History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art

This chapter explores the interplay of architecture, sovereignty and governmentality in the architectural design features and security mechanisms of American government buildings, including the US embassy in Berlin, and a new high-tech US-Mexico border crossing.  I argue that the “security replete environment” of the embassy and the defensive imaginary it creates, operates as both a statement of American hegemony and a stance on diplomatic privilege.  The embassy is thus “a physical manifestation of a set of ideas about security, whose identity as an architectural object depends entirely on its efficacy in one mode of functionality.”  In contrast to the overt securitisation embodied in the embassy, the border crossing is characterised by invisible security technologies designed to facilitate a trade/security nexus, where it becomes not only a boundary to limit access, but also a system to allow and encourage movement of a certain type; an apparatus designed to mediate transactions, not prevent them. Drawing on the work of Foucault, I argue that “the architectural design of these buildings employs the aesthetic to mediate the political, and to formulate the subject positions of a population.”

The Rome Olympics of 1960 provides an important example of the reformulation of a net-work of overlapping physical and political structures.  The first of the modern Olympics to determine a substantial urban development, this event constitutes a unique confluence of infrastructure, architecture, and political economy.  With the Olympic Games increasingly serving to stage a showcase for political ideology, the Rome games had its own politics and its own promises to display: the accomplishments of the Democrazia Cristiana party that would come to be known as the Italian “Economic Miracle.” This paper seeks to explore these relationships through an analysis of the adaptation of Rome for the Olympic Games and the architecture and infrastructure designed for them.
The Olympics created an urban infrastructure program through which Rome was able to introduce new economic devices and aesthetic regimes into its urban development.  An array of projects throughout the city manifested the ambitions of the Rome Olympics in its widespread modernization project, such as new sporting venues and neighborhood de-velopment.  These were set within a new effort at Keynesian economics both to build infra-structure as the basis of development, and to house a burgeoning bureaucratic middle class.  Each of these projects employed a new mode of architectural aesthetic in order to articulate their ideological ambitions.
Lastly, the Olympic Movement grew out of Barron Pierre de Coubertin’s pedagogi-cal and social reform effort. As the city of Rome built upon the legitimacy provided by the Olympic Games to justify ambitious social project, I will explore this effort at reform through an examination of the theoretical predicates and institutional practices of the Olym-pic Movement itself.

This paper examines the architectural and intellectual projects of William Thornton, architect of the United States Capitol, in relation to his ongoing efforts at the abolition of slavery. I situate Thornton in the tensions between the revolutions taking place in the Caribbean and the formation of the United States as a federal republic. I show how Thornton offers a distinct vision of the revolutionary capacities of emancipation and the fulfillment of the American Enlightenment that they would engender. I argue that, in his work, revolutionary ideas are conceived through the transposition of emancipated slaves to alternative geographies as an effort to continually counter the realities of a national financial system dependent on the perpetuation of the slave regime. This stems from my dissertation, The Incommensurability of the Modern: Architecture and the Anarchic from Enlightenment Revolution to Liberal Reconstruction, which offers an anarchic historiography of Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts architecture by assessing works produced under revolutionary and colonial conditions.

This paper examines William Thornton’s design of the United States Capitol Building in relation to his concurrent political and philosophical projects of resettling freed slaves in West Africa and formulating of a universal orthography. I situate Thornton within the historical and geographical contexts of the European mercantilist projects, the Atlantic Middle Passage, revolutionary movements in the Caribbean, and the formation of the United States as a federal republic. In this context, Thornton offers a unique vision of the revolutionary capacities of emancipation and the fulfillment of an American Enlightenment that they would engender. Within this discourse, the figure of the slave emerges as the ultimate subject of his design for the Capitol Building. But Thornton’s discourse, I argue, however radical its pretenses, can ultimately only reproduce the racial domination of the revolutionary republic – a mode of domination that is rendered legible in his architecture.

This paper examines two works of architecture related to the Haitian Revolution: the Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace, built under Henri Christophe, who reigned as the first king of Haiti from 1811 until his death in 1820. No archival records exist regarding the construction of these neoclassical edifices, and even their architects are unknown; all that remain are literary productions and mythical traces. Yet these traces point, productively, to a mythos behind this architecture—that of the enslaved who formulated a political space outside the terms of the colonial project, as well as that of the colonizer for whom the very suggestion of a slave insurrection would undermine France's colonial mercantile economy. I take the Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace to be architectural instantiations of these mythic configurations and shows that these artifacts of the world's first independent black nation attempt to solidify in architecture the ephemeral condition of insurgency.

