How to make the leap from the specific to the general, from the seemingly contingent detail to structural forces is a central question of microhistory. This paper ruminates on this crucial historiographical process by trying to make sense of how the relationship between the specific (painted details of plants from around the globe) and the general (something resembling the totality of the British empire) was bracketed in a small building in a corner of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, at the height of nineteenth-century imperialism. Conceived by the architectural historian James Fergusson (1808-1886), a connoisseur of “world architecture,” with galleries wrapping around a central atrium, the building opened its doors in 1882. What made the building unique were its interior surfaces which were entirely ‘wallpapered’ by 832 plant paintings made by the woman artist Marianne North (1830-1890). By the time of the building’s opening, North had already made a reputation in Victorian London as a woman who travelled the world alone, the female equivalent of the male colonial adventurer. Her oil paintings differed from conventional botanical depictions in at least two ways: they frequently pictured details of plants rather than plants in their entirety, and the species portrayed were never isolated but always pictured with their ecological surrounds. North funded the construction of the building in addition to making decisions about how her plant pictures were to be hung: in a manner that approximated the map of the British empire. While historians have been quick to jump to conclusions about how North’s assembly of botanical details amounted pictures of imperial totality, this paper attempts to use the building as an opportunity to look more closely at this process of translation from the detail to the big picture. How did the botanical detail contribute to the total picture of empire? What was the nature of the totality that was on display at the Marianne North Gallery? What other possibilities of totality might have been available in the nineteenth century? This paper triangulates between the evidence from the archives and contemporaneous theories of nature and political economy in an attempt to understand the process of translation from the specific to the general, a process that theorists of microhistory have rightfully identified as crucial to the approach.
Zeynep Çelik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design and the forthcoming Imperial Data: Architecture, Resource, and Information in Victorian London. She also co-edited the volumes Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century and Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice and is an editor of the journal Grey Room from MIT Press. Currently she is also co-chairing the ongoing project “Extractive Media” at Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Media.
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Architectural History at Harvard University. At the nexus of architectural, environmental, and intellectual history, my dissertation, title "Nature and Nation: An Environmental History of Architectural Ideas in the United States, 1840-1940" examines the nationalist discourse of American architecture in relation to its environmental conditions of production and enunciation. Prior to arriving at Harvard, I completed a licence’s and a master’s degree from Paris La Villette School of Architecture and worked for various architecture studios in Paris.
White, irregular bubbles of salt are bursting through the light-grey paint inside the hallways of Landssjúkrahúsið in Tórshavn. The Faroese hospital’s high-modernist concrete slab-blocks were planned and funded by the Danish state and built by an imported Danish and local Faroese workforce in the early 1970s. Within this seemingly mundane piece of healthcare infrastructure, these bubbles of salt reveal traces of Arctic social and cultural hierarchies that revise our understanding of both welfare and coloniality. This paper contributes to the growing scholarly field of critical Arctic studies, investigating Scandinavian colonial presence in the Global Far North. An architectural perspective can help bridge the political, social, and material legacies that shape contemporary culture in this rapidly changing region. With a theoretical starting point in the underexplored concept of ‘welfare colonialism,’ I examine how colonial domination operates through the construction and presence of postwar welfare institutions. Utilizing Faroese and Danish archival material, oral histories from Faroese workers, and material culture analysis from on-site fieldwork, I suggest that the materiality and labor embedded within Landssjúkrahúsið unveil colonial hierarchies that span the Arctic region. The hospital’s complex entanglement of transnational labor migration and construction methods enmesh this architectural history with cultural and material agency. Imported Danish cement served as binding agent for locally sourced aggregates, mirroring labor conditions where imported notions of race united or segregated workers. However, this colonial materiality was fated to disintegrate due to salt-contamination and Arctic climatic conditions. The now disintegrating concrete foundations literally and figuratively embody conditions of coloniality—a microhistory specific to Landssjúkrahúsið, yet significant for the broader project of interrogating colonial domination, its welfare-state legacy, and its presence in postwar architectural practice. As bubbles of salt continue to burst, weakening the concrete foundations of this welfare-colonial institution, understanding its social, political, and architectural heritage becomes increasingly urgent.
Frederik Braüner is a PhD candidate in architecture and European studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at Columbia University. He holds a B.A. in art history from the University of Copenhagen and an M.A. in architecture from the Royal Danish Academy. His research focuses on the history and theory of modern welfare-state architecture, primarily in the Nordics and the Arctic. In his ongoing PhD research, he is investigating the Danish welfare state’s colonial presence in the Arctic, looking into the social, cultural, and economic factors that influenced the waves of post-war modernization that took place in especially Greenland and the Faroe Islands. As a licensed architect in Denmark, he has worked in architectural practice, building restoration, and as an assistant editor for the Danish architecture journal Arkitekten and the UC Berkeley based architecture journal Room One Thousand.
Dwight Carey is a historian of architecture, empire, and slavery. His research examines these histories as they unfolded in the early modern colonial domains of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript titled, “Born From a Land of Experts: Slavery and Construction Labor in Mauritius.” This book follows the enslaved construction laborers from continental Africa, India, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia who arrived in Mauritius in the early modern period and then went on to develop an architecture of settlement on this formerly uninhabited Indian Ocean island. Dwight has also published several articles on the architectural histories and legacies of slavery, empire, and colonialism in Africa and the Americas. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, among other sources. He lives in the northeastern United States. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and the History of Art at Amherst College.
