Connected through Capital: Reading Transnational Investments as Spatial-Temporal Tissue in Architectural History

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed unprecedented levels of global connectivity. This included a flattening of global economic space: as political and economic actors alike called for frictionless global trade following World War II, capital flowed across nation-state borders in new directions and in new ways. In the case of investments in the built environment, these intensifying flows of capital were often accompanied by transnational movements of architects, engineers, and expertise.

In this paper I consider how focusing on transnational movements of capital opens up investigations of architecture, and its histories, that bring together actors and geographies in ways not typically foregrounded by architectural historians. Departing from the understanding of transnational history as a rich subset of global history—that is, to follow historian Pierre-Yves Saunier, a history of the “nuts, bolts, and pipes” of global circulations—I consider transnational investments as entry points into broad spatial-temporal histories of architecture. Following this precise methodological proposition, I highlight my own research that begins from the Belgian investment bank La Société de Belgique to connect mid-century concrete architecture in Canada’s prairie provinces contemporaneously to cement factories in Belgium, the Congo, and the Middle East, and over both space and time to a longer history of colonial exploitation in the Belgian Congo. In this way I bring methods from STS and economic history to the study of architectural history, querying a set of concrete buildings and their financial structures as bearers of long durée global history.