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Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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- [00:23]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
There.
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- [00:55]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
Subject to change this episode is brought.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Aaron Kerr about his book titled Incorporating Architects How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire, published by the University of California Press in 2025, helping us understand some corporate histories that are doing a whole bunch of things right. We're going to be talking about some architecture and engineering firms that are massive. Massive in terms of people employed, that are massive in terms of the amount of money they have at their disposal around the kinds of interventions that they're making into people's everyday lives. And yet these are not organizations that we usually think of as being this influential. And it turns out part of that is because these are not histories that they necessarily want to be told that much. But Erin has excavated a whole bunch of things to help us understand what is actually going on behind the scenes. And so we have a lot to discuss. Aaron, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
- [02:33]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:43]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
Sure. So my name is Erin Kerr. As you mentioned, I am an architectural historian and I am also an assistant professor of architecture and architectural history at Cal Poly Pomona, which is a polytechnic university in California. I first became interested in architects and architecture firms while I was an intern architect many years ago in the 2010s and I had grown up in rural Maine on the east coast of the US where there were no architects in my town. I went to a very small school to study architecture in rural Vermont. And at the time I was really struck by how little scholarship existed about architects work in general. The most recent books about architecture practice dated to the 1980s and 1970s and they really only focused on tiny firms and the so called genius creative artist architects. And so my initial questions really centered on how had this increasing size of firms come to be. By then they were employing thousands of people across architecture and engineering firms and really transforming the profession and built environment. So as I was starting to study these post war firms, I kept hearing about this firm named Daniel Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall, which today is known as the architecture and engineering behemoth named aecom, which is one of the largest of such architecture and engineering firms in the world. And the architects that I were, that I was interviewing was describing it as a sort of instigator and a model. So following all of these threads, I found that DmJim and AECOM's history was really defined by military contracts and political alliances that reached as high as the presidency in the US and it revealed a far more complex story of architectural practice than I had ever imagined or learned about. And so I wanted to share that history with both the public and other scholars studying architecture, peeking back behind a.
- [04:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Curtain and going, wait a second, there's loads here is often a really interesting start for a project. But of course being able to tell that story relies on having sources. So can you tell us about some of the sources that you used and tried to use to figure this history out?
- [05:05]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
Sure. So most of my architectural historian colleagues and art historian colleagues tend to focus on drawings or books of architects and artists. And you know, they visit archives where well known architects works are cataloged. But I was a bit more interested in looking at business records and documents from the firm as a way to understand the firm's history and business history itself as a design. And so these are much more boring documents, I would say, and the kinds of documents that my students don't find very interesting to think about. But after months of back and forth with AECOM's administration, the company's legal counsel denied me access, actually to its archives. And they claimed that their clients retained the rights to their drawings and documents, and so they couldn't be shown without permission. And so at other points, they said that the records couldn't be located, that they didn't have employees that knew how to access them, or even that boxes, there were thousands of boxes that they had stored in an offsite vault. Vault that were unlabeled and unindexed, so they didn't even know what was in them. So one of the workarounds was to follow the firm's paper trails wherever they surfaced in public repositories. So the National Archives, public libraries and university collections. And I also filed a number of Freedom of Information act requests, or FOIA requests to obtain documents that were held by federal agencies like the CIA and the Air Force and the Army. So looking at contracts and documents of that nature, letters of exchange, and in parallel, I also conducted a series of oral histories with current and former employees, as well as relatives of the firm's founders and its second generation of leaders who eventually created this behemoth known as aecom. And so these oral histories really proved to be invaluable. So not only did they illuminate the culture and decision making of the firm itself, but they also led me to forgotten records tucked away and attics and closets and garages, you know, family photo albums and business. Business cards and all kinds of things. So I started to assemble these various fragments from all of these sources, and I constructed what I like to call a historical ethnography. So a story that not only really reconstructs these institutional histories, but also tries to capture the lived experiences that animated the fragments that I was able to find.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting collection there of sources to bring together. So thank you for telling us a bit about that process of things. Now, thinking about the subjects of this. You've mentioned AECOM before, DimJim, I think, got a mention already. Can you tell us more about sort of the firms that you focus on? And is this a sort of really clearly 20th century starting point for these kind of big phenomenon, or do we see big architecture firms or some similar architecture firms before that?