This paper seeks to clarify the historiographical stakes of microhistory by turning to an early nineteenth-century attempt to account for the marginalized customs and forgotten traditions of medieval builders. In 1829, the jurist and amateur historian Christian Ludwig Stieglitz (1756-1836) published a slim volume entitled Über die Kirche der heiligen Kunigunde zu Rochlitz und die Steinmetz-Hütte daselbst (On the Church of St. Kunigunde in Rochlitz and the Stonemasons' Lodge There). This little-known book was transformative in its use of recently discovered legal documents that provided historical insights into the customs, habits, and beliefs of the medieval stonemasons who built the small three-aisled church. In contrast to pre-existing histories of the Middle Ages, which were almost exclusively told from the perspective of the sovereign or the state, Stieglitz's account of the stonemasons' lodge took up a different kind of body corporate through which to narrate a history of architecture from below. Having been trained as a jurist at the University of Leipzig, Stieglitz was uniquely situated to decipher these legal documents and bring them to bear on his analysis of this seemingly insignificant building. Drawing on theories found in Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Rechtsalterthumer (German Legal Antiquities) from 1828, Stieglitz approached these practices as "legal habits" (Rechtsgewohnheiten) with an enacted dimension that prefigured their reification through written laws. By uncovering and interpreting the legal habits embedded in these documents, On the Church of St. Kunigunde advanced that the symbolic actions and bodily techniques of medieval stonemasons had a determining role in the development of Gothic architecture.
Maur Dessauvage is a PhD candidate in architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). He works on architecture and architectural theory across the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on aesthetics and historicism. His dissertation examines the relationship historicist architecture, state-building, and art-historical thought in early nineteenth-century German lands. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices from Columbia University. His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center. He is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia, where he organized the first graduate student symposium entitled "Ministry and Mystery."
In a tendentiously titled publication, The Mayumbe Hell, Anne Schreurs self-published a series of letters written by her father to her mother. The letters begin when Léon Schreurs departs for Boma in 1937, having been hired as a mechanic by Agrifor, a Belgian colonial forestry company operating in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The letters are intimate exchanges between a man and his fiancée, who are striving to maintain their long-distance relationship. Yet, beyond the corny love declarations, these letters contain rare testimonies to everyday life in a colonial logging concession, deep in the Mayombe forest. Throughout the correspondence, Limba wood, which Agrifor harvested, is present in the ongoing struggle between machines and the centuries-old trees of the forest. While Schreurs’ personal story is focused on the everyday challenges of production, tracing the commodity chain of Limba wood links this ‘microhistory’ of a Congolese logger to a larger architectural history. After all, through a joint venture between Agrifor and the U.S. Plywood Corporation, Limba wood was transformed into a best-selling American product: Korina® plywood. Korina® became “the leading foreign blonde wood on the market […] finding its ways into homes, offices, and factories all over America”. One such home — and an early (and sponsored) use of this exotic novelty — was the Case Study House #8 by Charles and Ray Eames. Taking cues from recent interest in 'building ecologies' and the 'reciprocal landscapes' of architecture, this paper examines Léon Schreurs’ dreams and plans, complaints and fears, observations and prejudices, to explore how exploitative labour regimes, racialized land occupations, or ecological devastations are linked to one of the most canonical pieces of modernist architecture.
Robby Fivez works as postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. His research is driven by a fascination with the material and social processes of construction. With a particular focus on the architectural history of the Belgian Congo, he seeks to shed light on the colonial exploitation of ‘cheap labour’ and ‘cheap nature’ engendered by Western building practices. While these externalities of building surface quite crudely in this research, they are not limited to such colonial settings. Insights from this research could therefore influence construction history research in completely different geographic and temporal settings. So far, his research resulted in a number of participations in international conferences and workshops and in published research papers, book chapters and articles, among others in ABE journal, the Journal of Landscape Architecture and CRAUP.
Lorenzo trained as an architect at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm before completing an MA and PhD (2024) in art history at The Courtauld Institute of Art. His dissertation, currently under revision for publication as 'Ritual, Space, and Materiality in the Jesuit Confessionals of the Early Modern Southern Netherlands,' received the 2024 Art History Promotion Prize from the Swiss Association of Art Historians (VKKS) and was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, Lorenzo is developing a project on the transatlantic reception of Indigenous North American architecture through early modern travel narratives, maps, and diplomatic exchanges. In September 2025, he will join The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti as a Berenson Fellow.
The paper examines the logistical underpinnings of architectural production through the close reading of a single document: an inventory completed in 1753 of the warehouse where the city of Paris stored materials used to make ephemeral festival architectures. The 57-page inventory lists more than 14,000 objects ranging from plaster statues and trompe l’oeil canvases to wooden armatures and tin lanterns that were used and reused over many years. Written in a single anonymous hand, the inventory organizes items by the location where they were stored and their material composition. More than a list of contents, the inventory captures something of the facility’s operations. This includes, most notably, procedures for handling and reusing decorations that prefigure a modern circular economy for building materials. While remaining attentive to the inventory’s contents, the investigation will also analyze this inventory as a physical object whose design reflects an emergent bureaucratic and logistical imaginary that sought to measure, record, and transport an increasingly diverse world of material assets– including buildings. In this way, the paper works towards a fuller of understanding of inventories and similar kinds of paperwork as objects whose authorship, form, use, content, and production merit serious attention. More critically, this investigation enacts a double microhistory for the way it uses one inventory to link a single intensely local building to a global logistical moment in history that includes enterprises, like the British East India Company and the transatlantic slave trade, that also relied upon various kinds of storage architectures.
Matthew Gin is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. With a focus on early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, Gin’s scholarship moves architecture away from a paradigm of permanence by examining forms of spatial production that have largely vanished and are known only through fragmentary material traces. His current book project, Paper Monuments: Making Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Enlightenment France, is an expanded cultural history of temporary pageant decorations that uses contracts, drawings, and inventories to reconstruct ephemeral decorations and the enduring ways that they shaped knowledge production and power relations. His writing appears in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal 18, Renaissance Quarterly, The Court Historian, and the edited volume Material Cultures of the Global 18th Century: Art, Mobility and Change. He holds a PhD in Architectural History from Harvard University.
