This extensive text investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of “development” after World War II. Development theory did not manifest itself in tracts of economic and political theory alone. It manifested itself in every sphere of expression where economic predicaments might be seen to impinge on cultural factors. Architecture appears in development discourse as a terrain between culture and economics, in that practitioners took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how, for a brief period, architects, planners, structural engineers, and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life, but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms, development was, to cite Arturo Escobar, an immense design project itself, one that requires radical disassembly and rethinking beyond the umbrella terms of “global modernism” and “colonial modernities,” which risk erasing the sinews of conflict encountered in globalizing and modernizing architecture.
Encompassing countries as diverse as Israel, Ghana, Greece, Belgium, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, the Philippines, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Zambia, and Canada, the set of essays in this book cannot be considered exhaustive, nor a “field guide” in the traditional sense. Instead, it offers theoretical reflections “from the field,” based on extensive archival research. This book sets out to examine the arrays of power, resources, technologies, networking, and knowledge that cluster around the term "development," and the manner in which architects and planners negotiated these thickets in their multiple capacities—as knowledge experts, as technicians, as negotiators, and as occasional authorities on settlements, space, domesticity, education, health, and every other field where arguments for development were made.
Architecture in Development : Systems and the Emergence of the Global South
Description
Table of Contents
Introduction Part I: Developmental time 1. Incompletion: on more than a certain tendency in postwar architecture and planning 2. God’s gamble: self-help architecture and the housing of risk Part II: Expertise 3. Planning for an uncertain present: action planning in Singapore, India, Israel, and Sierra Leone 4. To which revolution? The National School of Agriculture and the center for the improvement of corn and wheat in Texcoco and El Batán, Mexico, 1924–1968 5. From rice research to coconut capital 6. "The city as a housing project": training for human settlements at the Leuven PGCHS in the 1970s–1980s Part III: Bureaucratic organization 7. Folders, patterns, and villages: pastoral technics and the Center for Environmental Structure 8. The technical state: programs, positioning, and the integration of architects in political society in Mexico, 1945–1955 9. "Foreigners in filmmaking" Part IV: Technological transfer 10. The making of architectural design as Sŏlgye: integrating science, industry, and expertise in postwar Korea 11. Infrastructures of dependency: US Steel’s architectural assemblages on Indigenous lands 12. Reinventing earth architecture in the age of development Part V: Designing the rural 13. Globalizing the village: development media, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the United Nations in India 14. "Ruralizing" Zambia: Doxiadis Associates’ systems-based planning and developmentalism in the nonindustrialized South 15. Food capital: fantasies of abundance and Nelson Rockefeller’s architectures of development in Venezuela, 1940s—1960s 16. The Jewish Agency’s open cowsheds: Israeli third way rural design, 1956–1968 17. Floors and ceilings: the architectonics of accumulation in the Green Revolution Part VI: Land 18. Policy regionalism and the limits of translation in land economics 19. Leisure and geo-economics: the Hilton and other development regimes in the Mediterranean south 20. Antiparochì and (its) architects: Greek architectures in failure
Author Description
The Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative is dedicated to advancing research and education in the history and theory of architecture. Since 2006, Aggregate has held dozens of workshops and symposia throughout North America in partnership with major universities, exhibitions, and research centers. Aggregate presents innovative scholarship on its website we-aggregate.org and has published the collected volumes Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2012) and Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
Architecture in Development is edited for Aggregate by Arindam Dutta, Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ateya Khorakiwala, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University; Ayala Levin, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles; Fabiola López-Durán, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at Rice University; and Ijlal Muzaffar, Associate Professor of Modern Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design.