 Thank you everyone for coming. My name is Lucia. Everybody knows me. I'll still say it Because we're being recorded. My name is Lucia Lai. I'm the director of the Buell Center for the study of American architecture Welcome to an afternoon of talks and presentations and discussions. It's a kind of composite event It's supposed to tie together straight three strands of Buell work, Buell related work First it's a preview of This installation that the Buell has made in collaboration with Adwo for the last six months Which will open next week in Chicago at the Chicago architectural manual Second it's a capstone of the architectural and land conversations and research series which has Resulted in the publication of this book Which will be launched today and then eventually in Chicago as well And Finally it's also a Occasion to mark the anniversary the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Buell Center By all accounts and this is just existing accounts in oral history the Buell Center was established to de-center the European Canon from its dominant place In the history curriculum of American architecture schools and my sources just walked in So as I said the goal of the Buell was to de-center the prominent place that the European Canon held in the teaching of history in American architecture schools and and four years later 40 years later the the theme of land and the plural Americas is intended to further destabilize the mission of the Buell By reminding us first of all that American architecture exists in hemispheric relation to the rest of the world and That there's always several Americas in the United States We named this event unsettling land as one does in academia to find an umbrella theme a phrase That gathers disparate presentations and focuses discussion in this case a discussion of current research in the history of the building practices of settler nations So today we'll ask ourselves. What does the history of the shovel a Settlement tool par excellence have to do with 19th century architectural historiography We'll also ask ourselves. Can we tell a synthetic global history of 20th century urban growth? That opens an alternate path for land rights ones which would be based not on property or acts of property but on the fact of occupancy We'll also ask ourselves with our curator friends what do big cultural events like biannuals owe to the urban struggles of the cities that host them What these questions have in common is that they unsettle the usual assumptions of the relationship between architecture and land and They also echo the Buell's own research Which as many of you know argues that land is not a blank slate that comes before architecture But rather that land is not an object, but that it's a relationship Today the phrase unsettling land rings differently than it did just a few weeks ago on this campus as we're kind of reeling from a crescendo of violence and of grief that is Unfolding in and around Gaza, which is the unsettled land on everybody's mind today at least on this campus and There's been a kind of quickening of anxieties about the ties that bind land and life let alone settlement And we also may feel an urgency many of us to stop our work to Maybe intervene or speak truth to power and certainly we may feel that the academic habit of theming events Seems a kind of purely literary frivolous conceit But even if or I would argue precisely because a new light has been cast on all ongoing research about land by current events because of that There's still a place for the longer arc and for the slower pace of scholarship and research Especially the kind of scholarship we're going to discuss today Which thrives on identifying historical patterns and global solidarities? So that's the spirit in which we're proceeding today and let me give you a guide to our afternoon At three we'll hear works and you can tell how this holds together because our posters are basically a time at three We will hear our works in progress stop from Timothy Hyde with a response by Manu Karuka at Four we'll have a keynote lecture from Joe Goldie with a response from Alec Bering After our coffee break, we will hear three presentations about the Chicago architectural manual. I'll present our booklet Emanuel and Massive of Adwo will present our joint installation and then two of the curators from the floating museum team We'll talk about their theme. This is rehearsal Speaking of which impressively they join us a few days before their installation is supposed to open in Chicago And at the end all will be welcome To the Buell Center around across the path where the book will be freely available to all and we will toast To the Center's 40 years in the presence of three of the former directors of the Buell who are a guest of honor today Two of whom are here already Gwen Wright and Ryan Hall Martin Joe Nockman will join later Bob Stern does not travel much, but he senses regards. So without further ado, let me introduce our first speakers Timothy Hyde is a historian of architecture whose research focuses on the political dimensions of architecture from the 18th century To the present with particular attention to the relationships of architecture and law He's the author of ugliness and judgment a very beautiful book That's not the subtitle, but it is a beautiful book on architecture in the public eye and also of constitutional modernism architecture and civil society in Cuba 1833 1933 to 1959 Responding to Timothy will be Manu Kuruka who is an assistant professor of American Studies and Affiliated faculty with women's gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College His work centers a critique of imperialism with a particular focus on an anti-racism and indigenous decolonization He is the author of Empire's tracks another very beautiful moving book indigenous nations Chinese workers and the transcontinental railroad Timothy will speak for about 35 minutes Manu has gently kindly agreed to be here Even though he has a many other places to be please join me in welcoming Timothy