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This dissertation studies a critical turn in Southern European discourses on urban form, one that shaped new approaches to political engagement in architecture and urbanism in the 1970s. Beginning in the 1960s, a group of left-leaning architects and intellectuals in Italian academia, concerned with the effects of speculative development on urban populations, theorized a new political approach to the city based on critical histories of urban form. I argue that this discourse on urban form carried an “historical imperative”—a demand to analyze the history of a city prior to any plan or project. Essential to this imperative was the idea that the history of modernity, in its processes of development and social relations, was inscribed in urban form. Accessing this knowledge via urban analysis meant accessing tools to reposition the architectural profession and critically engage with the development of the city. This study examines the discourses on urban form in the context of the Spanish and Portuguese transition to democracy, and how Iberian architects translated and deployed the central concepts of typology and urban morphology toward democratic processes such as decentralization, social preservation, and urban rights. While the history of modern architecture and politics has been typically associated with visionary utopias and state technocracy, this dissertation challenges this perspective by concentrating on the translation of discourse into the reform of professional institutions. In a circular movement between Italian theories—of Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi, and Manfredo Tafuri, among others—and their Iberian translations, this study traces four institutional fronts reshaped by this critical approach to urban form: the reform of urban pedagogy and planning led by Manuel Solà-Morales in Barcelona; the introduction of typology in the preservation of historical centers; the creation of a decentralized housing program in the Portuguese SAAL process; and the revision of modern architectural historiography by Ignasi Solà-Morales, Josep Quetglas, and Víctor Perez Escolano. Interweaving the histories of Italian and Iberian architectural discourse in an expanded intellectual map, this study offers a critical reflection on the intersection of conceptual and institutional frameworks of architecture, politics, and urban form, and repositions architecture in relation to democratic processes pertaining the city.

This dissertation explores architectural building types as critical components of, and unique points of interface with, three infrastructural systems, built or re-built in New York City in the decades after World War II. While contemporary infrastructure is enmeshed in regional and global networks far beyond the administrative bounds of the five boroughs, an architectural focus reveals these systems as inescapably local, tied to political struggles surrounding the siting, design, and construction of buildings; to socio-technical imperatives of density; to material consequences like traffic and air pollution; and to aesthetic effects like beauty, monotony, and monumentality. Three case studies—in food distribution, telephone service, and sewage treatment—explore different spatial techniques involved in the management of commodities, information, and waste. Reading each through the social history of technology, as well as the disciplinary tools of architectural history, brings to light unique aspects of architecture’s participation in the political, social, and technological landscapes of the contemporary city. This dissertation looks closely at the prewar roots and postwar creation of New York’s present-day systems: the adoption of the infrastructural buildings we see today, and the rejection of alternatives in design, values, and policies. It argues that the city’s vital systems, and their architectural manifestations, were largely designed according to the needs of various elite groups, in ways that supported the long-term deindustrialization and stratification of urban existence, though not according to a consistent or coherent plan. Well-studied postwar phenomena such as decentralization, automation, demographic change, and “urban crisis” take on different casts as familiar characters like politicians, property owners and architects are joined by monopoly corporations, technicians, and neighborhood organizers. Granular study of the processes that led to the adoption of particular plans, and the rejection of alternatives, reveals the city’s visual and functional landscape as one shaped by a wide—though far from democratic—range of actors. Today, these same infrastructures, physically durable even as their social use has been redirected or transformed, continue to participate in an ostensibly postindustrial and rapidly gentrifying city. By reexamining the narratives of these systems’ design and construction, the study of infrastructural architecture illuminates this inequitable history, while revealing moments of resistance and supporting calls for the further democratization of urban life by those whose needs have been discounted.

The focus of this research is in the area of political architecture and the way it has been affected by the way people perceive architectural symbols that represent abstract political agendas and ideologies. Such a study is important in order to create political buildings that respond better to their region and the society present there. The research approach adopted in this dissertation includes an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of practical research through case studies of the Apartheid Museum and Constitutional Court, using semi-structured interviews with key figures and standard questionnaires to the general public visiting the buildings. The findings from this research provide evidence that people’s perception of abstract symbolism represented architecturally is affected by their age, familiarity with architecture and level of education. Furthermore, it was found that political architecture should embody the true nature of its region and the society, while still representing the political agenda of the present power. The main conclusion being that the abstract political message becomes positively interpreted and adopted by the society, and the building becomes the physical symbol of that abstract political intent. This dissertation argues for a political architecture that symbolises the diverse identities of all South Africans so that the architecture can, through its symbolism, bring about positive social change.

