Architecture and Capital in the 21st Century: An Interview with Matthew Soules

Author: Erick Villagomez (interviewer) & Matthew Soules
Year: 2022 (Spacing Vancouver interview, on Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, 2021)
Source type: article (interview)
Raw file: raw/articles/villagomez-soules-2022-architecture-capital-interview.md

Summary

This interview with Matthew Soules, author of Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2021), distils the book's central thesis: contemporary buildings are best understood as spatio-financial constructs. Buildings always fulfil three roles — providing shelter, manifesting culture, and embodying wealth — but since roughly 1980 the rise of financialization has massively increased the wealth function of buildings, physically and operationally mutating them and their cities to serve the logic of finance. Soules outlines five characteristics of "finance capitalist architecture" and discusses how renderings function as finance technology.

Key Claims

• Buildings are spatio-financial constructs: all buildings simultaneously shelter, manifest culture, and embody wealth; financialization (since ~1980) has "significantly increased" the wealth function, so "buildings, and cities along with them, have physically and operationally mutated to better serve the logic of finance."
• Avatars of financialization: "iceberg homes" (large underground portions), "zombie urbanism" (owned-but-unoccupied units), and "ultra-thin residential towers."
• The five characteristics of finance capitalist architecture: (1) inherently unstable, creating spaces of crisis; (2) functions as speculative wealth storage; (3) a means of uneven development and heightened inequality; (4) a simultaneous propensity for highly iconic and extremely standardized spaces (standardization increases exchangeability/liquidity; iconicity attracts investors); and (5) — the most important — it increases the liquidity of buildings and their subdivided increments.
• Liquidity is engineered against social entanglement: financialization "de-socializes buildings"; the preference for "ultra-thinness" and "super podiums" (tall slender condo towers) literally diminishes neighbourly interaction, "in itself serves to advance liquidity."
• Inequality and "ethical insulation": drawing on Piketty, finance capitalist architecture entrenches speculation, escalating prices so the wealthy gain while others are left behind. "Philanthropic urbanism" (development levies funding social goods) offers "a form of ethical insulation that allows investors to ultimately conceal a system of massive exploitation with small benevolent acts." Soules cites Westbank's Vancouver House's "one-for-one real estate gifting" to Cambodia as an example.
• Renderings as finance technology: photo-realistic renderings are integral to the pre-sales condo market, which Soules calls "a market for the exchange of renderings." Rendering software is "just as much finance technology as it is architectural technology"; it favours viewing (remote, socially disentangled) over inhabitation, "in itself favours the logic of financialization."
• Response/agency: architects should engage real-estate finance as a creative/critical opportunity, and design housing that enables "deep and variegated social relations" — "an inherent and important challenge to the logic of financialization."

Connections

Concepts: Neoliberal Metropolis · Architectural Object · Gentrification · Consumerism · Iconic Architecture
Authors: Matthew Soules · David Harvey · Pedro Levi Bismarck
Related source notes: The Architecture of the City... (Bismarck) · The Enigma of Capital (Harvey) · The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Spencer)

Direct Quotes

"A primary argument of the book is that contemporary buildings are best understood as spatio-financial constructs."

"In the pursuit of heightened liquidity, there has been a preference for building form that encourages flat and disentangled anti-sociality."

"I think of contemporary rendering software as being just as much finance technology as it is architectural technology."

"Philanthropy... offers a form of ethical insulation that allows investors to ultimately conceal a system of massive exploitation with small benevolent acts."

Open Questions

• How does Soules's "de-socializing"/liquidity account of the ultra-thin tower connect to Bismarck's "architectural object" (the building as an "apparatus for the making of the indebted man") — are these complementary financialization critiques?
• Soules's five characteristics offer a systematic vocabulary for financialization — could this be developed into a synthesis or concept page?