SESAH Annual Conference 2025

Conference Presentation, September 2025

In 1941, political theorist James Burnham posited that a “Managerial Revolution” had taken place in the first half of the twentieth century, a rubric that is most often applied to understand the increasingly bureaucratic work of governmental agencies and private corporations. Architecturally, the consequences of this bureaucratization have been identified by scholars in the proliferation of planimetrically similar office buildings housing clerks and calculators. This type of architectural analysis has less often been undertaken for the buildings of trade unions, who similarly bureaucratized by the middle of the twentieth century in the U.S. as capital and labor reached a détente and organizers were tentatively permitted into the centers of U.S. power. Emblematic of this ascension is the headquarters of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), just across Lafayette Square from the White House executive residence in Washington, D.C. Designed by Ralph Walker, an architect famous for the design of numerous skyscrapers in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, declared in 1957 by the New York Times to be “Architect of the Century.” Aesthetically, the design stakes out a middle ground between stone-faced skyscrapers and midcentury modern style glass office buildings that conveys a sense of permanence and solidity melded with progress and innovation. The building has yet to receive analytical attention for its organizational and programmatic character, asking not how it was similar to buildings housing federal agencies nearby, but how it was different, how its spaces accommodated the organizing purposes of a national federation of workers and legitimated the organization’s status as the voice of workers in Washington. Based on original archival research in the collections of the AFL-CIO and its long-term president George Meany at the University of Maryland, and of architect Ralph Walker at Syracuse University, this paper will explore the way that Walker not only afforded but also directed and channeled the increasingly bureaucratic priorities of this ostensibly worker-led institution.

Mosaic mural by Lumen Martin Winter in the lobby of architect Ralph Walker’s AFL-CIO Building, Washington, D.C., completed 1956 (Ralph T. Walker papers, Syracuse University Libraries)

Architecture Exchange Symposium #4, Jussi Parikka: How Do Machines See Architecture?

Symposium Talk, April 2025

This paper highlighted the shifting purposes to which mapping has been put over time in design research, from the academic studio to the art gallery to the professional office. Drawing from the work of contemporary as well as mid-twentieth century architects, I questioned whether this has been and will continue to be an effective strategy for pushing back against the systematized “invisual” modes of image-making and analysis discussed by Jussi Parikka in his book Operational Images. Comparing such maps to research-based art installations, I argued that they offer a means of dealing with information overload. I explored the form these maps take (namely superimposed layers), the knowledge they produce (a proprietary heuristic understanding), and the mode of viewership they require (an almost paranoiac expectation to decipher and draw connections). I concluded by offering some thoughts on how operational images could be better mobilized to support the admirable values that deep maps embody. If we are to retain architecture as a cultural practice rather than a technocratic mandate, architects need to do better than compensatory gestures such as the making of deep maps.

Slope mapping for multi-family housing master planning project by Beverly Willis and Associates at El Paso, Texas, 1974, prepared using their proprietary CARLA (Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis) software package for rapid assessment of site feasibility (Beverly Willis Archive, beverlywillis.com)

SESAH Annual Conference 2023

Conference Presentation, September 2023

This paper theorized master planning as an administrative act distinct from architecture and urban design, one that mobilizes design expertise in support of the anticipative, projective, and imaginative faculties of bureaucratic institutions. Once adopted, master plans channel institutional growth and change but also, to varying degrees, manage and control architecture itself. Unlike most urban design proposals, master plans tend to establish stylistic standards to enforce aesthetic cohesion in excess of spatial arrangement. Producing a master plan requires a blend of omniscience and naivete, a stance that often causes designers to suspend disbelief in order to offer grand, abstract visions. Drawing from research in the collection of institutional planning consultant, author, and educator Richard P. Dober—particularly his work on the initial master planning phase of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta—this paper argues that as architects took on master planning projects in the post-WWII years, a phase shift took place that was as much methodological as it was professional. On the one hand, designing master plans allowed architects to champion abstract composition using closed spaces and volumes, an approach that was otherwise forbidden by functionalist dogma during the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, unlike other scales of modernist design, these projects’ success is often judged purely by the persuasiveness of their visual communication. On the other hand, master plans are often accompanied by hundreds of pages of bureaucratic paperwork documenting existing conditions, itemizing needs, and justifying projections— work that only specialists like Dober could effectively complete. As opposed to the infrastructural approach taken by engineers or the technocratic approach of administrators, what is it that designers bring to the practice of master planning? Why do these administrative reveries remain compelling despite their frequent failure to be realized in recognizable form?

Contact sheet showing master planning consultant Richard P. Dober meeting with Coretta Scott King and members of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center board, early 1970s (Dober Collection, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design) . 

SAHANZ/UHPH Joint Conference 2022

Virtual Conference Presentation, November 2022

In the 1960s United States, university campuses were seen as testbeds for urban spatial and social relations, and their master plans were therefore a prime opportunity for their designers, usually architects, to realize urbanist visions. Initiatives from this period remain staggering in their scale and architectural ambition. The State University of New York system a massive expansion on more than 50 campuses across the state during the tenure of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The most ambitious of its new campuses was its flagship arts college at Purchase, about 25 miles north of Manhattan, master planned by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Mimicking Thomas Jefferson’s famous design for the University of Virginia, the master plan symmetrically arrayed buildings for different disciplines around a massive paved plaza. Along the plaza’s centerline, Barnes himself designed an interconnected complex for students’ everyday needs. Flanking this was a concrete-framed arcade onto which buildings by other leading architects abutted. Barnes’ plan challenged these architects with prescriptive requirements intended to engender a cohesive and consistent atmosphere, including the dictate that all buildings be clad in the same gray-brown brick, and that all openings be framed in dark gray glass and metal trim. These prescriptions were a negative image of “architecture” as understood in this particular place and time: a stable regulatory regime within which architects could be liberated, within reason. Barnes’ design was a moderate’s version of a megastructure, intended to manage creative impulses—both those of other architects and of art students—rather than set them free. If the eternal problem of planning is to offer a vision for the future loose enough to adjust to the unexpected, then the vision offered here was the controlling gaze of a paranoiac. Is the master plan inevitably a tool of management, or can it be a liberatory document instead?

Model of Barnes’s final SUNY Purchase master plan with designs by several other architects, prepared for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Architecture for the Arts,” 1971. 

SESAH Annual Conference 2022

Conference Presentation, November 2022

Designed by St. Louis-based Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum (HOK) for the famed developer Gerald D. Hines Interests, Houston’s Galleria was a multi-purpose development with a fully-conditioned environment chilled enough to include a year-round indoor skating rink. HOK’s master plan organized built space within gridded modules made visible on the exterior. Module sizes varied based on each building’s purpose—hotels featured a slightly shorter floor-to-floor height than office buildings, for example, and the shopping arcade had much larger structural spans. Still, retailer identity necessitated more substantial variation in the case of anchor stores like Neiman Marcus. On the one hand, the Galleria suburbanized the urban spectacle of the commercial arcade and the world-unto-itself of the classic department store. On the other hand, it upgraded the distinctive spatial format of the shopping mall to the level of a new city center rather than a meager substitute. But it also created a placeless “hyperspace” indifferent to its humid subtropical surroundings. This paper asks: was this the end of the urban commercial spectacle or the moment of its rebirth?

A busy night at the Houston Galleria’s famous ice rink; view showing reflections in the mirrored ceiling above the frozen surface (Houston Chronicle)