Architecture and Money

Lucia Allais and Zeynep Çelik Alexander

Even though architecture’s dependency on economic structures is frequently acknowledged, architectural history has paid surprisingly little attention to this relationship. This course visits a series of themes that have been the focus of the recent scholarship on the history of capitalism—real estate, speculation, optimization, aid, credit/debt, insurance etc.—in an attempt to better understand architectural discourses’ historical relationship with the economy. Particular attention will be paid to texts and artifacts that help rethink traditional periodizations of architectural modernity and its historiographic geography.