This study narrates the story of the kursi—a decagonal wooden stand with a tray on top, adorned with inlays and horseshoe-shaped openings on its sides. Also known as the Damascus stool, Syrian tabouret, or Moorish side table, the kursi can be best described as a ubiquitous yet seemingly trivial accessory in historicist interiors evoking Neo-Mamluk aesthetics. Although unknown to the canonical design history, this artifact in fact became one of the most sought-after furniture pieces by the late nineteenth century, ultimately emerging as the quintessential symbol of a "global commodity" in the expanding market of Near Eastern crafts, as noted by Mercedes Volait.
The aim of this paper is to trace the nomadic journey of this specific artifact and to outline significant timelines, primary locales, and the influential actors that shaped the commercial flow of Ottoman arts and crafts throughout regional and transnational networks. I argue that the saga of the kursi was amplified by the catalogs, which, through their visual, textual, and commercial strategies, accelerated the circulation of the commodity before the commodity itself. I therefore draw on evidence from three trade catalogs, produced by Dimitri Tarazi&Fils from Damascus, Damascene Musa from Constantinople, and Fratelli Mora from Milan, and place them in dialogue with sources such as advertisements, auction catalogs, and photographs. This study intends to build what anthropologist Janet Hoskins calls an “object biography” by examining the economic, artistic, and social life of a furniture typology and this typology’s journey throughout Damascus, Beirut, Constantinople, and Milan. The microhistory of kursi thus offers a fresh perspective on the industrial arts with a shifted geographical focus. On a macro level, it delivers as a postcolonial critique of the flattened out Middle Eastern design culture.
Damla Göre has studied architecture at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and has taught and practised as an architect in Istanbul. Currently, she is a PhD fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, in the chair of Prof. Maarten Delbeke. Her thesis examines the notion of the salon as a contested cultural phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Ottoman art and architecture. Her work examines domestic architecture in the Mediterranean from a material culture and gender studies perspective.
When, in 1822, the recently widowed British travel writer Maria Graham (née Dundas, later Callcott) arrived in newly independent Chile, she decided to settle in what she called a ‘really Chilian cottage’ (1824). Consisting of three rooms and separate kitchens, it provided independence and a ‘seat of self’ (Pratt, 2008). The cottage plays a central role in how Graham situates herself and her book on Chile, which fluctuates between history, ethnography, diary, and capitalist catalogue. In this paper, I reimagine the materialities of the small building – long vanished – in what once were the outskirts of the busiest port of Chile: its whitewashed walls, slatted ceiling, one window, two doors, a curtain, the view from its veranda, and its garden with apple, orange, and almond trees. Only scant evidence from 1822 remains about the Almendral, Graham’s chosen neighbourhood, as it was destroyed and rebuilt again and again after multiple earthquakes. Extrapolating from this highly personal site, I explore how the type of the cottage has been gendered, assigned to a class, and put in the service of the imperial project between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I read Graham’s home through a selection of British sources, including John Wood the Younger’s A Series of Plans for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (1781), Mary Russel Mitford’s Our Village (1824), John Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833), and Jane Webb Loudon’s The Lady's Country Companion (1845). Through both imagined reconstruction and canonical re-reading, I show how the cottage is gendered as both the utilitarian, working-class masculine and the bucolic yet dignified and humble middle-class feminine. Drawing on methods of intersectional feminism and the global microhistory, the paper complicates the type of the cottage, revealing the coloniality, misogynism, and classism underlying some of its genealogy. Anne Hultzsch is an architectural historian, currently leading the ERC-funded group ‘Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900’ (WoWA) at ETH Zurich. She has taught and researched at ETH, the Bartlett, UCL, AHO Oslo, Queen Mary University of London, NYU London, and Greenwich University, among others. Her research draws on intersectional feminism to study the reception and use of architectures and landscapes between ca. 1650 and 1930, focusing on gender, print cultures, perception, and travel. She is the author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950 (2014) and has edited The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum, 2018) and The Origins of the Architectural Magazine in Nineteenth-Century Europe (The Journal of Architecture, 2020). Currently, she is working on the edited volume Women Writing Architecture: Expanding Histories 1700-1900 (with Sol Pérez Martínez, gta Verlag, 2025) and a monograph provisionally entitled Listen to Her! Writing and Architectural Agency Around 1800.
At the core of this microhistorical investigation is a cookbook, first published in 1692 by a woman, who had been exposed to much more education than she should have and who used the cookbook as an outlet for her academic interests. Along with letters exchanged with her sisters, the cookbook will serve as my main source to reconstruct the kitchen as a site of privacy where Schellhammer pursued her intellectual labour. Although the book was re-published in seven editions up until 1984, there is almost no information about the author Maria Sophie Schellhammer (1647–1719), and only via the men in her life can we gather scant data about her biography: Schellhammer was one of the excellently educated daughters of Helmstedt university’s most eminent polymath professor Hermann Conring (1606–81), and the wife of professor of botany Günther Christoph Schellhammer. In the opening dedication to her female readership, Schellhammer—influenced by her exposure to the university environment—writes that running a household, and particularly a kitchen, requires ‘science, diligence, and intelligence’ comparable to ‘composing a letter or writing a book’. By framing the operation of the household in scholarly terms, she neatly appropriates the scholarly habitus that was designed to keep women like her at bay. Spatially, the conceptual affiliation between the study in the professorial household and her kitchen, as implied by Schellhammer, resonates with the idea of a cookbook as a “closet”—a popular term in cookbook titles in the anglophone world at the time. Closets, overlaid with connotations of literacy, could be many types of spaces, and they could house various activities, the principal common denominator being that closets could be locked. The early modern female heading the practical aspects of the household was often seen carrying baskets with keys and in Schellhammer’s book’s frontispiece, a woman stands at the threshold between kitchen and dining room with a large key in hand. The key resonates with the relationship between the term recipe and “secret”. Cookbooks were at the threshold between secrecy (many recipes were called secrets) and self-representation to a broader public as some recipe collections were commissioned to give insight into the sophistication (i.e. wealth) of specific households. In this presentation, I will relate the early modern kitchen to the study, the closet, the secret and the key to reconstruct it as a place of (female) privacy.
