Out of Office by Lila Athanasiadou

From capitalist realism to domestic realism, architecture has played a major role in the standardization of work as well as in the engulfing of time dedicated to labour.

This chapter explores the spaces of labour, the birth of ergonomics and its intersection with both the military and the prison industrial complex. From medieval bloodletting rituals, to transhuman war veterans, from time saving devices to factory panopticons, from architectural standards to a modernist lifestyle design, this chapter traces the slow transformation of architecture into the spatial organization of exhaustion.

Image credit: Douglas C. McMurtrie, Reconstructing the Crippled Soldier p.6