The Spreadsheets of Risk examines how financial logics shape the production of architecture. Today, buildings are increasingly determined by calculations of risk, return, and predictability, translating design decisions into numerical exercises. What can be built, how it is built, and who has access to it is ultimately determined by financial logics rather than spatial, social, or ecological needs. Using the redevelopment of the former ABN AMRO headquarters in Amsterdam’s Zuidas as a site, the project proposes to view architecture as the spatialization of financial abstractions.

At the same time, architecture absorbs the risks that financial models externalize — ecological degradation, social inequality, and material depletion — which unfold over much longer and often irreversible timescales. It is architecture that operates as the transition layer between priced risk and often unpaid consequences.

In a world where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, The Spreadsheets of Risk accepts it as architecture’s contemporary condition. If architecture seeks agency under acceleration, can it do so by using its systemic forces against itself? If risk sits between the speculative and the situated, then architecture — as the materialization of risk — must learn to reorganize, respatialize and retemporalize risks rather than merely absorb them.

The project proposes a model in which these diverging timelines are brought into the same temporal regime by binding financial exposure to the duration of its consequences. This shift repositions architecture from a finished (financial) object to an ongoing process of maintenance, adaptation, and negotiation.

The project received an honourable mention in the Prix de Rome Architecture 2026 and will be exhibited at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.