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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture

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Vol. 1

Letter from the Editor - 
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds - 
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function - 
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd - 
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia - 
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture - 
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture - 
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi - 
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? - 
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia- 
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model - 
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion - 
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism - 
Nolan Aucone

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CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E7

From Fi-Fi to De-Fi: 
On the Architecture of Crypto Capitalism
Scott Gleason



Architecture does not exist in a vacuum — digitally or physically — as design decisions are intertwined in a complex system of social, ethical, political, and economic multipliers. But where does the line between architecture’s agency as an actor of design and larger societal phenomena begin to blur? Synthesizing the readings in this seminar, Matthew Soules’ Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultrathin1 and Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft,2 it can be argued that a new type of finance acts as an entangled multiplier with design that could be called De-Fi, or Decentralized Finance. Soules argues that following the 2008 Global Financial crisis, the architecture of finance capitalism has changed dramatically, where real estate has shifted ideals to be viewed primarily for wealth storage and speculation rather than a social good. Today, the current housing crisis — exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and artificial inflation of commodities and assets — and the emergence of decentralized digital markets and assets have changed the global landscape and our relationships with the built environment.

This thesis looks to pick up where Soules left off, extending his critique into purely digital realms like blockchain technology and decentralized finance, where the speculative architecture of “ultra-thins” has intensified while disrupting wealth inequality on a global scale. Where physical property now exists as digital images, renderings and tokens fully detach from any materiality and social/ethical implications. Cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) should not be understood merely as technological or financial innovations, but as architectural systems that reorganize ownership, space, and power through code rather than buildings. In this sense, crypto represents the fully dematerialized continuation of speculative architecture, where financial abstraction, control, and inequality are intensified rather than resolved.

Blockchain-based technologies now intersect with architectural practice through mechanisms such as deed and title transfer, tokenized ownership, and AI-generated imagery, signaling a shift in how architectural value is produced and exchanged. In 2020 alone, Bitcoin rose from roughly $5,000 to over $65,000, while the U.S. Federal Reserve printed approximately $3.8 trillion — equivalent to nearly 20 percent of all dollars ever created — illustrating the scale and speed at which speculative capital now operates.3

These developments raise the question posed by theorist McKenzie Wark in Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? If information is the primary commodity, and power is exercised through control of data and vectors, are we still operating within capitalism, or have we entered a more extractive system altogether?4 Traditional capitalism required ownership of the means of production. Today, power increasingly lies in controlling the “vector” through which value flows. Platforms such as Uber and Airbnb exemplify this shift: they own neither cars nor buildings yet extract enormous value by controlling the digital infrastructures that organize labor and space.

To understand the digital systems at play shaping this modern version of finance capitalism, it’s important to define some of the terms that Soules and Easterling propose. For Soules, “speculative architecture” is defined as architecture shifting from being about social mobility and cultural ideals we traditionally associate with home to being bought and sold primarily for profit and wealth storage. He defines sub-types of these speculations: Iceberg Homes, typically seen in London; Zombie and Ghost Urbanism, or unlived-in space; and Ultra-Thin high-rise luxury residential towers such as 432 Park Ave. Easterling highlights “active forms” that act as “multipliers” within a complex system: social, political, economic “invisible forces” that exploit and control without physical force. These invisible forces are enacted by “actors,” following Latour. These actors are CEO’s, prominent political figures, hedge fund bankers, developers, and other power brokers who control and manipulate systems that control the global capitalistic society.

In relation to today’s cryptographic ecosystems, we observe new digital multipliers such as De-Fi, the blockchain, and Smart Contracts seen in the Ethereum ecosystem. Blockchain, the infrastructure that all cryptocurrencies operate on, is a never-ending code that records data and transactions, mathematically encrypted in chronological order and verified through network participants (termed “nodes”) through a consensus mechanism, making it tamper-proof and central oversight unnecessary. Smart contracts, for example, are most notably associated with Ethereum and parameterized by the blockchain; a digital contract that can be programmed so that a predetermined action happens once certain requirements are met.5 These tools form the groundwork for De-Fi, creating a financial typology that allows lending, trading, and coding to operate entirely digitally via code, bypassing traditional banks and legal institutions.  By coding wealth inequalities, digital flows of optimization flourish in a new form of capitalism, an evolution of Soules’ idea of “financial fiction (Fi-Fi).”

