The Spreadsheets of Risk by Rik Lambers

Has the spreadsheet replaced the drawing?

What gets built, how do we build it and who has access to it? With architecture increasingly being absorbed into real estate, the answer is often not found in the architect’s drawings but in the spreadsheet. Calculations of risk, return, and predictability turn design decisions into numerical exercises. The Spreadsheets of Risk proposes to view architecture as the spatialization of these financial abstractions, using the former ABN AMRO headquarters at Amsterdam’s Zuidas as a casestudy.

But what happens to everything that these financial calculations leave out? Ecological degradation, material depletion and social consequences of architecture unfold over timescales that far exceed those of financial investment. By bringing these conflicting timelines into the same frame, the project asks how architecture might reconnect decisions to their consequences. Rather than simply absorbing the risks that finance externalizes, could architecture reorganize them, creating new relationships between capital, material and time?