RIOT Lecture Series: The Construction of Architecture. Clients, Contractors, and Capital, with Sarah Stevens

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.

Sara Stevens is an architectural historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her book, “Developing Expertise” (Yale University Press, 2016), studies real estate development in twentieth century American cities. She is a member of the collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (aaha.ca), curators of the Canada Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, and currently running a cross-Canada superstudio to end housing alienation (superstudio.aaha.ca).