Natalie Patricia Körner is tenure-track Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Design of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts—Architecture, Design and Conservation and at the Centre for Privacy Studies (DNRF138, 2019-2027) at the University of Copenhagen. At PRIVACY, she is research leader of the Privacy at Home research group. In her research, she relates relevant contemporary topics (privacy, climate change) to the environmental imagination and early modern history (1500-1800). Körner was educated as an architect at Cambridge University and at the ETH, Zurich and has worked for several practices including Zaha Hadid and Studio Olafur Eliasson. She received her PhD in 2019 from the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen. Körner has presented her work in numerous international conferences, such as the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America. She has published articles and papers in popular magazines such as San Rocco, The Site Magazine, as well as in academic journals, including Architectural Histories. Her artistic research and design work has been exhibited internationally and shown in publications by, amongst others, Apartamento, Icons of El País, Rum International and Wallpaper.
The first section of my research examines a 1921 record plan, conventionally viewed as a mere technical blueprint, to argue that a close reading of the stamps, dates and notations left by P.W.D. Engineers, seemingly mundane, actually reveals the technical labor dynamics and bureaucratic hierarchy embedded in these processes. By examining the hand-drafting techniques employed on linen sheets, the paper unfolds the technical craftmanship and tools used by Tracers and Draftsmen in producing architectural drawings. Additionally, reproduction of these plans through heliographic methods into blueprints emphasizes the technical expertise required. Tracing the sequence of signatures from P.W.D. Engineers further reveals the bureaucratic mechanisms governing plan approvals and dissemination to construction sites, a facet of P.W.D. historiography that remains underexplored.
The second section shifts focus to the publicly inaccessible records room where these P.W.D. records are housed. The space retains traces of its reorganization in 2010 by retired Head Draftsman Mr. Mandre and Senior Clerk Mr. Kharat. Through architectural ethnography, including close readings of the room’s layout, oral histories, and the mapping of elements left on the walls, the paper highlights how these traces reveal the decision-making authority of non-gazetted officials in selecting and preserving lower-ranking P.W.D. documents and labour reports in contemporary times.
This paper, by tracing the microhistory of a single document and examining the architecture of a neglected records room, makes the case for the pivotal roles of Tracers and Draftsmen. Their contributions did not remain integral within technical processes of the colonial past, but also shaped long-term archival practices, underscoring their influence on both the production and preservation of colonial public works.
1 The Public Works Department in India was formally established in 1855. It was one of the most important departments of the colonial administration, responsible for constructing public buildings and infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and irrigation works.
2 Formerly known as Poona, it served as a central administrative division to the Bombay Presidency during the nineteenth century.
Studying Architecture both academically and professionally has deepened my interest in the deciphering the complexities of constructing buildings. I graduated with a Master’s in Architectural History and Research from Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad, in 2024. My research interest lies in investigating 19th-century British India’s utilitarian architecture, studying the colonial Public Works Department (P.W.D.) from bottoms-up approach and decoding colonial archives. I seek to explore the socio-cultural and historical narratives embedded in these structures, identify the gaps in the current historiography of P.W.D. and unfold subaltern narratives that colonial archives have a potential to offer. I am always keen to explore new tools like ethnography that help to bring fresh perspectives to historical writing. In addition, I am enthusiastic about teaching and aim to foster dialogue-driven learning, especially in the fields of architecture and history. Currently, I work as a Teaching Associate at CEPT University in the department of Architecture.
The scale of environmental history here is relatively micro, roughly that of a human hand, of a knot. Corded artifacts seldom survive the test of time, yet, in Oceanic environments which had no metal (until very recently), fibrous material cultures enabled the (indigenous) Austronesian navigators to, beginning about 4000 years ago, lash together sophisticated outrigger canoes, and without a single nail or sextant, sail to and people nearly every island in the vast South Pacific. We are also interested in an even older peoples, the Australoids in Papua New Guinea, an over 40,000 year-old civilization, who invented Bilum looping, and used knotted cords such as the Kirugu as mnemonic cartographic devices. This comparative study in Melanesia highlights know-how rather than surviving objects, unbuilt-yet-inhabited environments over remnants of the built, and the persistence of know-how despite the ruptures of factors both environmental and European-colonial. The British zoologists and anthropologists AC Haddon and James Hornell traveled to Melanesia in the late nineteenth century and drew minutely-detailed lashings of canoes, string figures, and other artifacts. Their knot-work diagrams are key objects of inquiry here. How knowledge was learned, shared, or divulged with, and given its non-textual epistemological format, how this tacit and tactile know-how carried through thenceforth are of interest here.
How might lashing, knotting, and plaiting themselves be epistemological historical formats? Even though Gottfried Semper situates knots, wickerwork, and textiles at the origins of architecture (no doubt influenced by the Maori artefacts he observed in London in the mid-nineteenth century), it is not a history that appreciates architectural space beyond tectonics, stereotomics, and joining—nor one that fully appreciates the tensile physics of maintaining wood lashed together subject to perpetual motion. Invested in non-metallic and non-lithic material cultures hardly index-able or amenable to inscription, and in androgynous rather than solely-male labor, this study promises investigating the most delicate and least-visible aspects of making buildings and environments through deep time.
Adil Mansure is a PhD student at the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, interested in maritime indigenous histories of technology, architecture, and the environment in the 18-20th centuries. As a (SAH-funded) H. Allen Brooks Traveling Fellow 2022, Adil pursued oral histories exploring architectural information in Indigenous stories from the Canadian North-West. He also worked on the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini, co-edited Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque (Routledge 2019), as well, curated the traveling exhibit Instrumentalies of an Eternal Baroque, in which he pursued a ‘History and Theory via drawing and making’ method of historical inquiry. Adil has taught studios and seminars at the University of Toronto, the University at Buffalo, Wenzhou-Kean University, OCAD University, and Laurentian University; and worked in architecture studios in Toronto, New York, and Mumbai. He holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Mumbai University.
