ABSTRACT
While buildings and their subdivided increments have long functioned, at least in part, as assets to invest in, finance capitalism tends to amplify this function and, in the process, impacts the physical form and organisation of architectural space. The financialisation of architecture is now so widespread and normalised that it remains largely, and somewhat paradoxically, beyond scrutiny. This chapter focuses on North American condominium towers, and those in Manhattan and downtown Vancouver specifically, as exemplars of unique spatio-financial formations designed to maximise the investment asset function to the point of displacing architecture's many other possible roles. Financialisation aims to overcome these attributes in increasing real estate's liquidity. Vancouver is an exceptional case of financialised built form. While finance capitalism pulls architectural space away from use value and toward an after-human condition of financial instrumentality it cannot make the transition from one to the other in entirety.
