Architectures of Finance

The everyday functioning of global capitalism relies on seemingly abstract and smooth financial transactions over vast territories. Studying these processes architecturally foregrounds the material reality of the “immaterial” system of finance. This reveals the frictions the system creates, and thereby elucidates how its power is produced and subverted across borders.

The Minerva group “Architectures of Finance” examines how capital—understood as a forward-looking process for wealth creation—operates on the ground. Architecture, we suggest, actualizes notions such as debt and property, turning investments’ financial and legal claims into complex material power relations. This built environment emerges from and mediates the modern financial system; its aesthetics, we further propose, enables specific capitalist forms to become functional.

The group’s case studies range from nineteenth-century German financial imperialism in the Ottoman Empire to the offshore world of tax havens arising from decolonial and neocolonial processes in the middle of the twentieth century. The cases direct attention to the ways that finance is literally set in stone in bank buildings, gold mines or commercial infrastructure. By doing so, the group illuminates critical moments in the history of capitalism, moments that cast long shadows into the twenty-first century.