{"title":"The “Legitimized Architecture” of Minsk World: Primitive Accumulation through Housing under Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Belarus","authors":"Dasha Kuletskaya","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2056214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2056214","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Analysing the contemporary housing development Minsk World as a paradigmatic case of the authoritarian neoliberal shift in housing delivery in Belarus, this paper focuses on the intersections of law, finance and architecture. This paper makes three contributions to the debate on the neoliberal shift in housing delivery and the role architecture plays within it. First, it challenges the widely held opinion that the neoliberal shift in housing delivery never happened in Belarus. Second, it explores how building codes and regulations governing certain aspects of housing delivery can be overcome through political intervention by an autocratic head of state. In so doing, the paper introduces the concept of “legitimized architecture” as a way of describing the spatial dimensions of laws, codes and regulations. Third, it highlights the role of architecture, as professional practice, in normalizing the legal reforms that have facilitated the commodification of urban housing in Belarus.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"105 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45205816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financing the Modern Research University: The Ciudad Universitaria de Buenos Aires by Caminos and Catalano (1959–66)","authors":"M. Moro","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2106500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2106500","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The new campus of the Universidad de Buenos Aires entered architectural discourse in 1967 with a publication on the design of its typical block. While the university was considered the epicentre of urban and architectural development in Latin America, contemporary descriptions of the new Ciudad Universitaria assumed a technical tone and focused on structural diagrams and managerial tools. This article examines the spatial implications of this episode, which are inextricably connected with a sophisticated financial process within the bureaucratic apparatus of the university. It reveals the extraordinary managerial skills and mediation practices of university authorities—attempting to liberate capital flows in their favour—in ensuring a fruitful dialogue with executives and intermediaries of foreign private entities. An analysis of the hollowed-out typical block building designed by Argentine architects and educators Horacio Caminos and Eduardo Catalano traces the uneven delimitation of the urban interior as the new contested territory where knowledge production is controversially cultivated.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"126 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43137274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financialized Space","authors":"Jasper Ludewig, M. Koehler","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2106083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2106083","url":null,"abstract":"In 1826, Johann Heinrich von Th€ unen published Der isolierte Staat (The Isolated State), his famous early study in agricultural location theory. Von Th€ unen imagined a city situated on an endless and uniform plain surrounded by concentric rings denoting decreasing intensities of agricultural production as distances from the center increased (fig. 1). This model enabled von Th€ unen to formulate an ideal economy in which the land rent in each ring would gradually decrease toward zero as transport to the urban market became increasingly expensive relative to the value of the commodities being produced. The further away from the city, the cheaper the rent, until the “wilderness” beyond—comparatively worthless because unable to reliably furnish the market with commodities. Von Th€ unen’s model is neat and has clear implications, pointing both to the inherent qualities of the goods being produced and conveyed—the perishability of the fruit grown in the inner rings versus the durability of the timber harvested from the outer forests—as well as the potential of improved technology and infrastructure to create artificial proximities between center and periphery. Of course, this neatness also relies on a set of abstractions that are not found in reality: no city is so isolated, no commodity market is so centralized, modes of production are never so stable, natural conditions are never so uniform or predictable and no land economy is ever so free from speculation. But as William Cronon notes in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), his acclaimed environmental history of the productive system linking nineteenthcentury Chicago to the Great West, “none of these ‘distortions’ undermines von Th€ unen’s underlying principles. [... ] The ways people value the products of the soil, and decide how much it costs to get those products to market, together shape the landscape we inhabit.” And, as Cronon also notes, this soil and these landscapes were always already owned and occupied before being subjected to the practices of settler-colonial development. Later studies continued to adopt the underlying principles of von Th€ unen’s zonal model—from the Chicago School’s ring theories of urban growth, to nineteenth-century attempts to predict Parisian real estate prices—even as the increasing complexity of markets rendered commodity values more and more abstract. Today, in the age of so-called “planetary urbanization,” von Th€ unen’s rings have become vectors of consumption and production, radiating around the globe and inscribing themselves into an earth increasingly shaped and structured according to the extractive logic of capital. This issue of Architectural Theory Review was conceived and developed at a unique moment within the history of capitalism, when the first phases of the Covid-19 pandemic had given way to a global recession. Debt was cheap, placing the built environment’s imbrications with finance into sharp relief. Economic stimulus and tax concessions sparked real ","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42429096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financialized Berlin: The Monetary Transformation of Housing, Architecture and Polity","authors":"Anne Kockelkorn","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2104889","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2104889","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A financialized real estate market is both an abstraction of global capital flows and a localized driver of gentrification. Under this premise, architectural form and urban design become a performance of contradicting value formations. Drawing on the methods of urban history, geography, architectural criticism and performative writing strategies, this paper develops a theoretical perspective on the architecture of financialized rental housing based on a relational understanding of architecture and social space. The paper’s point of departure is the financialization of Germany’s social rental housing stock. Recent housing projects undertaken in the metropolitan region of Berlin by the real estate investment companies Vonovia SE and Deutsche Wohnen SE serve as case studies. The analysis identifies five strategies for cost-optimization that, taken together, outline the characteristics of an ideal city of financialization which promotes the destruction of social cohesion in the interests of shareholders.