RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients, Contractors, and Capital, with Davide Spina

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.

Davide Spina (University of Hong Kong, online) Spina's award-winning dissertation examined the Vatican-controlled real estate developer and contractor SGI (Società Generale Immobiliare), which emerged as a major force in postwar Italy's reconstruction. His research on what journalist Antonio Cederna called "the Leviathan" reveals how SGI coordinated 10,000 employees, bureaucratized architectural production, exploited planning regulations, and delivered schemes from residential developments to industrial infrastructure. Currently working on real estate development in 1960s-70s Hong Kong, Spina examines how developers and contractors shape architectural culture through corporate management systems.