An afternoon of conversation about co-working. When it’s good, when it’s bad, and how to make it better?

Architecture has always been social. As the legend goes, according to Vitruvius, “The beginning of association among human beings, their meeting and living together, thus came into being because of the discovery of fire.” One can speculate from this that the first act of building was not the construction of a personal dwelling, but a fire around which a community could grow, and from which the history of creative labor emerged. A constructed fire and a huddle of beings around it might demonstrate the first collaborative environment.

But what is often forgotten across the many millennia between that first act of community building and the Downtown towers and suburban office parks that make up the “creative workspace” landscape is that a good fire takes stoking. Architecture at its origins was not just an event of assembly but a continuous process of maintenance. Today, most architects do little to engage the afterlife of their projects, and this practice of maintenance is generally left either to cultish companies or indifferent landlords who ply us with free tap beer and rooftop yoga to keep us ignorant of the space and its discontents.

We at Labor Party would like to re-examine how designers build and stoke the fire. Instead of working top-down, We propose Labor Party as a bottom-up, ongoing series of workshops and community office hours -- an ad hoc co-working project that is organized provisionally to best cater to its participants as their needs arise and change.