RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients, Contractors, and Capital, with Irène Brisson

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.


Irene Brisson is a built environment scholar whose research, teaching, and practice center historically marginalized building cultures and designers in Haiti and the African diaspora within a radically expanded field of global architectural history. Their current book project, Kreyòl Architecture: Designing Haitian Dwellings, is based on their extended ethnographic research with architects, planners, bòsmason, non-governmental organizations, and residents engaged in housebuilding in Leyogàn, Haiti. Dr. Brisson is a co-director of the Caribbean Spatial Justice Lab, a network of transdisciplinary and transnational design researchers committed to addressing escalating inequality and climate vulnerability in the greater Caribbean region and its diasporas.