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah, so the book focuses on these large architecture and engineering firms. And I try to trace one of that. One of their histories in particular, as I mentioned, named aecom, which was based in Los Angeles, and it started as a company named Daniel Mann Johnson and Mendenhall or DimJim, that then sort of morphed into this larger thing named aecom. But they're the kind of firm that today is designing what they like to say as anything typical buildings like police stations or civic buildings, at the same time as highways and urban infrastructure and military bases all over the world for many, many countries. So anything that's built, they say they can do it. And they were in fact a 20th century phenomenon. So at the turn of the 19th century, architecture and engineering firms were considered exceptionally large if they had about 50 people. And so there was a correlation between large projects like a skyscraper in Chicago or factories for tanks and cars like Ford or the Ford Fact, and the large architecture firms that were required to design them or produce them. And so after World War II, these firms started to really balloon. And by the 1970s, firms were designing not only single buildings like factories, but actually entire cities. So the infrastructure, technology, communication systems, and even the legal code of many cities with offices in as many nations as the UN and with close to 100,000 people working within them, as in the case of AECOM.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, the scale here is pretty big. So I'm glad you've established that early on as a foundation for the rest of our discussion. We, however, have started at a slightly different point from where you start the book at. You start the book looking at the professional field of architecture and the sort of state of the sector in the 1970s. Why is this an interesting moment to begin an investigation with?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah, the 1970s is a entry point for the book, or I use the 1970s as an entry point for the book because it represents the moment that the profession begins to deregulate. And this is due to attacks by the federal government, first under the President Nixon and then under Reagan. And this is what most scholars describe as the beginning of so called neoliberalism, when the government shifts its policies away from Keynesian economics, which is to say that the government supported less intervention and wanted to actually encourage competition. And so this is a relatively well known story in architecture at least. But in a nutshell, the Department of Justice began attacking professions such as architecture and engineering during this period, which had defined the work of the architect as only the designing of school buildings prior to this. So prior to the 1970s, architects couldn't ethically engage in real estate or construction management or design build. And they also established that architects shouldn't compete with each other on the basis of price or steal projects from colleagues competitively prior to the 1970s. So anti competition in some Sense. And so all of this really changed due to these government attacks so that architects could ethically then engage in services that were once thought to be unbecoming of an architect, like construction and real estate and management. And they were actively encouraged to do this. They were actively encouraged to be more competitive, to fight for contracts and fight for work on the basis of fees. And so there were no longer set fees for architectural services. And just to add, I think most scholars of architecture and the built environment describe this period as the government simply changing their hearts and policy positions in some sense in a top down manner, which I found. But what I found in the book and what I describe is actually how architects and engineers encouraged these policy changes even before the government did. So some of the architects at the firm that I look at were deeply embedded in actually leading institutions and organizations like the Republican National Committee under Nixon. And they were in part responsible for hiring many of the first officers implicated in some scandals like the Watergate scand. And there were even a number of quid pro quos between firms like DMJIM and AECOM and state and federal governments for contracts in exchange for financial contributions to the rnc. And this again occurred under Reagan, who further deregulated the profession. So this is really why I like to start with the 1970s, to think about this pivotal moment of how they sort of deregulated and set themselves free.
- [13:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's definitely a key moment indeed. But as you've said, it's kind of building up to that point. It doesn't sort of come out of nowhere in the 70s. So can you tell us more about these sort of pushes within the industry and what those quid pro quos look like? Because of course you can have like people that run big corporations that try and get the government, you know, influence government policy, but it doesn't have to be in ways that kind of then change the whole sector, whereas this is clearly making that connection quite strong. So can you tell us more about the sort of post World War II-the 70s period to help us understand how we get to that moment of big deregulation?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Absolutely. So after World War II, these firms began to really explode due in large part to the simultaneity of reconstruction efforts around the world, as well as an expanded sense of defense and deterrent funding from during the Cold War and the Korean War and Vietnam War. So a lot of government investment. At the same time, there was also an incredible, incredible proliferation of international development commissions that were forming through newly created institutions that were established through the Bretton Woods Accord, such as the World bank, and institutions at home in the U.S. such as the USAID, which in effect funneled taxpayer dollars to these large firms in exchange for their services abroad, where they were allegedly modernizing many so called third world countries by imposing urban infrastructure and subjecting these countries to impossible levels of debt, which has been the subject of continued scrutiny even today. But this mountain of new funding allowed these firms to become exceptionally large, but also it pushed them to internationalize. And so they began to open offices all over the world during this period. And so with all of that economic power and political leverage, the US government really needed them to be able to establish this global power system because without them they wouldn't be able to do it. And so they were able then to manipulate professional code and deregulate the profession, as many professions were much, much more easily because they were so embedded in the government. And so we might call this a kind of imperial industrial complex by the end of the 20th century.
