Power to the Precariat

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices award spotlights North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices that have the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. This year, the League posed a series of questions to the eight practices that received a 2024 award, prompting each firm or individual to reflect on their working theories and methods, the opportunities and challenges of contemporary practice, and what’s next. 

THE OPEN WORKSHOP, led by Neeraj Bhatia, produces a diverse range of research projects and built works that bridge speculative research and formal design. Below, Bhatia discusses the catalytic force of architecture within asymmetric power structures.

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What does it mean to be an “emerging” practice or practitioner?

Emerging is a critical moment of distinction from a substrate. In this act of appearing there is the possibility of producing an alternative to the status quo. To do this, I believe a designer must sufficiently understand the nature, processes, and systems that comprise the substrate yet not be consumed by these very factors. Emerging is a crucial time of balancing naiveté and knowledge. Not being fully formed is so important to contend with how design can act within a volatile future. 

What does it mean for you to share your “voice” in the design field, in your community, in your practice?

We are interested in going beyond the singular voice of the architect to engage and enrich our work through the voices of overlooked human/non-human subjects. In the end, I see our work as providing a platform for various voices to emerge and be enhanced. To assemble this platform, I use several tools—including representation, convening, and advocacy. The architect as an advocate is about amplifying community voices and using these voices to craft meaningful designs of buildings, systems, and policy. One of the key tools of translation for this work is the use of representation. Building on Latour’s concept of the Dingpolitik, wherein representation is defined as how to gather people around an issue, how the object of concern is presented to those assembled, and the composition of the body politik, I employ representation in my work to both gather community voices as well as foreground the forces that often define their lives. I see architecture as a political medium that can subvert, rewire, redirect, and/or make these forces legible. In this way, advocacy and representation go hand-in-hand in engaging a pluralistic voice.

Where do you locate your practice environmentally, socially, and within the design field? 

My work centers on how architecture and urbanism can foster social, racial, environmental, and economic justice through the design of collective forums and collective form. Architecture has historically serviced regimes of power. Instead, I am focused on how architecture can catalyze new forms of empowerment to pull people and landscapes out of precarity. I focus this energy on issues related to collectivity because I feel that we first need to come together to create change and address economic and climatic issues which are already consuming us.

Understanding politics as the continual negotiation between collective and individual values, my work largely focuses on two scales of intervention: the urban territory, whose collective values are most precisely reified in the design of infrastructure, and housing, whose distribution, access, and typological design remain a large challenge. Working intersectionally and across these two scales, my main goal is to understand how architecture can produce a new type of power for the precariat.

What do you see as the main challenges for your firm’s practice in today’s economic, environmental, and political climate? 

I think the models of producing architecture are becoming increasingly risk averse in North America, which threatens experimentation. Because capitalism seeks stability in growth through predictable models, it becomes a large challenge to offer alternatives to the status quo within the current model. Interconnectedly, project delivery has become more and more accelerated due to construction (and overall) inflation. The outcome of this is that smaller practices tend to be overlooked for larger firms—particularly outside the realm of single-family homes and small-scaled commercial work. At the same time, the growing economic and environmental precarity will necessitate new models of design, project delivery, and construction. Presently, when you enter the world of materializing buildings, it is difficult to not somehow be complicit in some asymmetric systems of power. How do you change the system when there are few paths to actualizing architecture outside these power structures?

How would you define research in your practice?

Research is a process of learning and not knowing the outcomes. It could take many forms—mapping, interviews, observation, documentation, reading, translating, diagramming, layering information, etc. In essence, research challenges us to go beyond our own biases. While my representational techniques are more consistent, one of the reasons you might notice a formal and scalar range in my work is that it is influenced by, and responding to, research.

Do you teach? What is the interplay between your teaching and practice?

I teach at the California College of the Arts, where I also co-direct our urbanism research lab, The Urban Works Agency. We are an architecture program situated within an art and design school, which is fairly unique. Being in a school of art and design in the Bay Area is like being in a school of activists because artists on the whole are much more politically motivated and tend to clarify their politics through their work. Being in the vicinity of art practitioners daily reminds all of us that we don’t need to accept the systems we inherit—that we can push back. The generation that’s coming out of school is eager to think about how the discipline can have more agency. I’m really inspired by that energy and by the idea that the role of an architect can be expanded from designer to activist and advocate.

Do you prefer to work in a certain scale or typology, or do your projects range in scope? Is there a project type that you would like to design for but have not yet?

We have been very focused on collective housing typologies as a way of producing a domestic commons wherein people have more agency in defining their way of life. Given the increasing precarity of urban dwellers, living collectivity can provide forms of care, culture, community, and support to embed more resilience within everyday life. What I like about housing is that it touches on the design of the city through the scale of architecture. Moreover, you can’t separate housing from climate, economic, and social issues—in a sense it is at the core of many of the challenges we all are/will be facing.

When do you consider a project complete?

I don’t think a project is ever complete. Ideally, we keep returning to our projects to learn how they are being used, misused, and/or appropriated by users. For me, this is a process of moving beyond assumptions as a designer and learning from lived experience.

Can you name a person, book, film, or other source of inspiration?

Our practice is named after a book by Umberto Eco entitled The Open Work. This has always been a critical text for me, as I believe one of the largest challenges in teaching future architects is where designers should exert control within a system and where they allow for choice. Eco’s notion of “the open work” provides a useful template for how to reconcile design control with indeterminate and possibly conflicting factors. This is created by the author strategically leaving openness to a project for subjects to complete. In a moment of increasing political and environmental indeterminacy, the open work might provide a lens of how/where to exert control in a project. Whether a small installation, domestic space, or territorial infrastructure, our projects examine how the performance is one instigated by the designer but implemented by the subject—a subject that is both a human and non-human agent—and by doing so, gives agency to this subject. 

What did you last draw?

It might have been Peppa Pig or Bluey with my kids.

What do you need to do your best work?

Conversation and collaboration on one hand and silence and solitude on the other. I also find I am doing my best work when I am writing, reading, designing, and drawing interchangeably—each of these mediums often help me see and understand our projects in a different way.