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SUMMARY:RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients\, C
 ontractors\, and Capital\, with Davide Spina
DTSTART:20260413T143000
DTEND:20260413T160000
DTSTAMP:20260403T222702Z
UID:1cc1f4c49864d1ddbfe51c5db6bb5cc1c50866b1b319e105625e60ab
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Davide Spina \nWho develops\, finances\, and commissions arch
 itecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-i
 nvisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who comm
 ission\, 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 edu
 cation—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's
  deep entanglement with capital\, labor\, and power. Yet building is funda
 mentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach\, sha
 ped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more t
 han design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whose
  research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of archite
 ctural practice through corporate management systems\, the client as a Mep
 histophelean figure key to the attainment of projects\, the contractor as 
 a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced\, and the ent
 anglement of real estate development\, finance\, building\, and urban form
 . By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political econom
 y\, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work prod
 uctively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining h
 ow practice might be organized otherwise.\n\nDavide Spina (University of H
 ong Kong\, online) Spina's award-winning dissertation examined the Vatican
 -controlled real estate developer and contractor SGI (Società Generale Im
 mobiliare)\, which emerged as a major force in postwar Italy's reconstruct
 ion. His research on what journalist Antonio Cederna called "the Leviathan
 " reveals how SGI coordinated 10\,000 employees\, bureaucratized architect
 ural production\, exploited planning regulations\, and delivered schemes f
 rom residential developments to industrial infrastructure. Currently worki
 ng on real estate development in 1960s-70s Hong Kong\, Spina examines how 
 developers and contractors shape architectural culture through corporate m
 anagement systems.\n 
LOCATION:AAC 1 14 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==AAC%201%2014 https://epfl.zo
 om.us/j/67118003322?pwd=Rxn0N5RNHdUNwg0HhBRkRZzWPm8UlX.1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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