Economy and architecture: toward a quantitative historiography of architectural production

Abstract

This article examines why economic factors, defined through regulation, land, finance, and labour, have remained difficult to integrate into architectural historiography despite repeated attempts to move beyond stylistic, author-centred, and discourse-driven accounts of architectural change. Rather than offering a case study, it provides a historiographic and methodological commentary on a persistent explanatory problem — architecture's economic conditions are often acknowledged yet rarely reconstructed as historical mechanisms that can be systematically related to architectural production and expression. Revisiting key interventions on the relationship between architecture and economy, as well as more recent scholarship on finance and neoliberalism, the article argues that the central gap is not simply conceptual but methodological. What has been missing are reproducible ways to mobilise administrative records, digitised archives, and other structured datasets at scale, so that economic change can be traced as evidence rather than invoked through broad period labels alone. The article, therefore, proposes a quantitative historiography of architectural production, one that treats ordinary building activity as a privileged site where systemic economic conditions register most clearly. In doing so, it argues that categories such as postmodernism and neoliberalism can become testable hypotheses rather than retrospective explanations, and that economic mechanisms can be connected more explicitly to architectural expression.