The architectural heritage of Liberia is a powerful manifestation of the country’s particular history. Liberia was established in the early nineteenth century, in a territory inhabited by various West African ethnic groups, to relocate formerly enslaved persons and free people of color from North America. The settlers imported their experienced ideas of civilization and architecture, shaping the built environment of Africa’s first independent republic with classical features derived from antebellum building culture. Much of this heritage is now compromised, but it had been documented by several individuals who engaged with Liberia for different purposes, including Amanda Smith (1837-1915). Born into slavery, she obtained her freedom and became a Methodist preacher. Her illustrated autobiography, published in 1893, documents her evangelizing missions across North America, Europe, India, and Africa. Remarkably, the images in the chapters on Liberia are the only ones concerned primarily with urban landscapes. The book features vistas of Monrovia’s rectilinear, building-lined streets, while other illustrations depict prominent masonry facilities, adorned with porticos and classical columns.
Liberia’s architecture plays a relevant part in her account. She discusses the country’s housing conditions, the most suitable building materials according to the climate, her engagement with buildings, and their social significance. In the accounts of several authors, the built environment was central in conceptualizing narratives on Liberia. Complementing other sources, An Autobiography provides crucial information on urban and architectural matters, yet it stands out for its specificity. Smith’s distinctive positionality informs her confrontations with racial dynamics and immigration, as well as her encounters with indigenous ways of life. This paper examines how an atypical and accidental source like Amanda Smith’s autobiography can enhance knowledge on broader phenomena such as an overlooked architectural history, while providing unique perspectives on the cultural forces that shaped Liberia’s society and architecture. Federico Marcomini is postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, where he also collaborates with the research unit _Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture_. Previously, he was research assistant at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza. In 2024, he obtained a PhD in architectural history at the University of Florence. His research focuses on the reuses and readaptations of classical architectural languages in novel geographical and chronological contexts. His current research project, _Palladianism in West Africa: The Ambiguities of an Architectural Migration_, explores the uses and significance of classical and specifically Palladian models in the architecture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Liberia, situating them at the crossroads of architectural and cultural history, historiography and theory.
Curtis was part of the huge wave of white settlement that dispossessed Native Americans and erased their presence, in favor of a powerful national ideal of the land-and-home-owning, self-reliant, hard-working small farmer. Marginal documents such as Curtis’ journal reveal, however, the importance of indigenous labor in the early 20th century in San Diego County, where Indians were skilled cattle and sheep herders, orchard pruners, and adobe builders. They harvested crops and worked on irrigation projects and construction sites. Curtis’ ranch abutted a recently-formed reservation, and his land and house must have been tended also by indigenous hands.
This paper explores how minor artifacts such as Curtis' writings could yield a history of architecture and landscape that reclaims the dense indigenous life in Southern California not only before the arrival of the white settlers, but also after it. It sets the seemingly trivial material in Curtis’ journal against a background of Indian removal and struggle over land and water. Curtis was, first and foremost, a beekeeper, an occupation defined by reciprocities: can the collective caretaking that occurred on the ranch allow us to recover, in the architecture of the single family home on settled land, not only the triumph of conquest, but also the complex social and economic relationship that bound landscape, native inhabitants, and settler? Can the continuum between land and house, sowing and sewing, digging and writing, agriculture and culture that emerges from his journals, help us write differently about architecture?
Juliana Maxim is an art and architectural historian and a professor in the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History at the University of San Diego. She has written about the history of modern aesthetic practices—from photography to urbanism—under the communist, centralized states of the Soviet Bloc. Out of that research came a book titled The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1948–1965 (Routledge, 2019), in which she explores the intense and multifaceted architectural activity in postwar Romania and the mechanisms through which mass housing was invested with political meaning.
In this paper I will discuss the sophisticated ways in which the Inca collection, stored, and treated excrement and how the built environment at royal estates, such as Machu Picchu, was designed to accommodate these processes. In addition, I will explore how this material gathered in the acauasi, in turn, enabled the Inca built environment to propagate in ways never before recognized. For example, not only did the acauasi create a sanitized Inca place (while addressing complex Inca understandings of the body and exuviae), but this collected and treated material could be used to 1) fill newly built terraces that defined Inca sites, 2) make adobe used to build a diversity of structures, and to 3) activate the senses, such as being placed inside the base of raised platforms in order to amplify the sounds of dancing. In sum, it is by studying Inca toilets, that we can better understand Inca engineering, material science, agriculture, ephemeral architecture, bodily values, and soundscape, and in the process, profoundly transform our own view of the larger corpus of Inca built environment.
Trained as an architect and architectural historian at the University of California, Berkeley, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has written two books: At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero, and (with Jean Pierre Protzen), The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction. Nair has two current book projects. The first, Women and the Making of Inca Architecture offers new perspectives on the Inca built environment by highlighting the profound ways in which women designed, constructed, used, and gave meaning to Inca spaces and places. The second, (co-edited with Paul Niell), The Forgotten Canopy: Rethinking Ephemeral Architecture, Ecology, and Imperialism, examines Indigenous and African diasporic built environments across the Americas.
In 1771, the home of a gravedigger named Eyub El-Hac was raided by Mehmed Tahir Ağa, the Chief Imperial Architect, alongside the local imam, waqf officials, police officers, and stonemasons. They discovered 77 gravestones repurposed as building materials throughout the house—including the courtyard, garden, bath, and even toilets. One gravestone, read aloud to a public audience, was handed to a waqf officer after being removed from the floor. A judge later decreed that damage to gravestones was equivalent to harming public roads and bridges.