Although DeFi is often framed as a break from traditional finance, its architectural consequences mirror those of speculative urbanism. Architecture produced under finance capitalism increasingly follows the logic of “form follows profit,” prioritizing image, monumentality, and abstraction over lived experience. Ultrathin towers, ghost urbanism, and context-blind megaprojects reflect the same detachment seen in tokenized assets and virtual property. These buildings function less as spaces for inhabitation and more as interfaces for capital accumulation, reinforcing the idea that architecture now operates as a financial instrument. In the words of the late Frank Gehry, “In this world we are living in, 98% of what gets built today is pure shit. There's no sense of design, no respect for humanity or anything else.”6 Gehry’s dismissal of most contemporary buildings as lacking any real concern for people points to the same conditions this thesis examines: how today’s architecture is increasingly shaped by speculative finance, in which both physical structures and digital platforms function less as places for living and more as mechanisms for moving and multiplying capital.

Frank Gehry flips the bird

The contrast between traditional finance and De-Fi becomes visible when examining the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters in Manhattan. Designed by Foster + Partners,  the building presents itself as a progressive, net-zero, all-electric tower with expanded public space. Yet despite its technological sophistication, it represents the architectural language of the old financial guard: monumental, centralized, and physically dominant. Its form embodies power, control, and visibility, qualities historically associated with finance. While De-Fi operates through invisible code and decentralized networks, the Chase building reasserts traditional power through mass, height, and permanence. Its presence underscores the tension between legacy architectural power and the dematerialized systems that increasingly govern capital. Unlike centralized banking institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, De-Fi operates without physical headquarters, legal intermediaries, or centralized control, yet it reproduces many of the same speculative architectural logics.


J.P. Morgan Chase’s New Manhattan HQ



Digital systems also reshape labor and exploitation at a global scale. Platforms such as HappyCashier — which employ remote workers operating through tablets and video feeds — demonstrate how digital vectors extract labor across borders while masking inequitable working conditions.7 A viral image shared by Michael Dell during post-pandemic return-to-office mandates shows rows of empty desks and glowing computer monitors capturing this disjunction vividly.8 Work persists, but bodies are absent. Labor becomes ghostly, mediated entirely through screens and networks. Architecture remains, but its social function erodes as productivity becomes unbound from place and time.


Dystopian Image inside of the New J.P Morgan Chase Building being Mocked as the Buzz Lightyear Toy Aisle 
Happy Cashier Virtual Assistant


These patterns are not confined to office work. The mining of rare earth elements, the siting of data centers in drought-prone regions, and the offshoring of content moderation and other digital tasks all tie the everyday use of devices and platforms in the Global North to ecological damage and labor exploitation elsewhere. What is often framed as ‘virtual’ finance still depends on the very material infrastructures that are unevenly
distributed and intensely resource-hungry. This post-colonialism urbanism that technology has heightened has a profound impact; for this technology to exist, rare minerals and precious metals often mined in the Global South must be extracted. Doing so links local life to global systems of exploitation. Meanwhile, broadband networks and telecommunications infrastructure are largely owned by multinational corporations, and the flows of data and information through these systems enrich those same corporations

Unfortunately, technology has made it easier to spread power and exploitative control to the Global South and beyond — the smartphone being the biggest example. The gamification of smartphone applications is intentional. Robinhood is a clear example of how trading is turned into a game: during the COVID-19 pandemic, the app’s user base and trading activity surged, driven by an interface built around reward loops, visual effects, and constant prompts to trade.9 The gamified app recalls the Monopoly board game, which was originally designed to show how landlordism concentrates wealth; a didactic critique has been absorbed
into popular culture as entertainment.10 In a similar way, crypto, De-Fi, and speculative property markets now
function like a global game board, where risk is abstracted into screens and tokens while the costs are displaced onto workers, tenants, and landscapes far from the sites of decision-making.

Robinhood’s Gamified Interface

These algorithmic systems further complicate the relationship between architecture, governance, and power. As Easterling argues in Extrastatecraft, these systems operate as a medium of control, shaping outcomes through design decisions embedded in code. AI-mass surveillance systems, spearheaded by firms like Palantir, are utilized at the U.S.-Mexico border. An article posted in the American Immigration Council points out the design decisions, justification, and political ramifications of such systems, saying,

  •               “Palantir argues that it just provides the tools. It doesn’t decide who gets targeted, deported, or surveillance. Yet design choices shape real-world outcomes. Essentially, AI Architecture becomes policy. While the full technical design of ImmigrationOS is still emerging, past examples show why it’s important to closely scrutinize the construction of algorithmic systems, which can produce bias and inaccurate outcomes.”

