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Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

All that is solid melts into air. Then through a process known as sublimation, all gets solid again. This would be a relatively accurate summary of the ideological scaffolding upon which the book Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century by Matthew Soules is based. In some of the lazier narratives that pervade political discourses today, the processes of financialisation of contemporary capitalism are described as agents that dissolve the physical immanence of objects and places. One dominant agency is the ‘market’ driven by processes of immaterial abstraction, as described by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 2004 essay ‘The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time’. Nevertheless, what appears to have disintegrated in one place — the steel factories in Germany or the social housing estates in the UK, for instance — then reappears as a pile of rather real matter somewhere else, as a speculative residential condominium in Vancouver or a fancy waterfront renovation on some Mediterranean destination island. Rather than dwelling in the fascination for algorithmic transactions and immaterial entities such as cybercurrencies, Soules instead confronts head-on real, tangible spaces and objects, primarily buildings, seeing these as the reification of and instruments for the flows of capital that determine the contemporary world. His position is adamant; architecture is not just the byproduct of the process of financialisaton: ‘Architecture is [...] finance capitalism’ (p. 31). Let us skip the preface, where the author presents the customary litany of homages to peers, and dive into the carefully constructed and breathtaking sequence of arguments in the introduction and eight chapters that followed. After the introduction that deals with financialisation, the rise of neoliberal governance, and globalisation, the first chapter posits the cornerstone of the book, establishing the inextricable bonds between the forms of financialisation of the current phase of capitalist development with real estate and housing. Soules considers the centrality of real estate as the unique economic sector in numerous economies through a careful, critical reading of authors such as Jameson Review by Fabrizio Gallanti arc-en-rêve centre d’architecture Bordeaux, France fabriziogallanti@arcenreve.eu 168 Review