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"76 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46996649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fast Building: Money, Management and Risk at London’s Chelsea Harbour Development","authors":"C. Rice","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2049613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2049613","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Linking the financialization of architecture to commercial property development in the context of deregulation, this article examines the case of Chelsea Harbour, a seventeen-building mixed-use development completed in 1988 on the banks of the River Thames in West London. Ray Moxley, the architect who brought the project to fruition, was a proponent of what became known as fast building, a practice that used speed in the design and construction process as a means of holistic project control. In the 1970s, Moxley had developed what he called the Alternative Method of Management (AMM), an approach to project management that positioned the architect as the lynchpin of the construction process, directing all work on site and producing detailed construction drawings “just in time” as projects progressed. The article examines the fast-building practices Moxley instituted at Chelsea Harbour and situates them relative to larger shifts in planning and regulatory frameworks in the United Kingdom. The article argues that speed worked as a means by which the architect could negotiate these large-scale changes. In particular, the spatial innovation of Chelsea Harbour’s two centrepiece atrium buildings repositioned the architect as the manager of risk.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"56 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42147978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parcel, Bubble, Shell: The Insular Environment of Finance","authors":"Alexandra Quantrill","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2052915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2052915","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores how the design of an insurance brokerage for Willis Faber & Dumas by Foster Associates architects meticulously accommodate an increasingly constricted financial sphere. It analyzes links between privatization and delimitation across various scales: from material and spatial implications within the building, to its role in urban development schemes, to the intersection of domestic social and economic policies with international finance. The analysis centers on the local spatial implications of the United Kingdom’s transition in the 1970s away from a social democratic system that privileged industrial labor and manufactured goods, toward becoming an international center for the transaction of “invisibles” within a global financial market. The architects of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters described an “interiorized” architecture, with a diaphanous mirrored glass envelope maximizing views to the outside world while intensifying an inward focus. This paradigm of enclosure produced a model of internality particular to the outward expansion of capital.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"195 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43483520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Risk in “the Room:” Negotiating New Economic Paradigms in the Architecture of Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market","authors":"Amy Thomas","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2067202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2067202","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Today Richard Rogers + Partners’ Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s of London—known as “the Room”—is recognized as an icon of the High Tech movement, its modernity aestheticized through intersecting banks of escalators and a soaring twelve-story atrium. Yet on closer inspection, this interior represents a less satisfactory compromise. The product of years of protracted negotiations with a three hundred-year-old institution, the Room was conceived at a moment when the concept of risk, and the foundations of the insurance market, were transformed due to environmental crises, technological innovations and global financial deregulation. This paper contends that the changing nature of risk was mitigated through complex consultations over the design of the Room, simultaneously demanding new architectural solutions, whilst preserving the institution’s spatial and object-oriented rituals and mythologies. It concludes that the new Room, and the design process underpinning it, was a mode of institutional risk management in an age of uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"7 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41755086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Caley Horan, P. Hudson, M. Koehler, Jasper Ludewig, Amy Thomas, Alexia M. Yates
{"title":"Built Orders of Finance, Risk, and Racial Capitalism","authors":"Caley Horan, P. Hudson, M. Koehler, Jasper Ludewig, Amy Thomas, Alexia M. Yates","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2112829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2112829","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This issue of ATR considers numerous instances in which economic historians and historians of capitalism have turned to architecture as evidence of the workings of economic and financial systems. This collective position paper stems from the attempt to engage more directly with these disciplines; an attempt that was first manifested in the symposium “Built Orders of Finance, Risk and Racial Capitalism,” held online in early 2022. How are built orders shaped by processes of financialization, actuarial calculations of risk and the conditions of racial capitalism? How do built orders mobilize specific economic regimes? What kinds of evidence can be enlisted to discern the constitutive relationships established and maintained between architecture and regimes of finance? What scales are implied in these relationships? What is involved in their historicization? This article invites future conversations between the fields of scholarship it canvases to more comprehensively apprehend the terms, conditions, and histories of financialized space.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"213 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48678963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Speculation’s Spatial Terms: Imminence and Inevitability in Amaravati","authors":"S. Devabhaktuni","doi":"10.1080/13264826.2022.2089185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2089185","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper considers the interruption of Amaravati, a project for a new state capital in southern India. I argue that the terms and conditions of Amaravati’s financing had specific spatial consequences at multiple scales. The discussion traces the deterritorialization of an agrarian landscape into speculative real estate through so-called “land pooling.” It considers the new technologies and modes of governance that facilitated this speculation and catalyzed an “all-over, all-at-once” infrastructural strategy that organized construction work synchronously on scattered sites spread across 217 square kilometers of land. The expedited construction of government housing blocks—using monolithic in situ casting techniques—further supported the financialized terms of development, emphasizing the imminence and inevitability of the future capital as a means of securing private investment from around the world. As Amaravati’s ultimate demise suggests, the abstractions of contemporary global finance can be grasped through a close reading of their architectural manifestations.","PeriodicalId":43786,"journal":{"name":"Architectural Theory Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"147 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48804364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}