‘Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission’ | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/viewpoints/architecture-is-now-a-tool-of-capital-complicit-in-a-purpose-antithetical-to-its-social-mission/8681564.article
As large housing estates are being demolished and the age of great social democracies recedes, taking with it any notion of an architecture for the public, OMA partner Reinier de Graaf asks if there is any alternative to building capital
It is almost a year since Thomas Piketty published his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.1 If Piketty is right, we can once and for all bury the illusion that the present economic system ultimately works in the interest of all and that its benefits will eventually trickle down to the poorest in society. Contrary to what every economist after Keynes has been telling us, the inequality produced by capitalism may not be a temporary phase that will ultimately be overcome; it is rather a structural and inescapable long-term effect of the system itself. Piketty’s analysis is exceedingly simple. He identifies two basic economic categories: income and wealth. He then proceeds to define social (in)equality as a function of the relation between the two over time, concluding that as soon as the return on wealth exceeds the return on labour, social inequality inevitably increases. Those who acquire wealth through work fall ever further behind those who accumulate wealth simply by owning it. Only during the 20th century - under the pressure of two world wars, social unrest, revolutions, labour unions and the daunting presence of a global alternative to the capitalist system in the form of a (former) communist world - only during this unique capsule of time, was capital briefly surpassed by labour as the prime means to accumulate wealth.