Film

  • What’s your story?
  • GRANTEE
    The Architecture Lobby
    GRANT YEAR
    2020

The Architecture Lobby, "What's your story?" 2022.

What's your story? is a campaign within The Architecture Lobby (TAL), a grassroots organization of architectural workers advocating for just labor practices and an equitable built environment. What’s your story? documents, makes accessible, and amplifies the voices and experiences of architectural workers through video productions. These moving image artifacts contextualize the formation and evolution of TAL within a broader architecture labor movement, inciting the viewer to share their stories as they relate to being in right relations with inhabiting and producing the builtenvironment. The process of What's your story? is participatory, crowd-sourced, and methodological: interviews of TAL members are gathered by TAL members by following a codesigned methodology. When relevant, TAL members also interview people in groups allied and adjacent to TAL. This amalgamation of stories is curated into a long-form film documentary intended for a general audience. In addition, a series of short videos providing insights into specific topics are published via TAL’s digital stack (website and social media). The video productions make the story of TAL broadly accessible and invites new and renewed participation into the movement for a just builtenvironment.

Valérie Lechêne and Andrew Daley are member-organizers within TAL and the current working group stewards of the What’s your story? campaign. Together with the current member-organizers of the working group, they are grateful, beholden, and solidary to the current and former member-organizers of TAL and specifically towards the member-organizers of the following TAL bodies: Grievance Committee 2020; JustDesign Working Group; Administrative, Strategic, & Organizing Committees 2020–21; Administrative, Strategic, & Organizing Committees 2021–22; and Administrative, Strategic, & Organizing Committees 2022–23.

The Architecture Lobby (TAL) is an international organization of architectural workers, planners, and designers advocating for the value of architecture in the general publicand for architectural work within the discipline. The Architecture Lobby believes that power in a society should be democratic and widely distributed and that changes to a humanitarian built environment must be sited in organizing labor. It believes that the work architects do and the capitalist society in which we work need structural change to properly serve spatial justice. As long as architecture tolerates abusive practices in the office and the construction site, it cannot insist on its role in fighting for public safety, environmental health, or an equitable society.