Bücher der Reihe gta papers

Care work is at once omnipresent and invisible. It encompasses all forms of socially necessary - or reproductive - labor: raising children, cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the elderly and the ill, and many other tasks. It is what allows for and sustains productive labor (including architectural labor) in the first place. Although economic production depends on the work of social reproduction, care work is usually unpaid and pushed out of sight. It is indisputable that care work falls disproportionately upon women and unevenly along lines of race and class. Demographic changes, environmental crises, growing mobility, transformations of labor, and the reconfiguration of traditional institutions of care - from the nuclear family to welfare state provisions - have made the inequity of care a key problem in architectural debates.

The term 'social distance' was once only a vague metaphor to describe the relationship between different social groups. Yet it has acquired a precise meaning as the mandatory minimum distance for face-to-face interactions: 1, 1.5, or 2 metres (or 6 feet), depending on the jurisdiction. But what is the appropriate distance from which to interpret a pandemic? Rather than asserting a diagnosis of the con­tem­porary emergency, the issue Social Distance offers perspectives from archi­tectural history and theory. From the great plague of Venice to cholera in the indus­trializing city, from the human placenta to the 1960s bubble or the office of today, the fifth gta papers provides a broad range of reflections on contagion, disease, and health.