and Thank You Lucia And thank you Manu for generously agreeing to read through the paper and listen And thank you all for being here My talk of work in progress is called Eldorado Gothic Nathaniel Goodell writing to his brother Ira in June 1850 had need of several items unavailable in Sacramento, California Where Nathaniel lived? Would Ira who was then in New York City would Ira please purchase and send one pattern book Chester Hills the builders guide preferably but Asher Benjamin's latest would do 30 or 40 sheets of prepared drawing paper on pasteboard Watercolor paints bright colors especially three dozen hard crayons half dozen soft ones and 75 or a hundred differently sized sheets of drafting paper These architectural supplies will cost Nathaniel reckons about 20 or 25 dollars Which he will reimburse to Ira not with currency, but with some gold dust Gold dust for architecture or architecture for gold dust This is the transaction that I want to explore moving from the intriguing circumstances of Nathaniel's request to perspectives on architecture extraction and land Rising from events in the Western United States in the 19th century With fragments of some current work in progress I hope in the context of this marking of the Buell's anniversary to participate in some reflection on The question just what is the study of American architecture? Nathaniel Goodell had arrived in California in late summer 1849 debarking in San Francisco after a five-month journey Born in Massachusetts apprentice there as builder and then architect Goodell had designed several buildings But in spring 1849 he was captivated by the news Gold had been discovered in California and architect Goodell set off for the West In early 1848 when the first nuggets of California gold were discovered, which is to say encountered there for the first time by white settlers There were 15,000 non-native persons living in that area now marked out as the state of California By the end of 1848 stories of the success of the first prospectors had been published in New York and Boston Samples of color or gold nuggets had been displayed in St. Louis in Washington and an official report from the military Governor of the territory had landed on the desk of President James Polk who declared quote the accounts of the abundance of gold in the territory Are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief end quote the American gold rush had begun Nathaniel Goodell well-trained and successful in his career in Massachusetts was not Exceptional in leaving the business of the drafting table to a journey to for a journey to the gold fields The gold rush drew thousands of men from all manner of professions teachers preachers lawyers doctors accountants carpenters and Architects they set off the majority from the northeastern United States But also from Ohio Tennessee or some from Europe some from Asia to make their way to a region that was in essence an outpost The gold rush did not form a contiguous part of the settlement that unfolded through the land ordinances of 1785 that Orthogonal plotting of dispossession and colonization In its nature and certainly its consequences the gold rush came to be folded in to that continental project But its instigation and its initiation were conditioned by remoteness rather than by proximities Gold rush settlements in their material disposition were characterized by a market contingency What goods arrived by ship was more or less a matter of chance? Tools finished materials clothing stoves these were available only in quantities or in types limited by the decisions of a handful of store Proprietors and by the vagaries of weather along shipping routes Supplies were also limited by the nature of the gold fever So many men would pay any price to get on board ships at every port along the way that carrying cargo was an afterthought As soon as ships arrived off San Francisco the new arrivals including their ships cruise lit off immediately for the goldfields Abandoning ships to rot in the bay What I want to emphasize is the particularity of the seizure and occupation of land which was neither system systematic dispossession by agricultural settlement or capillaries of transportation nor organized under the policies or plans of a state Improvisation was the spirit and the reality of the two initial years of the gold rush Improvisation that resulted in precipitous urban growth and in architecture as well Sailor and artist Frank Marriott rendered scenes of the gold rush that suggested the pace and scale of events High and dry shows a street scene centered on the nantic hotel when a several buildings in San Francisco constructed from the hull of a ship Some buildings were built using dismantled materials But others like the nantic hotel rose up from the hulls of ships that had been beached upon mud flaps And then recast as buildings as those flats were incorporated into the land of the city The images important I think land and architecture were emerging reciprocally with one another and this architecture its urgency its Improvisational cast evident in this hotel was precipitated by the desire beckoning from under the land Back in Massachusetts Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was startled and reproving quote Suddenly the Californian soil is spangled with a little gold dust in an army of a hundred thousand picked volunteers the ableist and keenest and boldest that could be collected Instantly organize and embark for this desert bringing tools instruments books and framed houses with them end quote Bringing framed houses with them. There's some literal truth to this As pre-cut lumber or even some prefabricated iron structures were delivered to San Francisco and Sacramento But Emerson has a metaphorical intent the would-be prospectors leaving from Massachusetts were bringing with them skills and habits The framed building in particular would be a new arrival the history of architecture in California from the first Spanish settlements in 1769 through to the end of the 19th century was the