Using a microhistorical approach—through thick description and close reading—this study formulates that the Ottoman state not only managed cemeteries through the gravediggers’ organization but also actively protected their material contents under the Chief Imperial Architect’s authority. The study identifies this incident as a case of urban management and heritage preservation and explores the role of complex attitudes toward cemeteries from secular to spiritual, materialist to cultural in forming mentalities of urban heritage in pre-modern Ottoman society.
F. İkbal Polat is an architect and a PhD student in Architectural History at Middle East Technical University (METU), currently working as a Research/Teaching Assistant at Gebze Technical University’s Department of Architecture. Her thesis, titled “Death on the Margin: An Urban History of Istanbul’s Land Walls Cemeteries,” investigating the cemeteries of Constantinople/Istanbul during the Byzantine and Ottoman periods earned her the Best MA Thesis Award in Social Sciences at METU. She has presented her research at international conferences in Türkiye, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA, where she has received accolades including the Stockton Award from the Association for Gravestone Studies and the Scott F. Opler Fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2024. İkbal is also a member of the organizing team for DocTalks, an inter-institutional platform for PhD students in Architectural History and Theory.
Architectural historiography of colonial Indonesia centers on the biography, life and work of Dutch architects and engineers who were based in Java. This historiography continues to focus on the life and work of Indonesian architects, engineers, and politicians in early, post- Independence Indonesia. The vernacular builders who had worked before the arrival of the Dutch architects, bridging the knowledge between architects and construction workers, and working as intermediaries between Dutch/European and Indonesian generations of architects also deserve our attention. Through microhistories approach, this paper aims to describe the practice of vernacular builders, known as anémer in Indonesian, which was a translation of aannemer in Dutch, meaning builder, contractor and craftsperson, specifically the Bandung-based family entrepreneurs of ethnic Chinese Indonesians who worked with Dutch architects in the late Dutch colonial era and with Indonesian engineers in early, post-Independence Indonesia.
This paper is organized in three sections as follows: The first section is to provide a context of the genealogy of anémers as intermediary experts from local sources, such as autobiography, family memoir, and poems. The second section concerns oral histories from the Bandung-based anémers of Boen Joek Sioe and sons as well as Thio Tjoan Tek. This section portrays the marginalized voices of architectural and construction practices in the life of a city. I highlight their migration journey and hybrid identities, specifically the ways in which they accumulated their knowledge during the journey and landed significant projects in Bandung. The third section includes the interpretation of two photographs of the family of Thio Tjoan Tek. This research shows how the builders’ intermarriage, political alignments, racial structure and building trades interwove in their practices, both during the building of a hill station in the 1920s, and in the early, post-Independence era, marked by the venue for the Bandung Conference in 1955.
Rina Priyani is a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Architectural History, University of Virginia School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia, particularly the city of Bandung, Indonesia during the Afro-Asian solidarity movement in the 1950s-1960s. Her book project, "Remaking Bandung," examines the efforts of Indonesian intellectuals and visionaries of the postcolonial world who have been reinventing the city of Bandung, rupturing it from its colonial origin. She traced this lineage to the important moment in global history when the city hosted the Afro-Asian Conference, known as the ”Bandung Conference,” in 1955 and became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement. Dr. Priyani obtained her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, she taught at Bandung Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley.
"Name," "membership," "malignant commissions," "excuses." Each row in each matrix, hand-drafted on supersized sheets of yellowed paper, is filled with data. 261 cases give a concise overview of Norwegian architects' conduct during the WW2 German occupation. The entries are condensed from dossiers with obligatory forms for self-reporting and peer-submitted testimonies. They carry questions and estimations, well-established facts and unconfirmed suspicions. Red dots, blue dots, reference numbers, and abbreviations reveal the files’ purpose: to form the basis for the Norwegian Architects' Association's (NAL) 1945 extrajudicial purge against collaborationists.
1940–1945 is conventionally described as a dormant period for Norwegian architecture. The purge suggests otherwise, unveiling a sector with opportunities for those willing and able. Exceptional circumstances broke old hierarchies, forged new networks and elites, cast a different set of actors on the scene. Then came peace, bearing both rebuilding and reckoning. NAL recorded and processed every perceived or alleged transgression committed by its members during the war; first clandestinely under occupation, later openly with public support. Architecturally, offenses ran the full gamut from interior designs to military infrastructure. Morally and politically, they included accepting boycotted commissions, remaining a member of NAL after its Nazification, and—most egregiously—furthering German interests. Whether driven by threat, opportunism, or ideology, each suspect was subject to the same formulaic scrutiny.
This paper studies NAL’s postwar purge, looking beyond “befores” and “afters” to understand the “in-between.” Recently accessible process archives complicate the history of material and social reconstruction. It nuances the occupation’s effect on individual architects as they navigated specific dilemmas and relations. From names and social systems to accusations and evidence, the paperwork enables a fragmentary reconstruction of a brief but complex period when architecture was intensely political.
Ingrid Dobloug Roede is a PhD fellow at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) with a background from design, historic preservation, teaching, and cultural programming. She holds a Master of Science in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Master in Architecture from AHO. At MIT, Roede was a Fulbright Grantee, Aker Scholar, and recipient of the MIT SA+P SMArchS Thesis Prize. She is a co-founder of the publishing network Good in Theory.
How can we write a history of spaces meant to resist the gaze of hegemonic knowledge? This question stands at the heart of my “microhistory”: quilombo architecture in colonial-era Brazil and its modern afterlives. Quilombos were rural settlements – notably Palmares (c.1605-1694) – created by enslaved peoples seeking refuge from the brutality of plantation capitalism. Generations of enslaved African, Indigenous, and mixed-race Brazilians fled the surveillance and violence of colonial society to forge these independent communities in the hinterlands, where they cultivated food and built thatched-roof huts using artisanal techniques. Scholars such as Robert Slenes and Elizabeth Farfán-Santos have studied the history of quilombos with an eye toward diasporic African identity, cultural anthropology, and contemporary struggles for land rights among quilombo descendants, yet these sites have largely been overlooked by architectural historians.
