This dissertation contributes to the longstanding question of the relationship between the organizational forms of institutions—such as states, corporations, and universities—and the collections of buildings that house much of their activity. As a case, I focus on the departments of the U.S. federal government as they took shape during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that recent literature refers to as the American Developmental State. I interpret this as a political formation by examining the thousands of buildings designed and constructed across the expanding territory of the settler state by a group of architects, engineers, and clerks at the Treasury Department’s Office of the Supervising Architect. Historians of architecture have overlooked the tendency of contemporaneous critics todescribe this office’s approach as an architecture by machinery. I demonstrate that this “machinery” is best understood in terms of the territorial-scale coordination of materials, labor, and information; elaborate postal relays of authorship and authentication, and often- subtle variations of designs enabled through the affordances of lithography, photography, and formulaic epistolography. Employing digital historical methods to work between the scales of the Office’s archive and the nuanced modulations of individual projects, I argue that this office represents a crucial episode in the histories of both the architecture of administration and the administrative production of architecture.

This study examines how cultural, economic, and political conditions affected the building culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the 1790s to the 1920s. Although scholarly discourse has highlighted the immense role the AME Church played in the creation of the modern-day Black Church, architectural historians are beginning to fully appreciate the connection between this institution’s building history and the ontological evolution of Blackness and perceptions of such in the United States.

By reading primary material created by AMEs alongside reviewing secondary material focused on the religious, sociological, and political history of the AME Church, I look to unearth how Black Church building embodied issues of class, identity, and respectability amongst the AMEs. This work acknowledges that the AME culture of building formed within a crucible marred by the vestiges of slavery, violence, and discrimination against Black Americans in the United States. As such, by complicating racialized minorities as architectural protagonists reacting to their material conditions, this architectural narrative explores Protestant architectural trends in several key AME Church building projects and AME print culture centered on expanding the church, while also challenging racist assumptions about Black people through building and design.

This dissertation traces the emergence, transformation, and dissemination of participatory design across architecture, planning, and workplace organization from the 1960s to the 1980s, situating it within the broader political economy of post-Fordist restructuring.

Through three interrelated case studies – in the regional industrial districts of Emilia-Romagna (with a focus on Rimini), in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mantua, and automating Scandinavian firms from weapons factories to newsrooms – I examine how participatory design operated as a tool of eliciting input and a form of design labor in itself. While the practice has often been narrated within architectural history as a short-lived avant-garde experiment, I argue that its persistence, migration across professional domains, and adaptation to changing political conditions reveal its deeper role as a mediating tool between capital and labor during a period of economic and technological transition.

The study follows designers, planners, trade unionists, neighborhood activists, and management scientists – including Giancarlo De Carlo in Rimini; Herman Wrice, Russell Ackoff, Forrest Adams, Merle Easton and Richard Plunz in Mantua; and Kristen Nygaard, Pelle Ehn and members of Ergonomi Design Gruppen in Oslo and Stockholm – who, working under distinct regimes of Eurocommunism, U.S. urban capitalism, and Scandinavian social democracy, developed participatory techniques to reorganize relations of production at the scales of district, neighborhood, and firm. A common array of extractive objects and devices can be discerned across (and despite) these disparate geographies: interactive mock-ups and prototypes, solicited sketches and plans, cognitive maps and transects, questionnaires and mood boards, primers and textbooks, structured forms of play, and forms of televisual feedback designed to make work processes and social relations visible, negotiable, and reconfigurable. As designers moved closer to the “real world” of engaged practice, their participants became more immersed in virtual simulations, and as the number of participants expanded and “took part,” the artifacts that they used became more fragmented, mobile, and provisional.

Drawing on archival research, interviews, and close analysis of encounters between designers and participants, I show how participatory design’s multiple points of origin and disciplinary crossings were shaped by overlapping traditions of pragmatism, anarchism, bureaucratic planning, and corporate management science. Rather than a marginal or purely oppositional practice, participatory design emerges in the study as a historically situated form of post-Fordist work: one that recasts the designer as a “phatic expert,” whose primary task is to facilitate communication, configure users, and manage collaborative production across spatial and organizational scales. In reframing the history of participatory design in relation to shifting modes of accumulation, this dissertation connects its architectural manifestations to its proliferation in service design, user interface development, and other contemporary fields, revealing both the continuities and transformations of participation as a tool of design and governance.

