Building as Domestic Labor Ana María León
Left, brick baking equipment and tools.
Concrete masonry units are one of the most ubiquitous building materials in the so-called global south. Cheap to make and easy to assemble, they allow for self-build housing solutions for much of the world’s population. At the same time, they are made of cement, a toxic and environmentally demanding material. The CMU block embodies two incommensurable problems: housing precarity and global environmental collapse. The vast scale and complexity of these issues is simultaneously daunting and urgent. And yet, while the housing question remains an unresolved global challenge, the construction of shelter constitutes the domestic realm, a space traditionally dismissed as apolitical. Hannah Arendt has contributed to this misconception
Right, a scene from the project documentation film, “How to Bake 30 Bricks,” depicts the architects demolding a batch of bricks.
Building as Domestic Labor
49
