Photo by Anna Marie Kellen, the Photograph Studio: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
On the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, tucked away in the south west corner, lives a sweeping portrait of early 20th-century America. Thomas Hart Benton’s masterpiece America Today privileges the viewer to step into the life of this fragile republic as it existed 100 years ago.
Spanning decades, Benton’s mural tells the story of a soaring but broken country that faced crippling inequality, economic insecurity, racial division, and escalating international tensions. While these problems are familiar today, our collective response to them has not lived up to Benton’s vision. As we see a similar scale and similar qualities of crises in our version of America today, we would benefit from studying the solutions that Benton celebrated.
Central to Benton’s mural are a collection of the figures who appear to be laboring in real time. In particular, the panel “City Building” demonstrates the collective nature of bringing a building from idea to reality. The most prominent figures are the builders who are hammering, twisting, and lifting the many pieces used to assemble a building. In the corner, we see the architect huddled over the blue prints facing away from the construction on site. The practice of architecture today continues to inhabit this posture, but a new idea of what it means to practice this ancient discipline is emerging.
"America Today", by Thomas Hart Benton
The “City Building” panel of America Today provided the perfect imagery for my new book The Labor of Architecture: Creativity, Design, and the Building of a New Class Consciousness. The mural’s portrayal of builders and the solitary architect captures the long history of how design work became separated from the act of building – a history that continues to shape the profession today.
Tracing its origins to the Middle Ages, the workers we now call architects acted as “master-builders” on site. They coordinated various building trades using their extensive, hands-on knowledge. During the Renaissance, however, architecture began to separate from the physical construction site. It centered its labor in studios and, later, professional offices.
This traditional understanding of architecture has survived for a long time both within the discipline and in the public imagination. From The Fountainhead to the recently released film The Brutalist, architects are still viewed as heroic individual figures whose singular genius is responsible for bringing a design from vision to life. While this hardly reflects reality, as building a building requires a collection of teams and individuals with many different kinds of knowledge, it still remains the dominant view of the discipline from both the inside and outside.
Today, the architecture profession faces its own reckoning, and another potential transformation away from the individual and towards the collective. In 2022, my colleagues at Bernheimer Architecture and I, with the support of Architectural Workers United and the IAM Union, formed the first private-sector architecture union in at least a century. Tired of the lack of answers to the challenges facing our profession, from 60-plus hour work weeks to declining pay to gender and racial inequities in the workplace, we turned to unionization in order to collectively address the structural issues in our workplace and in our profession. In 2024, we signed our first collective bargaining agreement, which codified just cause protections, remote work, provisions to protect foreign workers on visas, and enhanced family leave policies, to name a few. All these protections were unheard of in the architecture industry. Though our movement is small, with another office bargaining their first contract and several others actively organizing, it is a beginning for the kind of change we hope to see across the building industry.
Today’s architecture unions are building on a legacy that stretches back decades to a time when the labor movement and designers came together to deliver projects that transformed the nation’s infrastructure in service of the public good. If we look back on the New Deal era in the United States, the time period during which our modern social safety net as well as the labor protections that workers and unions continue to rely on were enacted, we do not see a perfect country, but one striving to live up to its professed ideals of fairness, economic security, and shared prosperity.
Through the Works Progress Administration, the country assessed the damage of an economic system run amok and set to work rebuilding. Central to this vision was the labor movement, to which FDR owed much of his success. Constructing trails, bridges, and dams, agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) leveraged the collective strength of labor and design. Central to the TVA’s success was the Architect’s office headed by Roland Wank. Rarely taught in architecture schools across the country, Wank was a central figure in many of the TVA’s most successful works. As an architect, he was most interested in “the public interest” and maximizing the benefits of design for “the comfort and enjoyment of many” rather than working on large mansions for the privileged few. Beyond massive infrastructure projects like the Norris Dam, the TVA even included a ceramics department that sought to combine traditional craft practices with the artistic vision of the New Deal.
Just as the TVA reimagined the public purpose of design, our young movement at Architectural Workers United seeks to reimagine how architects can work collectively and use their expertise to serve the public good. By advocating for unionization in the architecture industry, we aim to bring democracy to the workplace of designers, a critical ingredient that is sorely missing, as well as providing their skills and expertise to the labor movement at large. In this way, our successful efforts at Bernheimer Architecture with the first private-sector union and collective bargaining agreement in the architecture industry will be just the beginning of a larger unionization effort across the design disciplines that might radically reimagine the connection between design and the public good.
Workers and management at BA Union bargaining
If we are to return to the ideas professed by artists like Benton and projects like the TVA, we have to expand the pool of those who both benefit and contribute to it. That means pursuing projects that promote large-scale wellbeing while protecting our surrounding environments, like the wildlife bridges being built in California and geothermal energy projects that supply an abundant supply of clean energy for buildings like affordable housing directly on site. These projects can also create good union jobs – from construction and maintenance to design and operations – ensuring that the benefits of a green transition include economic security for the workers who make it possible. While these projects are not without flaws, they point to the potential of integrating climate solutions with broader societal interests through the social expertise of labor and the technical expertise of design. Currently, projects like these are too few and far between. With a broader, collective movement that links public investment to strong labor standards and inclusive design, we could scale them up and ensure their benefits are shared widely.
I chose America Today as the cover for my book because its origins are just as instructive as its contents. Though the mural has found a permanent home in the Met, the piece was originally commissioned for a new building that would be the centerpiece of a radical new university: the New School. Founded by a group of faculty members who were pushed out of Columbia University for protesting World War I, and later embracing academic refugees from Nazi Germany, the university centered counter-cultural thinking in its pedagogy. While I teach here today, the current location of such a publicly oriented mural in a private art museum serves as a perfect metaphor for the current state of American society. Without collective projects like unions, we risk continuing down the road to democratic ruin.
Unionizing architecture should not only seek to benefit designers – it also must aim to bring their expertise back in service of the public good, just as the New Deal once did. Like the mural that once lived in a school devoted to radical ideas, today’s design workers have the chance to create a culture and a built environment that serves the many, not the few. The choice to organize is a choice to build that future together.
The Labor of Architecture: Creativity, Design, and the Building of a New Class Consciousness is available through Monthly Review Press.