focus of a book by historian Harold Kerker In California's architectural frontier published in 1960 Kerker argued the singularity of California's architectural tradition Emphasizing two words quote my purpose in this volume is to explain the colonial nature of California's frontier society in terms of its architecture end quote Kerker's use of the words colonial and frontier and the concepts that attend them is Circumstrived by the conventions of his moment, but he stretches their implications differently than we might expect Kerker's frontier is not only it is but is not only that of Frederick Jackson Turner the clash of savagery and civilization It is a frontier in relation to successive Arrivals beginning with quote the York Indians of the Calamity River the Russians at Fort Ross the Spanish Mexicans beside the Sonoma forest the Americans on the San Francisco dunes end quote for each says Kerker California was an architectural frontier and the distinguishing characteristic of this frontier was colonialism Aligning the connotation of political subjugation or material exploitation He means to describe the transplantation of cultural techniques of building quote Indian European American each Perpetuated on the Pacific frontier traditional building practices end quote By absorbing indigenous architecture into his retrospective view of the frontier in other words by using architecture to define his colonialism Kerker adopts a view of colonialism as a continuous process of human settlement less than a structure of political or economic domination The book that Kerker wrote from this original framework is a book that presents the Importation rather than the adaptation of architecture There are individual examples of hybridization or climatological accommodation But by and large his history is a history of the arrival and flourishing of an architecture matured in another context entirely Kerker calls this a quote social history that enables the direct study of a civilization a Quick note on Kerker's biography the dust jacket of this book informs us that mr. Kerker is quote a fifth generation Californian end quote Perhaps Kerker is himself a product of the colonial history. He recounts shaped by its environment towns and buildings a Curious reader tracing those five generations finds that Harold Kerker was a direct descendant of James Kerker a notorious mercenary who worked as a scalp hunter Dispatched to capture a kill at Apache Persons and paid bounty for each one in Retirement and before his death in 1852. He settled in the Gold Rush region from whence the Kerker line of Californian descendants began a Century later Harold Kerker received his PhD from UC Berkeley and after a few years at MIT He settled at UC Santa Barbara for his long career In his obituary the San Francisco Chronicle assures us that Harold Kerker's quote quiet Unassuming personality was totally at odds with James Kerker's violent nature end quote I'm certain that's true But the inclusion of one's genealogical tie to an ancestor famous for his role in the brutal colonization of the continental West as One presents an architectural history bound to that event is at the very least a complicating factor in the study of American architecture in a 1959 article titled El Dorado gothic That's where I've poached my title Kerker bluntly states quote the gold rush is the most significant factor in the development of California architecture end quote an emphatic and striking claim of historical causality a center for the study of American architecture would surely take an interest To be clear It's not the immediate material history of the gold rush that Kerker sees as its architectural contribution Arriving in haste consumed with gold fever miners used only rudimentary shelter quote caves brush arbors blanket lean to salvage tents in quote even in growing towns like Sacramento buildings had an improvised character quote Constructed of shakes mud and stone clappered in adobe having the ground for a floor and a dried bullock's hide in place of a door in quote Many of the settlers buildings were actually clad stick frames cladding cloth quote Skeletons clothed in dirty rags of canvas in quote as one disdainful observer put it These latter types of buildings were highly inflammable quote as Inflammable as the intemper of their inhabitants another wit observed So it's not a survey of the buildings that coincided with the gold rush that leads Kerker to his conclusion It's the buildings that followed in the second half of the 19th century with the causal link being the influx between 1848 and 1852 of so many trained and skillful architects Nathaniel Goodall from Belcher town, Massachusetts was only one of many individuals who had realized commissions as practicing Architects before chancing the trip west for greater fortune Kerker provides the biographies of some who had begun as carpenters before achieving their professional status and some who had academic training The majority were American meaning in his words born in the United States or the territories of the eastern half of the continent But carpenters or architects arrived as citizens of European nations and certainly from China as well Kerker has records of the former but no archival evidence to identify by name the latter This large group of architects so quickly gathered in a small region of rapidly growing population and commerce would be Responsible for the design and construction of dozens hundreds of important buildings hotels houses government and civic buildings 25 years after the gold rush Nathaniel Goodall would design Gallatin mansion, which later became the governor's mansion occupied by successive California governors including Earl Warren Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan Reagan was the last governor to reside there quickly deciding to move to a rental in the suburbs The concentration of talented architects in gold rush, California explains according to Kerker quote the stakes unique exception to the cultural Desolation of the frontier and