RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

This chapter introduces the special issue Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies by proposing the concept of the extended building site. Written with Liam Ross, it asks how architectural production can be rethought beyond the conventional boundaries of the construction site, and how the field of architectural Production Studies might be expanded to address the intertwined crises of capitalism and ecology.

The chapter begins from the legacy of Sérgio Ferro’s Marxist account of architecture, labour and the building site, but argues that this critique must now be extended across wider socio-ecological systems. Ferro describes the building site as a site of both extreme violence - he identified the Qatar World Cup stadia as the site of a genocide - but also a site of radical political possibility. The building site is not only the place where architectural drawings are realised through construction labour; it is also connected to distant landscapes of extraction, supply chains, carbon-intensive material production, energy systems, logistics networks, financial structures, and the social reproduction of labour. In this sense, every building condenses a much larger field of ecological and political relations.

The argument develops through a dialogue between Marxian theories of production and metabolism and Batesonian ecological thought. Marx’s account of labour, nature and humanity’s extended embodiment is used to understand architecture as part of a material and energetic metabolism, while Bateson’s work on mind, ecology, feedback and pattern opens the question of how architectural production also operates through semiotic, perceptual and cultural systems. The chapter therefore frames architectural production across both thermodynamic and semiotic registers: as a matter of material flows, embodied energy and extraction, but also of stories, myths, knowledge systems, rituals, images and forms of ecological consciousness.

At its core, the chapter argues that to ecologise Production Studies is not simply to add environmental impact to existing accounts of construction. It requires a deeper rethinking of production itself as a process embedded in, and productive of, ecological relations. Architecture does not merely occupy environments; it participates in making them. It organises labour, transforms landscapes, mobilises materials, encodes values, and contributes to the production or destruction of worlds.

The chapter sets out the conceptual frame for the issue as a whole, positioning the “extended building site” as a way to connect labour politics, material extraction, climate justice, embodied carbon, more-than-human relations and ecological value. It proposes an expanded critical practice for architecture: one capable of tracing the hidden chains of production behind buildings, while also imagining how design might contribute to the production of more just and regenerative ecologies.