Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of...

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 t...

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently, global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and prese...