- [15:30]
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
One forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com okay, that's helpful to understand the links that are being drawn here, both within the US Government but also abroad. What about the things that these firms were building? I mean, you said there was lots of reconstruction efforts and lots of money going into it. What were they actually creating, for example, in the 1960s?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah. So immediately following the war, the firms were often specializing in a single building type. So for dmjim, they were trying to specialize in school buildings. There was a shortage in California after the war of school buildings, which seemed like a good idea for these young architects. But they quickly realized that this boom wouldn't last. So they expanded into a number of different areas. They began to design military bases in Vietnam and Japan and Europe, ballistic missile facilities and prototypes here in the US during the Cold War. And this was the late 1950s and 1960s. And then they moved into private corporate headquarters for a range of kind of expanding corporations during the 60s and 70s, including what they described as these mirror glass office towers that started to pepper places like Southern California. And so they by the 60s they were hiring so called signature designers to try to help them boost their design reputation. And they hired architects like Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden, who were quite well known by then, and they were trying to push building envelopes. So Peli and Lumsden were trying to push the facades, the envelopes of buildings to do new things like having a rounded corner of a building to produce these kind of curvy facades that were detached from the structural core of buildings. And so as I mentioned to many of the corporate clients by the late 1960s had also expanded. So it wasn't just architecture and engineering firms, in part because of this massive investment on part of government. And they had parts of their businesses that didn't really seem to belong and so these were called conglomerate firms. So firms that were growing by diversifying and acquiring companies that, that often were geographically disconnected or diversifying services or products. So think of a company that might be manufacturing shoes, but also offering satellite technology services or something like that. And so DMJM and AECOM were in fact also conglomerates, and then they were working for conglomerates by this point. But the architects started to call the facades of these buildings the headquarters themselves also as a kind of conglomerate aesthetic, because of the way that these curvy facades were trying to reconcile the potentially divergent operations within them. So the facades had this difficult task of showing the buildings as somehow part of the same company. If you're designing a corporate headquarters, for example, the same company, the same organization, while at the same time trying to celebrate the divergent volumes within them. So each of the various parts of the company wanted to be recognized or celebrated the same time.
- [20:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this was a really interesting development to read about and kind of really helps explain why these firms, as you've been telling us, kind of got so big, you're kind of like, well, how many architects do you need? It's like, well, if you're doing things like this, the scale definitely makes more sense. Why was the US Government so invested in making this happen? What was the benefit for them of these firms getting so big?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah, so many of the post war firms that ballooned were led or started by young architects who were about 10 years out of architecture school. And many of them graduated in the 1930s and they also had served or they served in the military and had very stunted careers. And so they then made military friends who would later become important figures in the government. So some remaining in the military as commanders in various posts. And so when work started to dwindle in the post war years, they leaned on these friends. So they sent letters to everyone, please, you know, asking for, for pleading for, for work anywhere, even if they didn't have experience producing any of these kinds of buildings, like military bases, for example. So from this early military work, they then become close to city officials, such as mayors, who took note of their impressive work for the government. And then this later connections in the federal government. And so they were then writing informal letters and even with the staff of presidents by the 1980s, like Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, Michael Deaver, who was shaping much of his policy agenda. But in terms of what they were trying to achieve together with the federal government, I don't think that the architects at first had a real agenda beyond just trying to stay afloat and not go bankrupt effectively. But one thing naturally led to the next, and they were pulling into, they were being pulled into and began to design the very cycles of development that were necessary to keep the firms alive. And in fact, they were internalizing some of the structures of the federal government and the United States, how they wanted to keep themselves alive at the same time. So on the one hand, they were designing military bases and missile bases that were responsible for destroying entire communities during these wars, but then they would go into communities and offer services for reconstruction and so called modernization. So they were really benefiting from this cycle and these cyclical forms of destruction and development, which scholars like Naomi Klein describe as disaster capitalism. And really this continues today as we see it playing out. We saw it playing out after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, for example, or in Ukraine, most recently, or in Gaza, where firms like AECOM are actively trying, trying to rebuild, but where they also played a role in building up the infrastructures of their aggressors and contributing to climate change and all kinds of things. So they're sort of playing both ends of the spectrum.