My paper aspires to remedy this gap in pursuit of larger questions: Does the lack of physical and visual evidence for quilombo architecture mean they are forever relegated to minor status in our field? Why is it that “macro” myths and narratives, like that of the heroic Zumbi dos Palmares (c.1655-1695), a leader of the quilombola insurgency who became apotheosized during Afro-Brazilian radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, resist assimilation into architectural history? How might we change our disciplinary methods and perspectives to accommodate the fugitive agency of quilombo architecture and its place within hemispheric flows of artisanal knowledge between Black and Indigenous makers, e.g., the wood-and-grass oca housing structures made by the Kamayurá tribe of the Amazonian basin?
Fugitive both in use and in design, the architecture of quilombos mostly took the form of thatched-roof huts, hewn from palm fronds, wood, bamboo, and other local fauna, built for uncertain duration due to the threat of demolition posed by slavecatchers, police, and imperial military forces. Given their ephemeral nature, few extant traces remain from early modern quilombos. Their durability was not material, but rather mnemonic – an architecture passed down from generation to generation through the transfer of embodied knowledge, influencing later types of informal settlement such as mocambos and even modern-day favelas. Palmares therefore allows to reconsider the scales of “micro” and “macro” in the writing of architectural history. Drawing from my fieldwork conducted in Palmares, as well as available archeological evidence and documentation by European explorers (e.g., Johann Moritz Rugendas), my paper argues for a critical embrace of the ephemeral, the speculative, and the mythic in expanded histories of the built environment.
David Bijan Sadighian (Ph.D., History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, 2023) is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Yale University, where he researches and teaches the history of architecture, infrastructure, and material culture in the Atlantic World since the eighteenth century. His work situates the history of design at the nexus of empire, migration, capitalism, and political thought, bridging the disciplines of art and architectural history with global history, sociology, and related fields. His current book project, “The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design and Internationalism in the Age of Empire,” examines how the global circulation of methods of architectural composition shaped international order during the height of European colonial expansion (c.1870-1930). David is also developing a second project on ephemeral architecture in Latin America related to his ETH abstract. His work has received the support of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris), the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Max Weber Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the DAAD, among others. He has published his work widely, including an article in the EAHN journal Architectural Histories: “The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento in Belle Époque Brazil” (doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8598).
In 1448, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, initiated plans to replace the wooden beams of the Bethlehem Basilica’s roof. By 1484, his heirs Charles and Mary saw the project through to completion. Unlike his father and grandfather, who led gruesome crusades against the Muslim occupants of Syria, Philip was what I call a “soft crusader.” This is to say that while he kept his predecessors’ crusader dreams alive, he never actually led a bloody war in the Levant. Instead, he invested Burgundy’s valuable resources in Levantine Christian infrastructure, putting money into pilgrimage routes, hospices, and villages. Considering that each transaction required liaison with the Mamluk authorities in Cairo who ruled over Syria, this seemingly small, microhistorical renovation, expands while it threads together events that cut across seas, geographies, courts, and confessions. Burgundy’s material investiture in West Asia included the replacement of the Bethlehem Basilica’s ancient West Asian cedar beams with Central European larch. Philip began by requesting permission from the pope to carry out the renovation; he then negotiated for larch trees from the Alpine mountains to be felled, cut into planks, and brought downriver to Venice for shipment. But why go through all the effort when cedar was still readily abundant in Syria? It was, after all, ancient custom to build Jewish, Christian, and Islamic architecture with cedar, a wood that had magical origins in West Asian mythologies. I argue that to replace cedar with larch wood shifted the context of architectural diplomacy to accommodate a new set of European symbolic values in Bethlehem. This is to say that in Burgundy’s vision for renovations, European architectural wood materially abstracted and conveyed a European landscape to the so-called “Holy Land.” By microcosmically occupying parts of Mamluk Syria without waging war, the renovation effected Burgundy’s “soft crusade.”
Braden Lee Scott is an architectural historian who focuses on the expanded histories of ancient buildings and their receptions in early modern art. Sometimes he ventures into contemporary art, and his short book on Kent Monkman is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Assistant Professor of Early Modern Art & Architecture at the University of Manitoba, and held pre and postdoctoral positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte.
In Western historiography, the narrative surrounding the development of glass architecture since the 19th century is one of a quest for transparency, synonymous with progress and modernity. World’s Fairs and their extraordinary glass sceneries provided vivid case studies for such a narrative, such as the Crystal Palace and the Grand Palais. The first half of the 20th century gave glass new properties, reinforcing its key role in the construction of the Western imaginary. Iconic buildings with ever-larger glazed facades have become inescapable illustrations in publications on the history of modern architecture.
But how would this history unfold if, instead of looking through the windows of iconic buildings, it were written from the factories? Such an industrial history is often framed as an epic tale of technological progress, enhancing transparency, strength and comfort. However, rather than chronicling these innovations, this paper focuses on the men, women and children who, literally, manufactured transparency in the first half of the 20th century. They transformed silica sand and coal into glass sheets, while fighting for better working conditions as production processes became increasingly industrialised.
Focusing on the French glass industry, this paper draws on industrial archives and trade union publications to explore a subaltern history of architectural transparency. A key figure in this narrative is Charles Delzant, a glassworker, anarcho-syndicalist leader and editor-in-chief of La Voix des Verriers, a trade union newspaper that chronicled the struggles of French and Belgian glassworkers for nearly three decades. These sources reveal how the intensification of glass production, while contributing to the spread of modern architecture characterised by the ever-increasing use of glass, also deepened the exploitation of workers and natural resources. This paper therefore sheds light on a counter-history of architectural transparency deeply rooted in the Capitalocene and its associated politics of exploitation of nature and labour.
