Diana J.S. Martinez"The Master Material & The Master Plan: Architecture, Urbanism and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines"

This paper reexamines arguments from my recently published book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines, especially as it relates to my current book project, Master Plans: The Colonial Roots of Urban Renewal. Focusing on the intertwined histories of concrete construction and early theories of “race development,” the paper traces how colonial officials, engineers, architects, and social scientists understood the transformation of the built environment as a means of transforming the Philippine population itself. At the turn of the twentieth century, academics, civil servants, and government officials invoked specious interpretations of natural selection to scaffold a new rationale for colonial intervention. Presenting race as environmentally malleable, the reshaping of the colonial environment was taken up as an instrument for improving 'underdeveloped races.' Under Governor-General William Cameron Forbes and others, this logic was articulated as a policy of “material advancement,” that in practice remade the archipelago into an extensive network of modernized concrete hardscapes. This paper turns from what was called a "master material" to "master plans," focusing on the planning work of Daniel Burnham and William Parsons, the executor of the Burnham plans in the Philippines. Mostly addressed by architecture and urban historians as successful examples of City Beautiful planning, a close reading of the Burnham plans reveals a frank expression of the ambitions, organization, and racial ordering of US empire. The paper concludes with Yale's appointment of William Parsons as a founding member of the faculty for city planning, setting the stage for an argument that a practice of urban renewal with roots in New Haven was closely patterned after a colonial project. Diana Martinez is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, where she teaches Architectural History and Theory. Her research on the architecture of US empire focuses on the built environment of the Philippine Islands. Her first book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States' Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025), exposes the immense impact of a single (hybrid) material on the United States colonial project in the Philippines. In doing so, she links the history of US empire to the political, social, economic, and environmental transformations that simultaneously took place in the colony and the metropole.