accounts for the first flowering of Western architecture He means West Coast architecture in the several decades between the discovery of gold and the completion of the cross-country railroad and quote Starting in the early 1850s with the frame houses that in Emerson's words They brought with them and continuing with more refined buildings design in the 1860s and 70s these architects produced stylistic varied Colonial architecture in a frontier becoming ever less remote Colonial in Kerker's usage invokes an architecture detached from the material or climatological realities of its immediate surround That remains attached to a constellation or precepts or intention gathered in some other location of origin Kerker's emphasis on architectural style outward appearance as his register of evaluation is not then just a matter of Conventions of mid-century mid-20th century architectural history But a necessary means of acknowledging the displacement Staged by the precipitating event of the gold rush and the resulting flowering of architectural wealth architecture for gold dust and gold dust for architecture Remember that none of these architect adventurers came to California to be architects They came to be gold miners and they were Goodal and the rest headed up to the mountains to strike it rich And if that effort did not succeed they could return to their former skills working instead as carpenters for example a trade much in demand Nathaniel Goodal did just that recounting to his brother the prevailing but volatile wages to be earned as a minor or as a carpenter The arbitrage of carpenters wages and miners wages was a point of considerable importance During the winter of 1849 carpenters in San Francisco went on strike to insist that their wages be made equal to those of miners In that desired equivalence we see again a link between gold dust and architecture But a link constituted through Displacements from the mining camp to the hoisting of a shovel to the flakes of gold to the numerical Abstractions of wages back again to materials like nails or wood to the swing of a hammer to architecture I assumed that a gold rush mining camp is less familiar to us than architecture So I'm spending a moment or two here to discuss it because it will turn us now to some questions of land During the gold rush years gold mining in the region was placer mining which refers to the extraction of gold deposits under Existing or former riverbeds So it's not hard rock mining tunneling deep into the rock It's a process of digging away topsoil to unearth the sedimentary layer Then digging out a pit and drawing water across each shovel full to float out the lighter material The lighter minerals and leave only the heaviest one the gold This could all be done by one person with nothing more than a shovel in a pan The typical image of the 49er the lone prospect with a is a lone Prospector with a shovel pan and a pick anything else a mug or a mule was a fortunate luxury The California territory was formally owned by the federal government of the United States seated from the Mexican government By the Hidalgo Treaty But there were no land surveys no allocations of land patents the gold rush remember It was a rush Proceeded by a process of preemption or claims in the miners vocabulary any Prospector finding a likely spot staked a claim Marking off a patch of land and setting to work with a shovel and pick Land in other words was not obtained from but rather claimed by Once that claimed patch of land was exhausted the prospector moved on to another The reality of gold fever was such that no miner was really alone as soon as promising news came of a new strike Dozens would appear to work those same diggings each diggings was a camp of a few or many minors Managed from the start by an emergent set of customs and principles what legal theory calls a spontaneous order The gold rush diggings have drawn the attention of several legal historians over the past century Because of the particular character of their emergent self-governance During the first year of the gold rush the regulatory and the physical existence of claims were established by a consensus that developed Spatially as miners a consensus among the miners that developed spatially as the miners move from one diggings to another The root of consensus was the fundamental principle that each miner could hold only one claim by preemption By finding and marking out a piece of land a Miner could not accumulate land holdings to stake a new claim. He would have to surrender his current one a Claim was understood also to be a reasonable dimension. It was typically 10 foot by 10 foot square One miner could set his claim directly beside another's and because tailings the dirt that you shovel out had to be Deposited on your own claim the physical scale of these regulatory spaces was established in part by the embodied dimensions of the work itself Swinging a pick or dumping gravel from your shovel into the pan or sluice These tools had one other very important rule or role a miner was required to work his claim continuously Otherwise it was deemed abandoned and open to be jumped or poached by another miner Therefore another rule was followed while a miner was absent to get supplies for example a shovel or a pick left on the claim Signified its legal standing by signaling that it was still being worked No other miner could dig there while the shovel marked the claim These land laws of the gold rush began as verbal exhortations then developed during 1849 as emerging Customary law and by later that year began to be formalized as written codes promulgated in individual miners camp mining camps by miners meetings Typically almost entirely only American citizens were allowed to participate in these direct democracies European citizens usually managed to establish their own camps while Mexican miners and Chinese miners were forced away from profitable areas Native Americans regarded as existing outside these legal norms face the un-reasoned violence encountered elsewhere in the continent