Confronting Professionalism

The Seductive Nature of Developments

Olive Olusegun

BArch Hons 2021

Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Tuliza Sindi
Unit Tutor: Muhammad Dawjee
Unit Assistant: Lynette Breed

UNIT 19^︎︎︎
The Act of Service: The Myth of Violence

Professionalism is an institutionalised form of regulation and exploitation that seduces employees into sacrificing their lives for the enrichment of a company. The work approaches architecture as a curtain that conceals the hidden exploitative nature of professionalism. Concurrently, the ‘impressive’  architecture of professional institutions performs the role of seducing people into aspiring to professionalism.

Emergent architectural developments such as mixed-use office parks and luxury amenities are some of the ways that architecture acts as this seductive curtain. At the ideological scale, these developments are presented as socially and economically beneficial, however, on an intimate scale, it is revealed how these developments further regulate and exploit employees more than truly aiding them. 

The project proposes an exaggerated futuristic mixed-use development in the CBD of Cape Town. This development focuses on the production of hyper-productive employees by providing all the facilities needed to train, use and dispose of them in a machine-like 'building’ (i.e., schools, offices and even graves). 

The proposition exposes the hidden violence of professional systems as a whole  through  satirical exaggeration. It is presented in the form of allegorical drawings that are used as discursive devices between different stakeholders within the system of professionalism.  

Keywords:
Professionalism, Machine, Development, Productivity, Allegory, Satire

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