During the last three decades of the twentieth century, architects in the United States expanded and made fluid the geographical, professional, and economic scope of their practices. In many large firms, architects were no longer fixed to their drafting tables upon which they produced drawings for single buildings, nor were they defined by work in a single firm. Instead, they worked in multinational and multidisciplinary corporations, comprised of several diverse firms, and their work supported the production of entire cities—from buildings to infrastructure to the financial systems that made each possible. This dissertation examines the historical emergence of this expanded form of architecture practice, including the ways in which these new definitions and compositions of work precipitated, and were precipitated by, a series of broad, yet interrelated social, political, and economic shifts in the US between 1960 and 1990.

This research uses the Los Angeles-based architecture and engineering firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall (DMJM) as a lens through which to view these transformations. Initially formed as a three-person architecture partnership in 1946 in Santa Maria, California, DMJM emerged as a multinational corporate conglomerate, comprised of nearly a dozen diverse subsidiary firms beneath it, and it was responsible for the formation of what would become the largest firm in the history of architecture and engineering by the twenty-first century, named AECOM. Out-pacing a number of large firms that began to falter during the 1980s, DMJM maintained stability by acquiring and developing firms that broadened the domain of architectural work—from architecture to engineering, real estate to data processing, and from urban planning to finance. This research examines the particular ways in which architects expanded their roles, and how, as a result, the shape of architectural practice began to take on that of an urban economy. Within this new economy of work, architects began to pull new types of urban infrastructure into the fold of architecture, including government-sponsored military bases, ballistic missile facilities, and wastewater treatment plants.

While a rich body of historical scholarship has described how the prominence of large architecture firms after World War II were results of the organizational and collaborative aspirations of corporate capitalism, this dissertation exposes a pivotal juncture within the history of American architectural practice, when architecture firms began to both exemplify and reinforce a shift from capitalism to late capitalism. An unrestrained and unabashed pursuit of profit was coupled with a steady hand of Cold War state patronage, and architecture firms were fragmented and re-combined with others in new ways. DMJM’s history reveals how the possibility of conglomeration for architecture—the act of acquiring firms increasingly unrelated to building design—was predicated on a culture of practice in which architects were required to view themselves as social and economic equals, rather than as superiors, to a broader range of urban practitioners; as a result, they were able to make legible, as well as to increase, the economic and political value of their labor.

The relevance of contemporary architectural design is intrinsically dependent upon it’s being in-step with the aesthetic and spatial sensibilities of its time. Within Southern California, one of the most dramatic contemporary influences on aesthetic and spatial sensibilities is that of Latinization, in particular, Mexican/Chicano cultural practices. This dissertation speculates on the emergence of an architectural hybridity autochthonous to Los Angeles informed by a theoretical framework termed the Spanglish Turn. The development of this framework begins with an analysis of visual arts, and material culture in Los Angeles. This strategy aims to ‘stretch’ the relationship between architecture and specific forms of popular and material culture by speculating on the behavior informing them. Then guided by a formulation of this emergent spatial logic, it looks for tangential inroads and alternative patterns to begin to articulate a new ‘grammar of translation’ for LA’s popular and visual culture into the realm of architecture.

Pervasive Computing (PerC) is what happens when the Internet gets ubiquitous, embedded, and animated. Ubiquitous access to the Internet through mobile, wireless devices is imminent. More important and less understood, the Internet will soon invade real space as networked computing elements become embedded into physical objects and environments. Through this implantation, the physical world will gain digital qualities, such as computer addressability through unique identification codes. Since these elements can also be animated, the environment will be able to respond directly to what it senses. PerC will profoundly alter the construction and experience of the public sphere. As a case study, we (one of us from law, the other architecture) focus on what it might do to the shopping mall. After examining two possible scenarios, called smooth and friction malls, we tease out four basic design principles of privacy, transparency, open access, and publicity. Our recommendation is to embed these public sphere qualities into PerC as PerC is being embedded into the public sphere.