This papaer considers the problematic of slavery in the economic theories of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton through a consideration of competing schemes for Washington D.C. Pierre L’Enfant, following the Hamiltonian economic program, proposed a city of one hundred square miles, planned in a single stroke, to fill the entire District of Columbia – competing in size with the largest European cities. In a counterproposal, Jefferson offered a city of ten square miles that would gradually grow to fill the District over an extended period of time.
I propose that these two schemes offer competing visions on the economic growth of the United Sates and the role of slavery in these visions. For Jefferson, following physiocratic theory, the ground of wealth was in the earth. Washington D.C. was to serve as an entrepôt between the upper and lower extents of the Potomac River where goods coming from across the Appalachian Mountains would be loaded onto ships making transatlantic journeys. The growth of the city would thus index the development of American agriculture produced under a slave economy. L’Enfant’s plan, I argue, was in line with the Classical Economic theories advanced by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton founded the Treasury and the First Bank of the United States upon Revolutionary War debt by turning government-backed bonds into investment vehicles. This system, vehemently opposed by Jefferson, made L’Enfant’s plan possible by turning the city into a vehicle for investment in real estate capital. At this historical moment when enslaved people were commoditized as real estate, L’Enfant’s city developed in space a model for the circulation of slave capital.
These plans proposed two different forms and geographies of slavery in the American Republic. For Jefferson enslaved people produced wealth through commodity extraction extending into the western territories. For L’Enfant, enslaved people manifested as capital circulating in northern financial institutions. I interpret the sublime scale of L’Enfant’s plan for Washington D.C. within considerations of property and selfhood in the era of American chattel slavery.

The Haitian revolution is constructed in myth – the mythmaking of the enslaved who organized at a level outside the noological apparatus of the colonial project, as well as the myth of the colonizer for whom the very suggestion of a slave insurrection would undermine France’s bourgeois revolutionary establishment. These mythic configurations leave behind architectural artifacts. The forts, caserns, and armories of the colonial apparatus betray a subtle anxiety about the ultimate ground of this colonial endeavor in slave labor. The revolution as monumentalized in Henri Christophe’s Sans Souci Palace and Citadelle Laferrière – artifacts of the world’s first independent black nation – attempt to solidify in architecture the ephemeral condition of insurgency.
Revolution complicates the role of evidence in architecture’s historiography. It is perhaps symptomatic that no archival holdings of the Sans-Souci Palace and Citadelle Laferrière exist; all that remain are literary productions and mythical traces. Yet I do not aim to resolve fantastical accounts into a most plausible narrative, I take instead the mythos of these buildings to stand as evidence of a revolutionary impetus that is not accessible to the archive. Historiographies of colonialism have long recognized the instruments of power at work in the construction of the archive. The maps, planter’s guides, and treatises on race that circulated between Saint-Domingue and Paris often served not as evidence of the smooth functioning of the colonial apparatus, but as anxious markers of a revolution that was unthinkable even as it occurred. Perhaps these configurations speak to the very condition of revolution, being not formed according to strict causality, but manifesting through the indeterminacy of a clinamen, or swerve, by which events lack fixed origin; and perhaps this might lead us to read the very groundlessness immanent to the revolution back into its artifacts – configuring a void beneath architecture’s solid ontological foundations.

Hurricanes have been recurrent weather system in the Caribbean long before European settlement. The destruction wrought by these storms, however, is an immanently modern, and man-made, effect of European colonization. The plantation system created a feedback between land management, climatological systems, and island geology. Clearcutting and monocrop farming exacerbated hurricane damage in the West Indies. Wind speeds increased where native species that had historically provided resiliency were felled and soil degradation took place where the deep roots of old-growth forests were removed. Deforestation remade the geology of the West Indies by transforming the topology of the islands, with soil degradation forming gullies, standing water pits, and bringing silt to coastlands to form marshes. This had epidemiological consequences as the transformed geology created natural breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti Mosquito, a key vector of Yellow Fever – a disease native to sub-Saharan Africa imported to the West Indies in the holds of slave ships.

