Labor is central to the discipline of architecture and has been the subject of philosophical, economic, and societal concerns for centuries. In this Building Shop, labor is the organization of human force that enables the time-based material production of a building. The contemporary relationship between architecture and labor highlights the conflict between post-industrial manufacturing, material production, and automated forms of labor. 

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In the second half of the 20th century, the late Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste combined a local traditional material like brick with the advent of steel. Dieste developed four structural ceramic (cerámica armada) innovations using steel reinforced brick masonry: Gaussian Vaults, Self-Supporting Vaults, Folded Plates, and Ruled Surfaces. Each innovation was based on resisting gravity through form by making double curvature geometries. These geometries were built using kinetic formwork machines (encofrados). 

Eladio Dieste Building Shop 4.0 focuses on the graphical representation of labor by studying historical workflows through contemporary electronic media. Students make computer models and images of the Encofrados used to construct the gaussian vaults of four buildings constructed by Eladio Dieste’s practice in Uruguay.