Unsettling Colonial Science: Modern Architecture and Indigenous Claims to Land in North America and the Pacific examines the contested landscapes of research infrastructure and settler colonialism. During the 1950s and 60s, as the Cold War accelerated, Big Science sought new frontiers both conceptual and spatial. While the alliance between modern architecture and postwar scientific research has been the subject of significant historical work, the settler colonial politics and land relations ingrained in these large-scale laboratories and research stations has gone under-discussed. Investigating federally-funded research installations constructed from the 1950s-1990s, this dissertation addresses how Cold War-era science participated in the settlement of landscapes perceived as inhospitable through discourses and practices of “modernism.” It also examines Indigenous opposition to these land occupations as acts of self-determination. Covering a wide geography—from the Kitt Peak Observatory on Ioligam Du’ag in the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Inuvik Research Laboratory in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories of Canada, to the Mauna Kea Observatories on the Mauna Kea volcano on the island of Hawai‘i this dissertation moves between spaces where the universalism, modernism, and colonialism of the postwar settler colonial project are contested through material practices in the landscape and built environment. These places reveal how settler colonialism contributed to US empire in the twentieth century. Importantly, they also broaden discourses of resistance and refusal, showing how traditional land use, material culture, and mobility practices give rise to resistance movements. This dissertation investigates how different resistance movements protested the construction of research infrastructures on their lands. Across these cases, modern architecture does not operate uniformly. In some instances it is part of a state-initiated modernization project; in others affiliated with military-industrial architecture; and others an aesthetic exercise in a romanticized landscape. But in all, architecture is used to reify a division between Western modernity and “traditional knowledge” that undercuts land-based claims to sovereignty. Tohono O’odham, Kānaka Maoli, and Gwich’in activists and practitioners, along with environmental advocates and allies, mobilized grounded forms of refusal to insist that land use is political. I argue that these places and their histories reveal how modern architecture orders the land and its political meaning within settler colonial contexts. In the mid-twentieth century, federal science agencies, engineering departments, and architecture corporations deployed modernism as an instrument to make public and trust lands productive and national. Architecture is also a site where jurisdiction, land use, and the relationship to land is contested. These contestations open on to anticolonial histories of the built environment.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Architecture and political power have related throughout history in various ways. The most prominent function of architecture, as well as other aesthetics, in the political realm has been to raise the national sentiment of a people. The aesthetics of architecture can be used to sell the ideas of a political system to the populace both by the creation of new architecture and the destruction of symbols contrary to the polity. The vehicle by which politics and architecture interrelate is shown to be the rhetoric surrounding the buildings. Exemplary of this is the nationalist period of Europe, when characters such as Stalin and Hitler manipulated aesthetics to develop national sentiment. Hence, in newly democratic Prague and Berlin we see a change in architecture and a rhetorical debate on the national value of styles, though the styles used in each case were not the same. Architectural style is therefore shown not to reflect a specific political theory, and national sentiment is again the key way in which architecture and politics relate. / Major, United States Army

This dissertation examines the architecture of the French, American, and Haitian revolutions as well as the French 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune. The traditional historiography of neoclassical and Beaux-Arts architecture considers it as coextensive with the establishment of the nation-state, culminating in the institution building of the French Second Empire and postbellum United States under the banner of liberal nationalism. By examining moments of insurrection against the state and spaces outside of the conventional construal of the nation, I complicate this interpretation by highlighting its slippages and crises. My hypothesis is that democracy, as a form of social and political life, is intrinsically anarchic and paradigmatically revolutionary, and that architecture cultivates the aims and paradoxes of revolution. Revolutionary conditions, I argue, render this radical capacity of architecture salient, showing the ultimate incommensurability between architecture and the regimes that determine and delimit it.

Architecture and political power have long been interrelated throughout history and weaved into the fabric of the built environment. Politics in the past was preoccupied with the expression of power; however, there has been a paradigm shift in favour of the expression of identity, particularly national identity. Local as well as international precedents reveal the extent to which past regimes have manipulated architecture and urban design in the service of politics. Exemplary to this is South Africa, a nation in transition emerging from Western colonization and more recently, the Apartheid regime. It is a country still haunted by ghosts of the past and the spatial organisation of the ‘Apartheid city’. However, South Africa post 1994 is not without examples of contemporary architecture which is a reflection of an “open democracy” in efforts to facilitate renewed interaction and hope in politics and civic architecture. Germany, also emerging from an unsavoury past has embraced the concept of democracy in its political systems and architecture. As a result, the built environment is a record of past together with the present thinking existing in unison, creating rich and meaningful places and spaces rooted in the history of place and time. / Thesis (M.Arch.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished