What Can Piketty Teach Us About Architecture?

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is one example invoked by de Graaf of an architecture formerly designed around social equality and now co-opted by capital. Image © Flickr user: wojtekgurak licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Last year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century took the world of economics by storm. His historical analysis and critique of the capitalist system fed perfectly into the wider narrative being constructed in the wake of the global financial crisis. But what lessons does Piketty hold for architects? In an article for The Architect’s Newspaper, OMA partner Reinier de Graaf examines the way that the development of architecture in the 21st century mirrored that of economics, as the design of buildings became simultaneously a symptom and a cause of trends in capital. Read the full article – including de Graaf’s question for the architects of the 21st century – here.

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