Technoscientific knowledge plays a prominent role in decision-making around built heritage, shaping conceptions and definitions of heritage and influences perceptions of what interventions on heritage are acceptable. On the international scale, the authority of technoscientific expertise both is reinforced by and facilitates the movement of acceptable knowledge across national borders. To date, there has been little scholarly work to address the following questions: Who has the authority to define what constitutes relevant technoscientific knowledge for built heritage? What ways of knowing have been transferred transnationally, and how do they relate to local constructive cultures and heritage?

In response, this dissertation takes a constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how international organizations have coordinated multilateral movements of technoscientific knowledge since the 1960s, particularly focusing on initiatives to address earthquake hazards, disaster risk, and vulnerability. To examine how the organizations faced local contexts and heritage in their projects, I analyze discourses and outcomes that implicate earthen architecture, as a form of local knowledge and built heritage. While recognizing the contributions of technoscientific knowledge and experts to mitigating disaster risks, the dissertation parses the unintended outcomes of such movements of knowledge on local earthen heritage.

With a geographic emphasis on the Pacific Ring of Fire—especially Latin America, Japan, and the United States—the dissertation offers case studies for three groups of organizations: engineering communities of practice (i.e., International Association of Earthquake Engineering and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute); development agencies (i.e., the World Bank and Japan International Cooperation Agency); and international heritage organizations (i.e., UNESCO and International Council on Monuments and Sites).

These actors define what constitutes valid technoscientific knowledge and enforce those categorical boundaries by facilitating the international dissemination of that knowledge. This occurs through vehicles ranging from dispatching experts with the appropriate technoscientific knowledge; international training programs; convenings for knowledge-sharing; influential policies that distill expertise into normative documents; and provision of technoscientific equipment. By reinforcing a selective view of what counts as relevant and valid technoscientific knowledge, these organizations indirectly exclude or minimize of other ways of knowing.

Across the case studies, organizational actors have characterized earthen construction as unscientific and irrational, contrasting it with and privileging what they deem technoscientific. This results in actions and projects that exclude earthen heritage and its knowledge-holders or unintentionally create impediments to the future continuation of local constructive practices, echoing colonial practices of epistemological suppression and cooptation. Thus, despite more recent shifts in the international sphere to valorize local knowledge, a conceptual binary of the modern and scientific vs. the “traditional” and unscientific persists. This raises fundamental questions about the epistemological basis of ongoing efforts and calls to hybridize earthen construction with technoscientific knowledge, and whether these initiatives break down or uphold such categorical boundaries.

This research examines the intersection of neighborhood characteristics and child sex offender residential placement, using Long Island as a case study. The research examines how systemic inequalities, legislative environments, and social responses condition offender residency, which often finds offenders in economically disadvantaged communities. These communities, with elevated levels of poverty, unemployment, and weak social bonding, bear disproportionate burdens and contribute to patterns of marginalization for both residents and offenders. The study critically reviews residency restrictions, such as Megan’s Law, which, while hailed as promoting public safety, often lead to consequences of reduced employment opportunities and increased social exclusion for offenders. Media sensationalism and fear from the public continue to feed stigma, inform policy, and consequently produce nolessening of recidivism rates nor progress at tackling root inequalities. The research draws on theoretical analysis, quantitative data, and case studies to reveal the manner in which offenders are concentrated within neighborhoods of the least- desirable socioeconomic characteristics. These neighborhoods are typified by fewer resources and larger representations of minority residents. The patterns of clustering further destabilize neighborhood cohesion, promote systemic inequities, and detract from the rehabilitation of offenders; moreover, rather than punitive and uniform approaches, this study calls for policies that balance community safety with effective measures of equitable reintegration. It provides actionable insight on structural and social factors of offender residency that can be adopted by policymakers and communities in an aim to strengthen public safety and rehabilitation, and improve the stability of neighborhoods.