You never step into the same market twice, never more so than when you wade into the Mercado Abastos, the largest market in Oaxaca City, and one of the largest in Mexico...

This dissertation explores the role of architecture—specifically, clubhouses—in the construction and institutionalization of modern, organized womanhood in early twentieth-century California. Beginning in the 1870s women began gathering in groups across the country for self-education, self-discovery, and civic work. They called themselves “clubs,” a term borrowed from male culture indicating a new, more formal endeavor than existing women’s circles. By 1900 some one million women made up this vast, organized, and effective network. Through clubs women successfully fought for the right to vote, for juvenile courts, kindergartens, public libraries, drinking fountains, street lights, urban parks, improved sanitation, and other civic accomplishments we now consider essential public goods.

The achievements of women’s clubs have become so seamlessly incorporated into our notion of American civic amenities that they appear inevitable, natural—almost innate. The purpose-built clubhouses that played host to these efforts are equally unrecognized. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, clubwomen abandoned their private parlors and rented rooms to build expensive new buildings for themselves to facilitate their social action and interaction. More than one thousand clubhouses were built nationwide between 1890 and 1940, and many still stand today. California, due to tremendous Progressive Era population growth and development and property laws allowing women to own real estate, led the nation in clubhouse construction.

To raise funds to build, purchase a lot, hire an architect and contractor, and dictate and iterate upon a building program, as well as to operate, maintain, and often expand a clubhouse, was a massive, and massively symbolic undertaking. Initially the buildings centered on a single large, multipurpose assembly room used for meetings, performances, and lectures. As the institution matured many clubs built monumental structures that were part hotel, part restaurant, part YWCA, part country-club-in-the-city, and part social action headquarters. Through their clubhouses women gave material expression to the evolving meanings of womanhood, conveying their particular status as property and business owners, athletes, ambitious professionals, hardworking civil servants, or sophisticated urbanites, in turn. Clubhouses are an architectural type representative of women’s influence in turn of the century cities, and they represent both the ambitious scope and the shortcomings of organized womanhood.

This dissertation examines the role of U.S.-aided construction projects as an instrument of power and legitimacy in the rebuilding of South Korea after the Korean War through the Eisenhower years, by situating them in the socio-political context of the Cold War. It specifically addresses two intertwined historical questions: (1) How did the United States, portraying its image as an anti-imperialist nation, quickly establish a powerful hegemony in South Korea? (2) What influence did those construction projects have on the development of modern architecture in South Korea? This study argues that, in a war-ravaged Korea, construction projects were America’s core hegemonic projects in the making of a democratic, capitalist society. Through numerous construction projects in South Korea, the U.S nurtured democratic citizenship, established a private enterprise system, spread Christianity, instilled democratic governance, and offered the “American way of life” to Koreans. In addition, they provided a unique opportunity for the U.S. to fashion, with humanitarianism, America’s image and presence in Korea. Both in Korea and globally, images of the U.S. sponsorship of South Korean rehabilitation and peaceful co-existence between the Koreans and Americans became a powerful propaganda tool that promoted an image of American’s benevolence and leadership.

Grandiose and high-style architecture is not the focus of this dissertation; instead, the majority of buildings this study examines are simple and utilitarian structures. After the war, a great number of buildings had to be built in a short period of time using a limited amount of construction materials. A lack of building technicians also necessitated simple construction. Simple buildings provided an easier model for Korean architects and builders to learn American building technologies and the tenets of modern architecture. This dissertation examines the socio-political context of these construction projects, their ideological uses, the self-help approach employed by the United States, and the compromises made to accommodate Korean local conditions and customs. I analyze the diplomatic and governmental sources as well as construction documents. I also investigate the reception of the architectural projects from Korean journals, magazines, and newspapers. Using a variety of different sources from both the U.S. and Korea, this dissertation specifically focuses on the tensions and paradoxes between the promises and the reality of these construction projects as they took form in the process. In addition, by examining North Korean newspaper articles and other publications as well as archival sources from the former communist world, it compares South Korean reconstruction projects with North Korean counterparts.

Unlike the visual spectacle of North Korea’s monumental buildings, large squares, and wide boulevards, U.S.-assisted construction projects in South Korea were mostly small, utilitarian structure and mainly targeted the everyday life of the Korean populace (Chapter 1). For U.S. officials, the question of how to conceptualize their assistance was an important concern. Specifically, the United States called for international collaboration, rather than using the nameplate of the U.S. government (Chapter 2); construction projects were actively used as a propaganda tool (Chapter 3); and U.S. officials urged private sector entrepreneurs to participate in South Korea’s rebuilding (Chapter 4). Most importantly, the reconstruction had to be done by the Koreans. America’s primary role was to provide knowledge and materials with which Koreans could build their own cities and towns. Koreans actively participated in U.S.-sponsored construction projects, and through educational exchange programs, the U.S. government trained pro-American Korean elites in American universities and institutions (Chapter 5).

