RESEARCH

[Anti]Monumental Intelligence
Mellon Foundation Grant, Humanities in the Age of AI, HUMAN Fellow, Lake Forest College

“Anti-Monumental” works with AI to critically evaluate Chicago’s public history monuments, and to propose corrective augmentations or new models that better represent the complicated history of race, conquest, and representation in Chicago. The project responds to the city’s commission – the “racial healing and reckoning project”– tasked with evaluating over 500 Chicago monuments. Though seemingly singular, each monument is entangled in complicated and far-reaching histories of exploitation, extraction, and displacement – histories without physical commemoration in the contemporary city. In conversation with an LLM, the project begins to unravel the histories underpinning monuments central to Chicago’s public narrative, to analyze the contemporary public discourse surrounding their preservation or plans for removal, and to connect them to alternative histories of being and belonging. The project experiments with generative AI’s capacity for reading and producing images to question identified monuments, and to re-envision them as “anti-monuments” to Chicago’s diverse, complicated, difficult, and hidden histories.

Statue of the Republic and "the White City," World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893
​The monument currently remains standing on the former fair grounds at Jackson Park

Gottfried Semper, Detail of the Parthenon, 1836, demonstrating how it would have appeared as richly painted in Ancient Greece, opposed to the common whitewashing of its history. 

Divided by Design
Under contract with University of Georgia Press, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series

"Divided by Design" investigates the hidden histories of labor exploitation, workforce housing, and uneven development underpinning key sites of Los Angeles' celebrated architectural heritage. It exposes how spaces characterized by substandard living conditions and deliberate segregation functioned as sites of architectural control and social management for the racialized labor forces that built the city. The book delves into the practices of the Pacific Electric Railway Company, contrasting the lavish bungalow resorts for white tourists against austere "section houses" for Mexican track workers, revealing the exclusionary tactics that underpinned the region's architectural growth. The second part investigates the politics of preservation and cultural erasure embedded in the celebrated Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architectures of Southern California. It uncovers the hidden histories of Indigenous craft and labor, often exploited through Indian boarding schools like the Sherman Institute, which trained Indigenous youth in servitude and Anglo domesticity to support the expansion of the metropolis. The third part examines the broader narratives of homeownership, migration, and suburbanization in Los Angeles, revealing how racist ideologies expressed through redlining and racially restrictive covenants were not only legislatively, but materially inscribed into the built environment. The book investigates the paradoxical nature of homeownership within the suburbs developed by the Los Angeles Investment Company, which marketed bungalow tracts to working-class Black families while instituting overtly discriminatory practices and disparities in amenities compared to white subdivisions.

“The Bivouac,” residence of General Harrison Gray Otis at Los Angeles, Ca. pictured along with the Glenwood Mission Inn as examples of the “mission renaissance” in: Horace Stoll, “California’s Modern Mission Buildings,” The National Builder 52, no. 8 (Aug 1, 1911): 33.

Modernism's Territories
Under contract with Routledge, Architecture Borders & Territories Series

​"Modernism's Territories" uncovers the hidden narratives of coloniality and imperialism that shaped the built environment of the United States and its overseas territories from the Spanish-American War to the post-WWII era. This groundbreaking book challenges traditional architectural histories by revealing how the development of celebrated buildings, neighborhoods, and architectural practices were inextricably linked to the clearance of subaltern communities, displacement of the working class, and construction of racial
geographies–both at home and abroad. It considers the entanglements between “Pan-Pacific,” “Pax-Americana,” “scientific,” “hygienic,” “functional,” and “regional” forms of modernism in
architecture and urban design and the politics of Progressive, Commonwealth, New Deal, and U.S. Naval structures of power.

Pages from “Planning: Guam,” Progressive Architecture (January 1953), illustrating “tropical modern” projects and plans designed by Richard Neutra under the direction of James Murray Stewart and the Guam Planning Commission. Stewart and Neutra were both involved with public housing and urban renewal projects in the U.S. under the Housing Authority, both before and after their work in Guam.