This paper will examine interactions between human, insect, climate, and geology that reshaped the political territory of the West Indies at the end of the eighteenth century. Colonial Administrators sought to maintain the efficacy of the colonies though climatological research and conservation efforts. The hurricane season of 1780 devastated the fleets of several colonial navies, loosening metropolitan control and offering greater autonomy to plantation owners. Enslaved people, meanwhile, deployed the precariousness of the West Indian climate to their own advantage. The Yellow-Fever carrying Aedes aegypti Mosquito proved an unlikely ally in slave insurrection. Early exposure to the disease provided immunity with only mild symptoms. To those exposed as adults it was often fatal. Yellow Fever devastated Napoleon’s army sent to quell the Haitian Revolution. In each case, the imminently modern sphere of political action played out within the modern transformation of the West Indian climate.

When German geographer Carl Ritter visited Haiti’s Sans-Souci Palace in 1820, just eighteen days after the death of King Henri Christophe, he described its Jardin du Roi as plush with tropical plants and rows of mangos, “neither in the old style nor the new.” It seemed to follow no European precedent (neither the “old” seventeenth-century baroque gardens nor the “new” eighteenth-century picturesque gardens) but through his description we can identify a number of hybrid practices such as the interplanting of native and imported species and the mixing of European landscape practice with the uncultivated maroon ecologies that had served as the stronghold of the Haitian Revolution. This paper considers the Jardin du Roi at Sans-Souci as a hybridized plantation landscape, formal garden, and marron enclave that negotiated the agricultural, political, and territorial practices of the Haitian revolution. David Scott describes the Haitian Revolutionaries as conscripts of modernity finding political agency within the Atlantic World. Christophe himself held a creolized sovereignty, having been both enslaved and King – occupying both extremes of sovereign exception. If this particular admixture of Caribbean geography, African and south and east Asian crops, and European landscape practice was the site through which revolutionary agency was be born, perhaps the Jardin du Roi offered a model of a new landscape in which revolutionary sovereignty could dwell.

This thesis explores the implementation of the American Marshall Plan in France and its precipitation of structural changes within the realms of economics, politics, and cultural subjectivity, studying their manifestations in both the built work of the postwar reconstruction and its concurrent discourse on architecture and urbanism. In the turn from the interwar classical to the postwar Keynesian economy, there followed a cultural transformation that resulted in the social welfare state. The consequence is what Deleuze would describe as a shift from mechanisms of discipline to societies of control, where the mass subject controlled by centralized agents would transform to the active subject of a middle class physically operating of the mechanisms of agency that control them, this thesis studies the architectural manifestation of this transformation. Through the discursive projects set out in the journals I'Architecture d'aujourd'hui and Techniues et Architecture, as well...

encountered conditions of constant flux that demanded grounding, even if only discursively. Attempts to elucidate accounts of historical violence toward specific bodies may appear anachronistic, yet we inhabit at least as many pasts as we experience presents and imagine futures. Scholars of bondage in the early modern Mediterranean have increasingly attended to the visualizations of corporeal violence on armaments and monuments-tattered clothing, bound limbs, hunched backs, and contorted faces-as projections of one people's moral and martial superiority over another. 4 Contemporary historians, artists, and publics have also suggested other ways in which such images (and bodies as images) should be treated. 5 More so than the representation of a living body, but seldom scrutinized, the corpse inhabits a liminality between personhood and object. 6 One could reframe the orientations of flotsam corpses visualized by de Contreras and al-Qadiri as manifestations of racialized truths occurring upon and within the landscape. Exhuming the specters of discriminatory epistemologies that they contain not only reveals the theological and political dynamics we have inherited from the past but also may help to explain our persistent, resounding indifference to the flotsam bodies of today.

This article considers the 1953 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Built in USA: Post-War Architecture in relation to American diplomacy during the Cold War. By examining the international circulation of  Built in USA by both governmental and cultural sector institution, we situate American postwar architecture within the informational agendas of a broader ideological struggle. We consider the engagement of media – image circulation and administrative apparatuses – with geopolitical forces and show the way in which architecture, in its status as  a form of media, recursively negotiated them.