By examining architecture as a lens through which to address the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the U.S. influence on South Korea in its reconstruction period, this study fills the lacuna of the unexamined relationship, one that linked the political contexts of the Cold War in East Asia, the foreign policies of the United States, post-war nation-building in North and South Korea, and the development of modern architecture in South Korea.

This dissertation examines the architecture and social intent of Student Union buildings. The narrative reaches back to the first quarter of the twentieth century when students and college leaders in the Midwest and Northeast formed the Association of College Unions, but focuses on the postwar period in California when Student Unions became modern, standard fixtures on North American campuses. Early ideas about social education in the targeted the socialization of young men and women, class distinctions, and the business sphere that many students would enter as graduates. Subsequently, architects took cues from private social clubs and YMCA buildings. In the 1950s, however, ideas about social education turned toward the G.I. and the postwar demographic of college students. As a result, campus leaders took steps to build large postwar Union buildings that they thought addressed the needs of a broad middle-class culture. By providing arenas for consumption and postwar leisure activities, proponents reframed the social agenda and gave buildings new form.

The underlying institutional armature of Student Unions and the rhetoric behind them remained largely unchanged between 1920 and 1960. Student Unions were and continued to be called "living rooms" or "hearthstones" of the campus. But after World War II, the strategies deployed by Union proponents and architects, especially in California, adapted to the social context of the university campus, creating a complex combination of rhetoric and form. Vernon DeMars, Donald Hardison, and Lawrence Halprin, who designed the postwar Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley, and Welton Becket, who designed the postwar Union at UCLA, dutifully called their buildings "campus living rooms." The interior spaces, however, were boldly modern, and the buildings mimicked corporate hotels, shopping malls, and civic centers. The shift domesticated non-residential campus buildings and helped introduce modernism and its social vision to large postwar public universities. Students no longer experienced separate lounges for men and women but found themselves in coed commercial complexes with large cafeterias, bookstores, and bowling alleys. By examining parallel architectural developments such as the design and growth of suburbs and urban renewal, this dissertation recasts the history of Student Unions.

This dissertation is shaped around the question of how under the politics and rhetoric of sanctions architecture acts as a cultural response and evinces different cultural reactions to the economic situation in Iran. Sanctions, while well understood in terms of politics and economics, have not been studied as part of everyday Iranian culture. And while they have been looked at as a temporary politico-economic force, their impact on physical space as a permanent social phenomenon has not been explored. Today, a vital part of what I call “the culture of sanctions” in Iran is experienced materially in architectural terms. I take interest in how the culture of sanctions has stimulated new forms of critiquing the built environment among different communities of practice.

Architecture is viewed in this project as a tapestry pf practices, which include construction, design, development, representation, even pedagogy, activism and speculation; these realms are explored in the chapters of this work among different professional groups, namely, builders, realtors, ordinary investors, architects and artists. The built environment in my research is studied along with the everyday political and religious rhetoric around sanctions. On the one hand, sanctions are viewed as an obstacle, and the cause of Iran’s “global isolation.” This has more than ever created a socio-psychological market for the cultivation of things that are “modern,” “western,” “global,” and “foreign.” On the other hand, sanctions are viewed as a rather positive force—an opportunity to build an Islamic economy independent of Western imperial influences. Such nationalistic reactions, which are tied to the spatial discourses of colonialism, globalization, and modernism, have also influenced architectural practices in terms of design, material culture, and financial calculations.

To build on this, I argue that sanctions have simultaneously worked as a closing and opening mechanism. In other words, they may have closed the borders to certain goods, capital and material flows, but they have also opened it to particular ideologies and cultural economies. This resembles the inherent polarities within the word “sanction” itself—a contronym, which means “permission,” and “deterrent” at the same time. The invocation of sanctions as a contronym has a value as an analytical framework because Iran has suffered from massive sanctions in the past few decades, but what this work has found is the process by which Iranian people and the Iranian state “sanction” themselves. Sanction here does not mean the deterrence that was imposed on them, but the permission Iranians have given themselves to respond to the ongoing political and economic instabilities through different cultural and economic strategies. My work documents the ways in which architecture is imagined and materialized in this political field of simultaneous depression and progression of ideas. To study the built environment in this manner is not to downplay the ruinous psychological and economic impacts of the imposed embargoes on society, but to view them as a form of “creative destruction.”

Memorials and the Cult of Apology examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. In the broadest terms, my research is an intervention into the cultural history of the built environment. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, my dissertation builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. It uses five representative case studies located in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, to develop this argument. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, my work incorporates methods, readings, and theories from a vast array of humanistic disciplines, particularly postcolonial theory, Holocaust and human rights scholarship, and debates about justice, recognition, reparation, and morality. My archival and field research combines methods drawn from architectural history and the humanities ¬–close reading, literary interpretation, and storytelling–, which I apply to the formal analysis of built memorials and their urban contexts. This formal analysis is complemented with ethnographic interviews with designers, experts and site visitors, as well as participant observation of both commemorative events and what has been called ‘apology activism.’