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this does definitely kind of evolve. You know, one thing does seem to very much lead to the next. But if we go back for a moment to the 1970s in particular, now that we understand the context better, I wonder if we can talk about something that seemed in some ways pretty specific to that moment, which seemed to be internal debates that these really, really big companies were having about the usefulness of books. Now that's interesting in and of itself. Also, we are on the new Books network. We like books here. So why were they debating about whether or not books were useful at this point?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah. So firms were beginning to think about the challenging status of books during the 1970s, not just because people weren't reading, but, but as a way to understand or write about themselves. And so, on the one hand, as financial capitalism was taking hold, so stock investment and ownership of companies was changing. As just one example, they were becoming more important. Books were becoming more important than these hard investments. But there was a concern that book value, what they described, or present value, wasn't the best way to understand a firm's economic worth, especially thinking about the future or its economic potential. So they started to advocate for market value as a way to think about future projections and worth. So at the same time, though, architects were also realizing that they had organized their own professional manuals as books. So thinking about professional associations like the American Institute of Architects Handbook, that needed updating. And so they had A single volume book that really couldn't contain everything about business as business was expanding and becoming much more complex and it was a bit rigid. So they began to use binders, which they called portfolios. And they had many volumes of these portfolios so that they could easily swap out parts or update things and account for the complexities of business practice as necessary. And so trying to think a little bit about how a stock portfolio might relate to an architect's portfolio in design, but also their business portfolio in practice. And just one last point, I think in the, in the book I also describe how even academics and scholars during this period studying architecture and studying the built environment were also writing about firms and the profession. But they were combining the stories of many firms and their own sort of as ethnographies and anthologies, which I think corresponded with the changes that were going on in the same firms that they were studying, even though they weren't yet able to see some of those structural changes. So I try to connect the dots between all of these types of books and the changes that were going on within them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always love connecting dots between books. Thank you for telling us about that piece of the research. Moving then to looking at what some of these firms are doing in terms of people. Obviously, as you've mentioned, one way in which these firms become huge is the sheer number of people that they employ. Now, they can't all be architects. Can you tell us about when and why firms start to hire people sort of beyond the traditional type of sort of white, middle class man, architect who has a degree in architecture? How do we get broader groups of people involved in these firms?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah. So because of the sizes of these firms, there became this need to hire more people, especially to tend to this incredible system of organization. So how do you manage it was one of the primary questions they started to ask. And so they needed types of workers that traditionally architects didn't need, like a librarian or a records manager or a technologist and a computer operator and on and on. And so these were sort of positions that were outside of the primary operations of a traditional architecture and engineering practice, if you think about drawing as the primary, the heart of the practice. And so at first they started to lean on women, women and people of color for these positions. Many of them came to these firms after having some prior experience in city government or government agencies, and in many cases because they were the only places that would hire them. So there were very few women and people of color in the profession of architecture, in large part because it was. And I would Say very much still is considered a gentleman's profession as it was imported from Europe in the 1800s into the US but in any case, these large firms were hiring women and people of color much more frequently than the smaller firms. And their very presence, I argue in the book, in these offices started to really make a difference and open the door for them to take other roles at the center of these operations as architects or even as attorneys, or even as presidents or vice presidents, though they were still always fighting discrimination and biases and assumptions about what, what work they could or could not do.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
But they're there and as you said, they're there in some pretty large numbers. So what were some of the impacts or implications of these workers joining the firms and the work that they were doing both kind of in the shorter term and the longer term?