This dissertation starts with the consideration that the climate disaster is going to change every aspect of the built/living environment as we know it, and asks: what can architecture do after disaster? For this examination, the dissertation looks at one of the most optimistic and understudied post-disaster rebuilding efforts, that of the Skopje earthquake in 1963. Through the examination of archival planning material, the Skopje example shows how architectural labor can be organized for a common cause of the community and that architecture can thrive without capitalism. Skopje was a successful rebuilding effort because it was entrusted to the local architects, engineers, and planners, and not government or military contractors, with international help, which was there to lend expertise, technology, and media attention to help support funds for the project. The reconstruction effort, because it was mostly done by the local architectural workforce with some international help was able to produce a city suitable for the climactic necessities and conditions on the ground and provide humane urban living conditions for thousands of people. What this study of the Skopje reconstruction further shows is that architecture thrives outside of the constraints of speculation and zero-sum games of exploitative profits. This was because the Skopje project and others like it during the 1960s showed a different way of building and constructing the built environment for the benefit of the people and their needs. This dissertation explains the reconstruction process to show that it was suitable example for an environmentally sustainable future.

This thesis investigates the discourse production of the media in Turkey; the role of the mainstream media in legitimizing urban transformation policies of the Turkish government and the social agency of alternative media in raising public awareness about the concept of urban transformation, through the case of Ayazma Urban Transformation Project in Istanbul. The Ayazma case demonstrates that, during the Ayazma Urban Transformation Project while the mainstream media developed a supportive discourse that fosters the dominance of the government in the production of urban space in Turkey, the alternative media developed an oppositional discourse with the aim of stopping the actions of the government in urban space—although it has no immediate practical implications for the urban transformation projects that are underway. However, this thesis argues that the accumulated role of the alternative media’s presentation of urban transformation projects has shaped an understanding of the contemporary urbanization processes in Turkey. Although the mainstream media is apparently more dominant than the alternative media in terms of having influence upon the implementation of governmental projects in cities, the oppositional and resistive discourse of the alternative media paves the way for ruptures in history that may fire future urban revolutions.

During the American Progressive Era, discourses of progress were co-constructed with racialized ideas about habitation. Communal, matriarchal, semi-nomadic, and self-built dwellings and their racialized inhabitants were positioned as antagonists to a single-family, heteropatriarchal, Anglo-American ideal. As associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Craftsman, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival style bungalows that defined Los Angeles’ suburbs presented an illusion of self-made, simple living in connection with nature and frontier ideologies. Though purportedly democratic, the development of the suburbs involved the conversion of Indigenous lands into private property. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples, Black migrants and ethnic Mexicans were funneled into worker housing while employed in the construction and maintenance of a domestic sphere that secured social and financial capital for beneficiaries of Whiteness. The dissertation focuses on three sites where this occurred that have since been erased in the physical landscape, as much as in the public imaginary: 1) The Pacific Electric Railway Company’s labor camps, home to Mexican workers who built and maintained Henry Huntington’s exclusive Pasadena suburbs and resorts; 2) The homes built and maintained by students of the Sherman Institute, an Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California for the vocational training of Indigenous youth; 3) The bungalows of the industrial suburbs marketed to Black and unskilled employees of the Los Angeles Investment Company, a home-building enterprise that went on to build racially restricted, residential subdivisions in southwestern Los Angeles. In each case, laborers were racially targeted and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary, and flimsily built structures that materially foretold their demise and future redevelopment. This research challenges conceptions of the “slums” familiarized by neighborhood surveys, by exposing how their production was instrumental to the construction and maintenance of the suburbs. The chapters of this dissertation devote themselves to the designed details of these hidden histories, as emerging from three distinct labor camp, domestic service, and industrial suburbs. Though historically unique in their racial, material, geographic, and social composition, when considered together, the three sites demonstrate a commitment to settling labor and race through the uneven development of the domestic sphere.