A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that COMPAS, a risk-assessment tool designed by a private software firm Northpointe that is widely used in the criminal justice system, was nearly twice as likely to incorrectly label black defendants as high risk for recidivism than white defendants. It also incorrectly labeled white defendants as lower risk for recidivism than similarly scored black defendants.  These weren’t just technical errors. They were design decisions — based on which data the algorithm used, how it weighed different factors, and how it categorized risk. The resulting scores were presented to judges at critical moments in the legal process, shaping decisions about sentencing and release and impacting the lives of thousands of people subject to incarceration and prosecution. This is the danger of treating algorithmic systems as neutral: despite their decentralized automation capacities, they are fundamentally still created by people, clearly reflecting human judgment, bias, and prioritization.”11    

Gabriel Fuentes’s work on Architecture in a Post-Truth World interprets Robin Evans’ “rights of retreat and rights of exclusion” by underscoring this point:

  •                “The medium is the message: protectionist partition and isolationist infrastructure. For Evans, the architecture of retreat, of keeping out, and the architecture of exclusion, of locking in, are two sides of the same coin.”12

In algorithmic systems like ImmigrationOS, code replaces walls, yet the effects are spatially real. Borders, access, and exclusion are designed not through buildings, but through interfaces and databases.

The tokenization of real estate represents one of the most direct intersections between architecture and De-Fi. Platforms such as Propy13  and Polymath14 enable property ownership, transfer, and fractionalization through blockchain-based systems. While these tools promise transparency and accessibility, they further abstract land and housing from local context and community. During peak COVID, both RealPage and Greystar Property Management — one of America's biggest landlords — were caught in a collusion scheme, using an algorithm that shared sensitive market data to artificially price fix for landlords.15 Zillow, America’s most popular app for market listings, has also recently come under fire, accused of using AI to enhance property images and even lying about conditions of said properties.16 Both in architecture and real estate, price fixing and colluding are considered unethical and illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Laws levied against the AIA and, more recently, the 2024 NAR laws for real estate. In these cases, code does not eliminate manipulation; it systematizes it. Responsibility becomes diffuse, authorship obscured, and regulation increasingly difficult.

Virtual environments such as Decentraland and The Sandbox extend these De-Fi dynamics into fully dematerialized space. Here, architecture exists solely as financial surface; tradable, speculative, and detached from material constraint. As MetaHaven writes in White Night Before a Manifesto:

  •               “Surface will multiply beyond any laws of supply or demand formally called information overload, is the new reality of design. Its unit of measurement is virtual. Separate from territory, which is limited; surface is to territory what speculative capitalism is to gold. Surface being anorexic, and Hyper-Thin is a pre-condition to virtual capital adding to the historical structure of a city. Surface accounts for value extracted from public space and infrastructure rights in the means of value production.”17

In these environments, architecture no longer mediates between people and place but between users and platforms. Space becomes a financial abstraction optimized for visibility, branding, and accumulation.

Ultimately, the political dimension of speculative architecture reveals that neither buildings nor blockchains are neutral. As states retreat from regulating housing, finance, and labor, political power is increasingly delegated to private platforms, algorithms, and code-based systems that function as de facto governance. Crypto, De-Fi, and AI-driven real estate markets do not dismantle centralized power; they redistribute it upward and outward, concentrating control among those who design, own, and manipulate the digital infrastructures through which value flows. In this context, architecture, whether material or virtual, operates as a political technology: it organizes access, enforces exclusion, and naturalizes inequality while obscuring authorship and accountability. The globalization of these systems extends speculative logics across borders, binding local housing crises, labor exploitation, and environmental extraction to transnational networks of capital and data. What emerges is not a post-capitalist future, but an opaquer and more intensified regime in which space, ownership, and citizenship are increasingly governed by code rather than democratic process. Confronting this condition requires reasserting architecture’s ethical and political responsibility not merely as form-making, but as an active participant in shaping how power is distributed, resisted, and potentially reimagined within a globalized digital economy.

So, what do digital active forms look like? Perhaps spaces which primarily focus on wealth speculation, where design, social, and ethical implications are secondary. In architecture that includes spaces for storage, logistics, brands, copyrights, data centers, etc. It is obviously buildings like 432 Park. Ave: unlived in, where the kitchen has not a speck of dirt in sight. It is the mega mansions that look like community colleges on full display despite their desire for financial sheltering. It is context-blind architecture, unrelated to the local vernacular in which it’s built, like the CCTV Tower by OMA/Rem Koolhaas. It is data centers built in the Global South without regard to deforestation, biodiversity, and water retention where clean drinking water is already rare. It is the 2022 FIFA World Cup stadium built in Qatar with exploited, forced labor by the thousands. It looks like NYCHA sitting on 2,000 vacant units despite 270,000 people desperately needing them.18 It is the constant de-structuring of social good in the world for profit-based results.

