Loudreaders

“The only purpose of education is to make new worlds collectively. This requires the practice of curiosity as a daily habit and the exercise of dignified and purposeful rebelliousness. Other worlds are possible.”

Loudreaders Trade School is an alternative model of architectural pedagogy that fosters the exchange of knowledge through networks of intellectual solidarity.

Loudreaders Trade School questions architecture’s role both, as a ‘high’ art and as a technocratic expertise devoid of political content, and instead proposes the ‘art and craft of the screen’: architecture at the intersection between critical thinking and digital media.

Following the concept of vocational education, the Trade School proposes architectural thinking as forms of knowledge that can be exchanged through ‘how-to’ workshops and Loudreading sessions.

Loudreaders borrows its name from an alternative practice of education in the 20th Century created as tobacco workers engaging in the boring labor of rolling cigars hired one of their own who knew how to read, to read for them during the entire work-day. As the practice of loud-reading grew, the lectores (loud-readers) will become traveling performers with an international audience, creating networks of solidarity all around the Caribbean, as well as a massive, shared and open access oral library to workers who were denied any other form of formal education.

As the practice of the LOUDREADERS shifted to queer, feminists, and anarcho-syndicalists, the texts they would read moved from the classics of ‘Western’ literature to philosophy and literature that shared an emancipatory, decolonial, and anti-capitalist imagination.

The Trade School builds on the tradition of the LOUDREADER while wondering what if, instead of just reading to the workers (with the risk of making their capitalist exploitation more bearable), new forms of education could replace the repetitive labor of destemming tobacco leaves and rolling cigars with subversive techniques for the workers’ emancipation. 

The Trade School proposes the use the techniques of contemporary architectural production in order to construct other worlds. 

Equipped for a world in crisis, worldmakers would be less invested in the apolitical learning of phenomenologies of space and less invested into the passive urban stroll and the contemplative sketch, and instead would learn to engage through flashing screens, and group chats. Instead of visits to historical cities, new forms of intelligence will consist of the hunting and gathering of online paraphernalia. In order to create new worlds, worldmakers would have to navigate the open seas of data and information and be able to perform a “destemming” of ideological content through moving and still images, and critical narratives.

The concept of the Loudreader first as an alternative educator for the uneducated workers, then as a distributor of anti-capitalist imaginations is rethought as a producer of critical positions and new diffusion techniques.

Against the contemporary alienation brought in the form of physical distancing in the times of Covid-19, the disconnection between people and their means of production, and the growing separation between architecture and the rest of society, the Intergalactic Trade School reconsiders the possibility of articulating critical questions, ways of making, and thinking about architecture as knowledge that can be exchanged through public platforms. In search of networks of solidarity and against neoliberal exploitation, Loudreaders adopts the model of the Intergalactic networks that go beyond the links of spoliation enforced by globalization.

Concept Image Sample No.1:

Revolutionary Architecture Case Study: Tobacco Plantation in Cayey, Puerto Rico


Concept Image Sample No.2: