RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients, Contractors, and Capital, with Tiffanie Paré

Who develops, finances, and commissions architecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who commission, 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 education—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's deep entanglement with capital, labor, and power. Yet building is fundamentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach, shaped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whose research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of architectural practice through corporate management systems, the client as a Mephistophelean figure key to the attainment of projects, the contractor as a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced, and the entanglement of real estate development, finance, building, and urban form. By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political economy, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work productively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining how practice might be organized otherwise.

Tiffanie Paré is an architect and researcher. She earned a B.Sc. in Architecture from McGill University (2019) and a Master’s degree in Architecture from EPFL (2022). Alongside her academic research, she has worked as an independent architect and as a research assistant at EPFL’s Laboratory THEMA and the Archives de la Construction Moderne (ACM). She has also served as a jury member for architectural competitions, including the SIA 142 competition for the expansion of CFPne and HEPIA in Geneva. She is currently leading her doctoral research project “Contractor as More-Than Builder” at EPFL, funded by the Doc.ch SNSF, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Sarah Nichols (EPFL) and Prof. Dr. Davide Spina (HKU). Her research examines the historical role of building contractors in shaping building culture in Switzerland and beyond.