to determine the makeup of the Administrative and Strategy Committees (comprised of the seven positions that we elect members to each year) in the hands of the Organizing Committee (the group of chapter stewards, working group coordinators, and elected Administrative and Strategy Committee members that meets on the second Thursday of each month). Previously, each elected position was codified by our bylaws, which are a legally binding document.
As a result, elections might look a little different this year – they may not even be elections. To get involved, join us at the February Organizing Committee meeting on 2/20 (invites always on mobilize!), where we’ll finalize our approach to the 2024 governance cycle. Or, look forward to participating starting early March.
We supported student organizing.
Students are a critical part of our membership and the student chapters they steward are a pillar of our organization. In March of 2023 we stood in solidarity with the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), of which many lobbsters are current or former members, as they went on strike for higher wages and fair working conditions. The strike was settled in August, when 97% of the GEO members voting approved a new contract.
Due south from Ann Arbor, the University of Houston Chapter made a comeback, revising their strategy document to reflect the evolving needs of their student body and beginning to host in-person meetings. Are you a student interested in starting or picking back up a chapter of The Architecture Lobby at your university? Reach out to us on instagram or through email at info@architecture-lobby.org!
We hosted our third iteration of the Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School.
The Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School grew from an ambition within The Architecture Lobby to develop a “school” that shares and deploys new models for educating designers within and beyond the context of capitalism. ABC 2023, Future Belonging: Organising for Global Change, called for contributors and participants to join together to answer the complex problem of how to capture, share, disseminate, and evolve liberatory spatial practices at different scales across global contexts and cultures. It also initiated the ABC Hub, an asynchronous extension of the school and open-source online platform for connecting built-environment organizers and collecting the unique strategies, techniques and tools to support them.
ABC, as both an event and repository, invites the involvement of individuals and collectives working to effect change in spatial production and the built environment; working with people, groups, communities or organizations to bring about an equitable tomorrow; or working with new organizational techniques for leveraging influence. The Architecture Lobby’s Academia Working Group, the coordinator of ABC, meets every two weeks and welcomes engagement across and beyond the Lobby in the planning of ABC 2024 and development of the ABC Hub and additional publishing initiatives. For more information, visit the ABC website and the ABC Hub, follow @arch_lobby_awg on Instagram, or reach out via abc@architecture-lobby.org.
We invested in distributive justice.
With the support of the Racial Justice Working Group, we began to re-examine how Lobby resources could be better utilized to make participation and the benefits of membership more equitably accessible for us all. We created a mutual aid line in our budget for membership participation and development. These funds were utilized to ensure anyone interested was able to participate in our in-person Members Congress in Cambridge by providing mutual aid transportation funds on request. We are also experimenting with ways to support each other through the realities of workplace resistance and organizing. We will be sharing more of our stories, expressing our goals and needs, and lobbying for members to mutually support each other. Check out our first of many Mutual Aid Bulletins:
Kevin mutual aid
Active Chapters
New York City - nyc@architecture-lobby.org
Boston - archlobbyboston@gmail.com
Bay Area - bayarea@architecture-lobby.org
New Orleans - neworleans@architecture-lobby.org
Arizona - arizona@architecture-lobby.org
University of Houston - archlobbyuh@gmail.com
Yale - yale@architecture-lobby.org
Pratt - pratt@architecture-lobby.org
Twin Cities - twincities@architecture-lobby.org
Active Working Groups
Racial Justice Working Group - racialjustice@architecture-lobby.org, https://calendly.com/tal-racialjustice/check-in
Academia Working Group - https://linktr.ee/arch_lobby_awg, https://www.instagram.com/arch_lobby_awg/
Green New Deal Working Group - gnd@architecture-lobby.org, https://architecture-lobby.org/working-groups/green-new-deal/
Unionization Working Group - polite.regrets@gmail.com, https://architecture-lobby.org/working-groups/unionization/