Architecture is generally regarded as a benefit to society because, through its most visible structures, it expresses cultural values. At the same time, however, buildings convey information about the society they inhabit, even in ways that go beyond mere representation. They spatially reflect the political and economic conditions of a given place and time, thereby making socio-political relationships visible in both their form and function.

There are at least two ways in which the economics of buildings—encompassing architectural design as well as everything that follows construction and during the building’s use—is reflected in political economy. The first is relatively straightforward: expensive buildings often serve elite users, such as museums and other cultural institutions, luxury hotels, private villas, or ostentatious mansions. The second way is less obvious: buildings with high technical requirements often serve elite users indirectly. The most striking examples are high-security prisons, but also hospitals, zoos, universities, and government buildings, which control, restrict, or exclude individuals operating outside the law (in the broadest sense).

Why have those who study buildings as cultural assets often failed to link building economics with political economy, even though this connection can be directly analyzed? The answer reflects the historical separation of individual disciplines and professional fields. Engineers went one way, architects another. Careful cost tracking accompanied the former, but not the latter. Architects could thus claim that “architecture” has a value exceeding the sum of its parts and that the value of buildings understood as cultural assets cannot be measured in florins, francs, or yuan spent on their construction. However, this well-known historical development can be rethought; understanding the relationship between cost and value remains an important challenge for the field.

In this lecture, I seek to link the economic profile of buildings with their use and to trace the connections between class, race, and access to resources that reveal how social inequality can be recognized—and potentially addressed—in architecture and the built environment. This is not an assault on the barricades, but a conceptual leap over them, driven by an effort toward a critical history of privilege.

Claire Zimmerman focuses on the history of architecture and the built environment in general. Her work focuses on discourses that persist from the past to the present and seeks to formulate historical questions that help architects, historians, and students navigate contemporary challenges. Her publications include: Albert Kahn Inc: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905–1961 (MIT Press, 2025), Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (co-edited with Reinhold Martin, Minnesota 2024), and Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization (co-edited with J.-L. Cohen and C. Crawford, MIT Press, 2023). The Costs of Architecture (Grey Room 71 [2018], co-editors L. Allais and Z. Çelik Alexander) explores the topic of construction costs and their significance for the history of the built environment. Claire Zimmerman earned her B.A. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1985) and her M.A. from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1990). She received her Ph.D. in art history in 2005 from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. From 2026 to 2027, she served as editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She currently directs the doctoral program in architecture, landscape architecture, and design at the University of Toronto, where she also serves as a professor of architectural history.