Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines
- When
- Friday, November 6, 20261:30 PM – 4:00 PM ESTAdd to calendarGoogle Calendar
- Where
- Wesley W. Posvar Hall 4130230 S Bouquet St, Pittsburgh, PA 15213Open in Maps
- Hosted by
- Asian Studies Center
Reminders arrive as notifications from the NextToU iPhone app. Get the app
About
During U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. In Concrete Colonialism, Diana Jean S. Martinez examines the motivations for and lasting effects of this forgotten colonial policy. Arguing that the pervasive use of reinforced concrete technologies revolutionized techniques of imperial conquest, Martinez shows how concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies. Martinez locates the origins of this material revolution in the development of Chicago, highlighting how building this urban center atop exceptionally challenging geology made it possible to transform diverse global ecologies. She details how the material’s stability, plasticity, strength, and other qualities served the shifting imperatives of the US colonial regime, playing a central role in defending territory, controlling disease, and constructing monuments to nation and empire. By describing a world irreversibly remade, Martinez urges readers to consider how colonialism persists — in concrete forms — despite claims of its conclusion.
Diana Martinez (BA Architecture 2001) is an architecture historian. Her research on the architecture of United States empire focuses on the built environment of the Philippine Islands. Trained as an architect, she received her MArch from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) in 2006 and a PhD from Columbia's GSAPP in 2017.
Martinez's 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 venture in the Philippines. In doing so, she links the history of U.S. empire to the political, social, economic, and environmental transformations that simultaneously took place in the colony and the metropole.