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SUMMARY:RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients\, C
 ontractors\, and Capital\, with Sarah Stevens
DTSTART:20260223T160000
DTEND:20260223T173000
DTSTAMP:20260416T122859Z
UID:33891080bfb5bcc5b7380d9af1496097547e2316c8cfd0dc9e0d635a
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Sara Stevens \nWho develops\, finances\, and commissions arc
 hitecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-
 invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who com
 mission\, the contractors who build\, and the capital flows that determine
  what gets realized. While architects are trained to focus on design\, the
  political economy of construction is largely absent from architectural ed
 ucation—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture'
 s deep entanglement with capital\, labor\, and power. Yet building is fund
 amentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach\, sh
 aped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more 
 than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whos
 e research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of archit
 ectural practice through corporate management systems\, the client as a Me
 phistophelean figure key to the attainment of projects\, the contractor as
  a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced\, and the en
 tanglement of real estate development\, finance\, building\, and urban for
 m. By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political econo
 my\, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work pro
 ductively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining 
 how practice might be organized otherwise.\n\nSara Stevens is an archite
 ctural historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her b
 ook\, “Developing Expertise” (Yale University Press\, 2016)\, studies 
 real estate development in twentieth century American cities. She is a mem
 ber of the collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (aaha.ca)\, cu
 rators of the Canada Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale\, a
 nd currently running a cross-Canada superstudio to end housing alienation 
 (superstudio.aaha.ca). 
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