Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism, Modern Architecture, and the Rise of American Hegemony, explores how modernist architecture and urban design structured the settler-colonial project and rationalized liberal ideas of legal order in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and the surrounding Colorado and Mojave deserts, it shows how architecture became a fundamental technology for governing Empire through Indigenous land and migrant labor, while also fundamentally mediating the Agua Caliente’s own efforts toward self-determination. The book has been supported by a publication grant from the Graham Foundation and a Getty Research Institute Fellowship.

Inland Empire shows that the canonical discourse on midcentury modern American architecture cannot be disentangled from the history of settler-colonization and its resistance by Indigenous nations. Palm Springs in Southern California offers a particularly illustrative case study of this dynamic: as a favorite holiday resort for prominent artists, capitalists and politicians, it was both conceived and constructed as a model settler-colonial city. From early colonial structures to midcentury estates, modernist architects like Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and William Krisel, working for builders, speculators, and politicians, enshrined and instrumentalized the Agua Caliente’s underdevelopment for settler profit and power. Their technological innovations in environmental design, construction, and the management of labor developed sophisticated new ways to fragment and alienate Indigenous land and sovereignty. At the urban and regional scale, their projects segregated the new desert leisure economy from the Inland Empire’s sprawling military and agricultural infrastructures, redefining Manifest Destiny for a post-industrial world. Design, I argue, offered particular ways of managing Indigenous resistance by reinforcing the underlying logics of a rising American hegemony: economic and logistical growth via environmental extraction, racialized displacement, and selective assimilation into markets and civil society. 

These colonization efforts, however, were resisted by Agua Caliente political leaders, from Francisco Patencio to Vyola Olinger, who deployed various unorthodox design tactics against discriminatory urban policies, as well as the many anonymous Indigenous and other racialized peoples who lived on the Reservation. I trace their formal and informal architectures of resistance as a kind of decolonial modernity, with consequences for how we should understand architecture as a discipline that produces and enforces legal orders. 

This edited volume critically unpacks the idea of the “region” that underlies regionalism in architectural discourse. Instead of thinking of the region as a spatial-cultural given, the authors interrogate its historical construction as a technique of governance and as a mode of coloniality, asking how and why the region came to architectural prominence in conjunction with the formation of urban planning.

Often collapsed into a geographic category, the region crystalized processes of economic and racial formation within the constitution of the nation state in the nineteenth century. But by the end of the century, it grew an independent meaning, becoming a flexible territorial unit that could attach itself to political and administrative boundaries at will. This ambiguity holds still true today, with the region at times traversing international borders to designate geo-strategic economic or military alliances, or in other cases, broadening constellations of the “local” – a vehicle for claim-making and self-determination against the state.

The region’s capaciousness and spatio-temporal elasticity is examined in this volume, showing how it has been mobilized to advance different political ends. The essays cover such disparate geographies and regimes including turn of the century Germany, American archeology in the Middle East in the 1920s, the 1930s Soviet Union, interwar France, colonial and postcolonial India, and Colombia and Northern Canada in the postwar periods. The essays illustrate the region’s expansive reach as an epistemic construct, offering valuable analyses of the intersections between architectural history and the workings of territory.

'Parametricism' has been heralded as a new avant-garde in the industries of architecture, urban design, and industrial design, regarded by many as the next grand style in the history of architecture, heir to postmodernism and deconstruction. From buildings to cities, the built environment is increasingly addressed, designed and constructed using digital software based on parametric scripting platforms which claim to be able to process complex physical and social modelling alike.

As more and more digital tools are developed into an apparently infinite repertoire of socio-technical functions, critical questions concerning these cultural and technological shifts are often eclipsed by the seductive aesthetic and the alluring futuristic imaginary that parametric design tools and their architectural products and discourses represent.

The Politics of Parametricism addresses these issues, offering a collection of new essays written by leading international thinkers in the fields of digital design, architecture, theory and technology. Exploring the social, political, ethical and philosophical issues at stake in the history, practice and processes of parametric architecture and urbanism, each chapter provides different vantage points to interrogate the challenges and opportunities presented by this latest mode of technological production.

With essays by:
Phil Bernstein, Benjamin Bratton, Christina Cogdell, Teddy Cruz, Peggy Deamer, Andrés Jaque, Laura Kurgan and Dan Taeyoung, Neil Leach, Reinhold Martin, Matthew Poole, Peg Rawes, Patrik Schumacher, and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió.

With contributions from over fifty architectural historians, theorists, students, writers, and practitioners from across the globe, the texts in this volume provide a slice through the uneven terrain of values and unequal labor practices of historical and theoretical architectural work. The booklet is intended to spark a conversation about what the value of such labor is, both within the discipline and profession of architecture, and how it impacts and is impacted by the discursive and material production of the built environment.

With essays by:

Felipe Aravena, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Daniel A. Barber, Chris Barker, Kadambari Baxi, Nick Beech, Joaquin Díez Canedo, Jordan Carver, Aaron Cayer, Dariel Cobb, Kieran Connolly, Joe Crowdy, Tobias Danielmeier, Peggy Deamer, Laura Diamond Dixit, Kirti Durelle, Eva Hagberg Fisher, Gary Fox, Frabrizio Gallanti, Curt Gambetta, Anna Goodman, James Graham, Gevork Hartoonian, Andrew Herscher, Mark Jarzombek, Tahl Kaminer, Hanan Kataw, Anne Kockelkorn, Sben Korsh, Christos Kritkos, Nadir Lahiji, James Longfield, Yasser Megahed, Jacob Moore, Joan Ockman, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Joanne Preston, Eric Peterson, Peg Rawes, Eric Wycoff Rogers, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Susanne Schindler, Jack Self, Adam Sharr, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Brent Sturlaugson, Meredith TenHoor, Stefano Tornieri, Alessandro Toti, Norihiko Tsuneishi, Tijana Vujosevic, Mabel O. Wilson, Yang Yang.