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Dr. Aaron Kerr
Yeah. So they really paved the way for many other women and people of color within the profession at large. And there, there was a story of one woman I describe in the book who was hired in the 1970s and was, I think the only woman or one of only a few women in her graduating class when she was studying architecture. And when she first got to work at Dimjim, one of the senior architects asked her to go make his coffee for him and she said, excuse me, but I didn't get my master's degree in architecture to be waiting on you. Or in another instance, there was a board of directors who suggested that the company hire a woman for quote, the PR effects for the company and that it that might be beneficial to the company. And all the other men on the board of directors said heck no. But I highlight these women in the book and I really tried to emphasize their various roles from well known architects Zelma Wilson to Kim Day to Ellen Wright and on and on, who went on to lead their own firms after they worked at DMJM and aecom. Some of them headed the very large international organizations. Some of them even were the CEO of, of well known international airports, for example. And so like it or not, I think that these large firms were important catalysts for change within the profession, even though I think it's still today very largely white and male. But I think these large firms play a role in moving that needle even just slightly.
- [30:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting to think about that. Is there anything we haven't mentioned yet about the book that you want to make sure we include or anything that you found especially surprising in putting all this together?
- [30:47]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
I think one of the things that really just surprised me in general was I think just how deeply embedded architects had become in state and national government. It was not something that I was expecting. I was expecting to study these big firms to get a sense of how architects expanded and what it might mean for the organization of work globally. But I had no idea that they were having cocktails with presidents and engaged in quid pro quo, like we might expect, perhaps with other industries with more economic power. But. And this is something that I think still continues. So the city of Los Angeles now hires architects as liaisons for other architects to help them navigate city planning and permitting policies. And firms like AECOM are handed commissions, such as infrastructure contracts for the Olympics in LA as they're planning for this, or even the rebuilding of the wildfires last year, all without any public competition or requests for proposals. So they're seeming to be really embedded in government. They're just hired because of their reputation and political and economic clout. And this is something that I assumed was not part of the practice, the profession of architecture, as I was learning about architecture as a student. And so I think that was perhaps the most surprising part of this whole story.
- [32:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's definitely a big realization to come to. And really goes back to what you were telling us at the beginning of kind of going, ha, on a second, you know, drawing the thread a little bit. What'll happen? And then, oh, wait, there's all of this to explore and discover, which you've done and told us about here. So thank you for that. But before I let you go, is there anything you're working on now that this book is done, even if it's not related to this, anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [32:32]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
Sure. I'm in the very early stages, I would say, of researching and writing a new book about, generally about men, masculinity, and secrecy. So as I was finishing this book, I was finishing it while I was living and working in the state of New Mexico at the time. And I learned that there was a mountain in which the Church of Scientology buried their archives. And so I began poking around and trying to find out why they were buried there and what the roles that architects or builders may have played in the organization. And I started to study them and the reasons behind all of this. And what I'm beginning to realize is that this is a form of store, that this form of storage is actually quite common among wealthy organizations that are attempting to store or hide money or records of many kinds in places like the desert, where there are incredibly loose regulations and often very little oversight. And so this is all still shaped by the Cold War nuclear thought. And there are many wealthy men and wealthy individuals who acquire land for this very purpose, for tax write offs, among other things. And so I'm beginning to trace this broad history, first through New Mexico and thinking about the desert, through various stories of builders who are working on these land development projects, from the Catholic Church to Scientology to Boy Scouts to even wealthy individuals like Jeffrey Epstein. So it continues, I think, in many ways the line of thought that I began in this first book, but framed more as, as public scholarship, we might say, about men and masculinity and told through the eyes of builders who I find are more open and forthcoming, at least in this project, rather than architects who tend to be a bit more guarded and secretive. And perhaps this is stemming from the training and the history of the profession itself. So that's what I'm up to at the moment, and not sure exactly where it might go, but I'm sort of just having fun pulling on threads and seeing where they lead me.
- [34:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds like a lot of very fun threads to pull on. So I really hope that becomes a book and you'll come back and tell us about it.
- [34:44]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
I would love that.
- [34:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Incorporating How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire, published by the University of California Press in 2025. Erin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [35:00]
Dr. Aaron Kerr
Miranda, thank you so much. It was so fun, fun.