As architecture and digital finance become increasingly intertwined, the boundary between reality and fiction continues to erode. Architects are no longer merely designers of buildings but are participants in systems that structure global flows of capital, labor, and information. Blockchain and decentralized finance do not introduce a new condition so much as make an existing one explicit: architectural power now operates primarily through invisible infrastructures, protocols, and code. To design within these systems, whether physical or digital, is to actively participate in the production of inequality, access, and control. Neutrality, in this context, is not a position but a concealment.

As John May argues in Everything Is Already an Image,  architecture must abandon the illusion that computation and digital representation are simply tools layered onto an otherwise stable discipline.19 When code functions as infrastructure and speculation governs both virtual and physical environments, architecture no longer produces buildings first; it produces systems. Crypto and De-Fi expose this shift with unsettling clarity. They reveal an architecture capable of operating entirely without material form, optimized for speed, abstraction, and financial extraction. The danger is not that architecture is becoming digital, but that it is becoming automated, unaccountable, and detached from human consequence. If architecture continues to deny its role in these systems, it risks becoming nothing more than an interface for capital. The task, then, is not to design better images or faster platforms, but to confront digital finance as architecture and to decide whether the discipline will merely encode power or finally challenge it.


  1. Matthew Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, (2021) 
  2. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014.
  3. Visual Capitalist, A Dollar’s Worth: Purchasing Power of the U.S. Dollar, infographic, n.d. 
  4. McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London, New York: Verso, 2019) 
  5. Fidelity, What are Smart Contracts and How Are They Used? (Fidelity.com, March 17, 2025), https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/smart-contracts
  6. Karissa Rosenfield, “Frank Gehry Claims Todays Architecture Is (Mostly) Pure Shit”, ArchDaily, October 23, 2014
  7. CNBC. “Happy Cashier Outsources Service Labor to Other Countries with Virtual Cashiers.” Video. May 9, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/05/09/happy-cashier-outsources-service-labor-to-other-countries-with-virtual-cashiers.html. 
  8. Rachel Kiley, “ ‘Packed in like sardines’: Photo of JPMorgan’s new headquarters mocked for its unique, quadruple monitor setup,” The Daily Dot, October 27, 2025, https://www.dailydot.com/news/jpmorgan-headquarters-draws-backlash-monitors/  
  9. Celina Ye, “Robinhood’s Behavioral Nudges: Gamification of Trading and Lack of Investor Education,” May 2024  
  10. Smithsonian Magazine, “Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality,” January 2015 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/
  11. Steven Hubbard, “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants’ Movements,” American Immigration Council (blog), August 21, 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/
  12. Gabriel Fuentes, “Architecture in a ‘Post Truth’ World,” Log no. 39 (Winter 2017). 
  13. Propy, ”Propy 24/7 Real Estate Closings Powered By Tech”. Propy.com. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://propy.com/home/
  14. PolyMath,” Real Estate”, PolyMath.Network, Accessed December 9, 2025 https://www.polymath.network/asset-types/real-estate
  15. Realtor.com, “Nations Largest Landlord to Pay $7M After Claims of Rent-Setting Software Raised Rents”, Realtor.com News & Trends, November 20, 2025. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/greystar-us-landlord-property-management-settlement-algorithm-rent-hikes/
  16. Futurism,” This Listing for a Rental House is Mangled With AI So Badly That You‘ll Cackle Out Loud“, Futurism.com, October 8, 2025. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/listing-rental-house-mangled-ai#:~:text=%E2%80%9CWe%20live%20in%20an%20era,and%20potentially%20even%20committing%20fraud.
  17. MetaHaven, White Night Before a Manifesto (Edinhoven, Onomatopee, 2008)
  18. The Wall Street Journal, “New York City Housing Authority Criticized in Comptroller’s Audit,” June 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-housing-authority-criticized-in-comptrollers-audit-1435186766?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfrW5YopFnx_c68FhEwogoeQ3py3BCx0Au9VRkc47JDGiDIcOKe5jFmlvZh9S4%3D&gaa_ts=6938745d&gaa_sig=srq1HZHQlw7TO0wVQsfghsYNGsP7p_CHyvVIUc48yhbHxIG4zz_z
  19. John May, “Everything Is Already an Image,” Log no. 40 (Spring/Summer 2017): 9–26.