Form and Fetish : Architecture, the Commodity, and the Ends of Capitalism

For more than half a century, critical theory has seen architecture as an ideological tool of capitalism. Form and Fetish confronts this assumption – developing a new form of critique to fundamentally rethink the relationship between architecture and capitalism at a time of economic crisis and environmental breakdown.

Douglas Spencer, author of the critically acclaimed The Architecture of Neoliberalism, introduces contemporary Marxist theories of value, commodity fetishism, and economic compulsion to examine architecture as a vehicle for accumulation and a means of subjectification. From architectures of luxury in Seoul, Bangkok, and London to climate-controlled enclaves in Singapore, from billionaire real estate in Los Angeles through to Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, Spencer explores how architecture has shaped itself to these ends through its disdain for everyday use and its fetishization of form.

As capitalism buckles under the weight of its own contradictions, Form and Fetish is an appeal to de-fetishize, dis-alienate and re-collectivize the design and construction of the built environment. With its capacity to protect and to shelter, to articulate and mediate our relationships to others and our environments, architecture, Spencer argues, is too essential to be treated as exceptional, too important to be determined by exchange value.

This book is a must-read for architects, architectural theorists, critical theorists and philosophers – all who wish to seize the opportunity to rethink design and building activity as a means to realize collectively conceived ends.