Results
November 14, 2011

Workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau 14-18 Nov. 2011

After Levittown - The Architecture of the Real Estate Market

The Architecture of the Real Estate Market
This theme investigates the connection between architectural production, spatial development and the financial markets. In the 1980s, a transformation has set in away from investing in immobile capital, i.e. land, and towards investing in liquid assets that can be transferred across national borders in the form of funds and portfolios. Thus ownership has been decoupled to a hitherto unknown extent from the location of the assets. A new international ‘financial market architecture’ has emerged, which spawns speculative building projects, but even more so asset structures, in which even the project financing risk has become the object of a pyramid selling type of speculation. It was the American suburbia’s foreclosure crisis in which hundreds of mortgage borrowers lost their homes that ultimately uncovered the fragility of the financial markets.
The researched data and information will be translated into maps and diagrams visualizing the complex relationships and nexus between infrastructures, financial flows, ation, actor-networks and institutions. The results of the mapping workshop will be integrated in the existing working exhibition.