Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 took on the mantle of modernist expression while also acquiring government contracts and immersing themselves in bureaucratic processes. This book considers how, for a brief period, architects, planners, structural engineers, and various practitioners of the built environment employed themselves in designing all the intimate spheres of life, but from a consolidated space of expertise. Seen in these terms, development was, to cite Arturo Escobar, an immense design project itself, one that requires
Trade Review
"Brilliantly questioning the figure of 'development' that haunts modernism, Aggregate gets down to the dirt of the Bretton-Woods world: the entanglement of architectural discourse in food insecurity and mining infrastructures, debt servicing and dictators, supply chains of materials and expertise. A must-read for architectural thinkers."
Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
"This timely book addresses a major blind spot in contemporary architectural scholarship: the central role of the design disciplines in the processes of modern, postcolonial development in creating the exclusions and inequalities of our time."
Fernando Lara, Potter Rose Professorship, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Developmental time 1. Incompletion: on more than a certain tendency in postwar architecture and planning 2. God’s gamble: self-help architecture and the housing of risk Part II: Expertise 3. Planning for an uncertain present: action planning in Singapore, India, Israel, and Sierra Leone 4. To which revolution? The National School of Agriculture and the center for the improvement of corn and wheat in Texcoco and El Batán, Mexico, 1924–1968 5. From rice research to coconut capital 6. "The city as a housing project": training for human settlements at the Leuven PGCHS in the 1970s–1980s Part III: Bureaucratic organization 7. Folders, patterns, and villages: pastoral technics and the Center for Environmental Structure 8. The technical state: programs, positioning, and the integration of architects in political society in Mexico, 1945–1955 9. "Foreigners in filmmaking" Part IV: Technological transfer 10. The making of architectural design as Sŏlgye: integrating science, industry, and expertise in postwar Korea 11. Infrastructures of dependency: US Steel’s architectural assemblages on Indigenous lands 12. Reinventing earth architecture in the age of development Part V: Designing the rural 13. Globalizing the village: development media, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the United Nations in India 14. "Ruralizing" Zambia: Doxiadis Associates’ systems-based planning and developmentalism in the nonindustrialized South 15. Food capital: fantasies of abundance and Nelson Rockefeller’s architectures of development in Venezuela, 1940s—1960s 16. The Jewish Agency’s open cowsheds: Israeli third way rural design, 1956–1968 17. Floors and ceilings: the architectonics of accumulation in the Green Revolution Part VI: Land 18. Policy regionalism and the limits of translation in land economics 19. Leisure and geo-economics: the Hilton and other development regimes in the Mediterranean south 20. Antiparochì and (its) architects: Greek architectures in failure
