Architecture in the financial-digital era: The design, construction, and rent of form

Contemporary architecture is dangerously enmeshed with the entertainment industry and the field of advertising. This meshing has pushed architectural form to the limits of materiality. Architecture today searches for maximum informational rent, a process typical of global product branding; through this process, established building and production principles are subverted by a play of volumes and effects beyond any rule or limitation. Relying on digital design technologies and the reorganization of the building site, this new fetishism of form, analogous to the autonomization of power and abstract wealth in contemporary capitalism, defines the new condition of architecture. We study this condition by focusing on the work of those architects who are most successful in the current system of professional recognition and rewards. So as to identify this architecture of exception more precisely, we analyze emblematic works from the last twenty years; in these works we identify a set of particularities and recurrent issues that define the political economy of exception and rule today. We begin by analyzing the tangle of meanings associated with contemporary built form. We then move on to the sphere of production from the new technologies of digital design to transformations in the building site. Finally, we examine three processes as they relate to contemporary architecture: circulation (through the proliferation of images in the media), consumption (in particular through the tourist industry), and distribution of wealth. Our investigation reveals that architectural production, in its new stage of conception and realization, is overdetermined by the search for monopoly rent through intrinsic properties of form. We argue that cutting-edge architecture has become one of the most expressive manifestations of flexible accumulation and brand revenue under the prevailing logic of financial capitalism.