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Princeton University Press
Coming March 2027
Master Plan: Architecture, Politics, and Power
Coauthored Book with Joss Kiely (University of Cincinnati)


After the Second World War, American architects were frequently called upon to design master plans at many scales for public and private clients. Functions ranged from sprawling campuses and resorts to airports, embassies, office complexes, factories, and even entire neighborhoods. This book provides the first in-depth history of this seemingly routine project type, exploring how these proposals were leveraged for social, political, and economic gain during a critical period of rising Cold War tensions at home and abroad.

Drawing on original archival research into dozens of familiar and newly recovered projects across the United States and around the world, Michael Abrahamson and Joss Kiely offer an unprecedented look at the era of the master plan. Spanning the years 1945 to 1975, when the practice flourished, they highlight unpublished materials and lesser-known projects by some of the biggest names in modern architecture, including Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill; Minoru Yamasaki; Gunnar Birkerts; Harrison and Abramovitz; and Edward Larrabee Barnes. They examine designs by women and minority architects who have long been marginalized, such as J. Max Bond Jr., Chloethiel Woodard Smith, and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel.

Beautifully illustrated, Master Plan shares new perspectives on famous—and infamous—works of large-scale architecture and planning, revealing how America’s postwar architects concealed political and economic agendas within the seductive visual language of concrete, glass, and steel.

Preorders available at Princeton University Press

Cover design by Office of Luke Bulman
Archithese 2.2024
Mirrors in Late Modern U.S. Architecture
Journal Article, 2024


Late modern mirrored-glass architecture in the United States has often been decried as faceless, derivative, and devoid of meaning. Surveying the landscape of mirrored buildings and theorizations of mirrored architecture reveals, however, meaningful experiments and symbolic depth behind these façades. Discussing theorizations by Fredric Jameson, Arthur Drexler, Diana Agrest, and Reinhold Martin, then analyzing works by Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, Philip Johnson, and Gunnar Birkerts, I conclude that even if conventional curtain walls had lost their luster by the late 1970s, late modern architects were far from finished with reflective surfaces.

Mirrored theme float, Jimmy Carter Inauguration Parade, Washington, D.C., 20 January, 1977. Published as frontispiece to Pamela Heyne, Today’s Architectural Mirror: Interiors, Buildings, and Solar Designs (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982).


In this article I argue that a once-prevalent collective ethos in architectural practice reached its apotheosis during the 1950s. Transformations that were nascent in the that decade spurred a retrenchment around the individual author, at least among the small and midsize firms that still comprised the bulk of the profession at the time. As early as 1960, simmering anxieties about the aesthetic anonymity of modernism came to be linked with concerns about social conformity, resulting in a desire for distinctive authorial identities among architects, critics, and clients. When discussing authorship today, we must take account of the ideological props that bolster this still-pervasive myth of the individual author despite its increasing disingenuousness: first, that authorship in the U.S. context served as a weapon in Cold War debates concerning liberty and collectivity; and second, that it also acts as (psychological) compensation for the alienating realities of architectural employment.

Portrait of 19th Century US architect Henry Hobson Richardson featured on the July 1965 cover of Progressive Architecture, illustrating dramatic change within the image of architects from visionary individualist to “pseudo-corporation man” and back again, as explored by Jan C. Rowan in his editorial that month.

Oxford Bibliographies on Architecture, Planning & Preservation (Oxford University Press)
Peer-Reviewed Article, 2022

Though he has been marginalized in most mainstream accounts of modern architecture, Albert Kahn (b. 1869–d. 1942) is increasingly considered one of the most important and consequential US architects of the 20th century. Kahn is known primarily for the technically innovative and rigorously functional factory buildings that his still-extant firm Albert Kahn Associates, Inc. (founded 1903) designed for automotive manufacturers, including the Ford Motor Company, but his firm was also responsible for hundreds of eclectically styled buildings for other purposes in Detroit, Michigan. This bibliography surveys literature on Kahn and his firm within ten thematic categories, including texts by Kahn and his siblings, contemporaneous criticism, those dismissive of his firm‘s relevance to histories of modernism, and the recent turn in scholarship toward crediting Kahn with substantial contributions to twentieth-century architecture.

Partners of Albert Kahn Associates, Detroit, 1920s. Albert Kahn Associates records, Bentley Historical Library.
RA. Revista de Arquitectura, n. 23 (English and Spanish)
Journal Article, 2021

A fundamental shift in employment patterns among architects in North America during the 1960s and 1970s impacted the ways particular kinds of tasks were either monopolized or delegated within firms. This article uses the archive of the US-based architectural firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates to show evidence of a growing gulf between executive architects and employee architects (particularly women assigned to interiors work), as well as the persistence of chauvinistic practice ideals under changed circumstances. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis building design is shown to be illustrative of the gulf between imaginative and interpretive labors.

Sketch by Gunnar Birkerts and others exploring variations for the catenary structural system of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis building, ca. 1968. BL000573, Gunnar Birkerts papers, Bentley Historical Library.