Jean Souviron is an architect (ENSA Paris-Est) and civil engineer (ENPC) with a PhD in architecture from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research focuses on 20th-century building techniques and their relationship with indoor climates and the environment. He analyses the architectural, social and ecological impact of the implementation of industrial policies and energy regulations, combining history of architecture and technology, engineering sciences and environmental humanities.
The current literature on the history of the construction of the Dakar—St. Louis railway explains its implementation as primarily a French military control operation of the Cayor, a nation encircling most of France’s territories. The macroeconomic stakes were often studied in detail, describing Cayor’s dispossession and dissolution. However, these accounts remain focused on France’s colonial motivations.
This paper follows, almost day by day, a resistance campaign of desertification from December 1882 to January 1883 against the construction of the railway. Threatened by the imminent French invasion disguised as a railway line splitting the Cayor in the middle, thousands decided to abandon their homes rather than submit to French rule. They made the lands they traversed unusable by burning fields and sealing water wells with soil. Aware of the resistance, the French army followed the people on their journey eastward to ensure they didn’t return, remilitarizing outposts left unused in peaceful times.
This study attempts to forensically reconstruct the events by mapping them, making the dissonant voices against the railway spatially legible. The subject invites an innovative methodology as we follow actors who destroyed their environment. Against the backdrop of the construction of a hegemonic structure—the built environment of the railway—the desertification campaign emerges as an overlooked anti-colonial struggle.
Alican Taylan is an independent architect, engineer, and Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University, where he studies nineteenth-century environmental and colonial history. Recently, he curated Strategic Landforms (2024), an exhibition about military architectural production in Senegal over the nineteenth century. From 2018 to 2022, he was a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute’s graduate architecture program. He contributed to various exhibitions, including co-curating Confronting Carbon Form (2023), first shown at The Cooper Union, which explored innovative disciplinary approaches to addressing environmental concerns in architecture. His work was supported by grants from institutions including the Architectural League, Graham Foundation, Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, and New York State Council on the Arts.
This study centers on the architectural patronage of Ayşe Sineperver (d.1808)— a consort to the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–1789)—who spent much of her life waiting to become a queen mother (valide sultan). She bore a son, Mustafa (later, briefly, Sultan Mustafa IV), and a daughter, Esma (known as Esma the Younger). Following Abdülhamid’s death, Sineperver and Esma were relegated to the capital’s old palace. When Esma, at the age of 14, was married off to Küçük Hüseyin, formerly head footman to the new sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), and his later Grand Admiral, Sineperver exerted control over her daughter’s new household and estates through the stewardship of Ömer Ağa, who also served her directly.
Sineperver groomed Ömer, a commoner from a Cretan family of mercantile upstarts, to become one of the expanded court’s elite middlemen. Their vast epistolary correspondence, which the study mobilizes, revolved around architectural commissions, estate management, and luxury gift-giving—tasks entrusted to Esma by the sultan’s court. Written in a frank and quotidian tone, Sineperver’s prolific letters reveal not only the remarkable education of an Ottoman bureaucrat by a marginalized court woman, but also the considerable architectural knowledge Sineperver acquired through managing her daughter’s household. This study, then, presents a microhistory of eighteenth-century dynastic architectural decorum (adab) and taste in the Ottoman capital, alongside a detailed exploration of the many actors involved in maintaining it. The letters also introduce us to the networks of Ottoman Greek architects, referred to as kalfas, such as Komyanoz, Todori, Yorgi, and Yani, who appear as even more marginalized subjects within the dynastic purview of Sineperver, Esma, and Ömer. We attempt to reconstruct these largely domestic royal sites—now entirely lost—through correspondences that involve these interconnected builders. In addition, understudied sketches from contemporaneous Grand Tourers, most notably Thomas Hope and Robert Cockerell, assist in visualizing the detailed textual descriptions found in the letters.
Deniz Türker is an Assistant Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Rutgers-New Brunswick, who specializes in late-Ottoman and Turkish visual and material cultures. Her book entitled, The Accidental Palace (Penn State Press, 2023) traces the architectural and landscape history of Yıldız, the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul. She also has a sustained interest in the history of Islamic art collecting (especially in the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Egyptian domains). Her next project is centered on Yıldız Moran’s photographic practice in the context of Anatolia’s rediscovery by Turkish humanists in the 1950s.
However, the heroic narrative of the introduction of European design principles and philosophy onto a receptive – and passive – Mexican audience oversimplifies the complex realities of the Palacio’s construction. The archival record echoes with the traces of the indigenous laborers involved in the construction of the Palacio, of the people who laid the stones, mixed the lime, carved the capitals, and mounted the balustrades of this building. Many of these young men belonged to Nahua communities, whose traditional ways of life were being actively disrupted by increasing pressure from the Bourbon crown.
In this paper, I consider the history of this building from their perspective, reading the Palacio through the lens of these unnamed, unacknowledged and largely unknown workers. Using construction records, economic histories and reconstructed indigenous building techniques, I argue that the participation of these communities in the construction of the Palacio is central to contending with its history. Attending to these under-studied figures provides a richer and more nuanced reading of this building, offering insights into the larger history of Neoclassical architecture in the Americas. Here, issues of labor, economic opportunity and colonial racial identities shed light on and complicate the familiar narrative of academic stylistic exchange and transmission. Rebecca Yuste is a historian of nineteenth-century art and architecture, completing a PhD in art history and archaeology at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the relationship between landscape and empire in Bourbon Mexico. She writes about global neoclassicism, the history of garden design, and questions of imperial botany. Her research has been supported by the Society of Architectural Historians, the Hispanic Society of America, and Dumbarton Oaks. Rebecca holds an AB with high honors from Princeton University, where she won the Frederick Barnard White Prize in Architecture.