Having derived from customary laws, which had in turn developed from those early verbal agreements The mining camp codes that regulated the claim claims process were all broadly similar across the region And they became viewed across the region equally as a kind of moral code Though they did have a moral cast these were fundamentally laws of property As legal historian Andrea McDowell argues the claims system emerged from a deliberate as a deliberate choice made by the miners Federal jurisdiction being only notional at the time the first wave of miners in 1848 Encountered the ravines as a commons in Anglo-American legal terms Ignored or violently challenged of course was the reality of the inhabitants and actions of indigenous peoples already there In transforming the region from a commons a notional commons into a space structured by rights of property The miners chose and then held to the claims system as McDowell emphasizes This was in contrast to the fee simple property rights that accompanied the federal disposition of land elsewhere fee simple refers to the ownership of land as property in possession and in Perpetuity typically the claim system followed use of fruct rights of property meaning that property right Inherred in the use of the land Not in its possession a miner who held a claim for who held a claim had a property right as long as he used The staked out land for mining, but once he stopped mining he would no longer hold any property right in law Hence the customary practice of leaving a shovel to signify that the property right was still being exercised McDowell points to three reasons why for what she and other legal historians regard as the spontaneous development of highly determined modes of land Governance in the gold rush first there was a specific environmental reality such as the remoteness of the diggings their seasonal duration They only dug in this during the summers The individual labor of the prospector digging pits Second was an awareness of uncertainty Any given gold claim would be exhausted at some point and a new one would be needed which meant that every miner anticipated the next claim which they did not yet have The code limiting each miner to one claim by preemption ensured the availability of future claims and Relatedly third the miners nurtured an anti-capitalist sentiment that favored use over possession They held a deep suspicion of property rights of land ownership Recognizing that it would they would enable individuals with capital to accumulate monopoly land holdings and thereby diminish the future livelihood of miners without capital The claim system is codified typically allowed one claim by preemption and then only one additional claim But no more than that by purchase this allowance afforded some of flexibility in the system But still enforce the priority of use as the basis of any property right in land because even a purchased claim still had to be worked at all times The legal history of the gold rush opens different questions about equations gold for architecture and architecture for gold If the displacements of Kirkers architectural history of the gold rush traverse the register of architectural style Then the particular legal conception of land in the gold rush diggings might point toward a more material perspective For despite the abstraction that seems to adhere in any legal conception of land the land ordinances of 1785 would be the example The laws of mining camps held closely to embodied practices defined directly by the use of land digging with a shovel in Gold Rush, California both a building site in a place or mine made use of one common tool the shovel The ubiquity of the shovel like all ubiquities I suppose renders the shovel almost invisible Certainly the shovel has been invisible to the architectural historical eye It was there at every building site in Sacramento in san francisco Digging digging holes for pilings trenches for footings moving mud or clay or lime The shovel is somewhat more visible to the historical eye focused on the gold rush Only because the shovel and the pick became the common symbol of the prospector If you had traveled through the diggings in 1849 you would have seen not only a lot of shovels But a lot of shovels made by one particular factory the Ames Shovel Company John Ames began making shovels before the Revolutionary War by 1848 the Ames Shovel Company in eastern massachusetts was manufacturing a quarter of a million shovels each year Run by John Ames's grandson Oliver and Oakes Ames the company dominated the global market Ames shovels would be supplied to the union army during the civil war for trenches and earthworks A few years later they would be used throughout the construction of the transcontinental railroad An endeavor completed with a famous last spike the golden spike Driven to connect the westward and eastward sections of the railroad But carried out by thousands of laborers wielding the Ames Shovel Held by a chinese labor in the foreground of thomas hill's commemorative painting The Ames brothers were involved in both the shovel and the rail Oliver Ames served as the president of the union pacific railroad the line running west While his brother Oakes schemed to arrange favorable stock sales in the railroad's construction company That arrangement ended in scandal, but the railroad was built And so too was a monument to the Ames brothers at the railroad's highest point of elevation in southeastern Wyoming Designed by H. H. Richardson Designed by H. H. Richardson Approved by his friend Frederick law Olmsted and with sculptures by augustus saint godin's The Ames monument sits quite easily within a familiar kind of study of american architecture We can approach the monument differently though foregrounding the question of land in at least two ways one material and the other legal Though the design and the labor for the monument both came from massachusetts brought to wyoming by the norcross brothers Construction company the monument was constructed with local stone The stone was quarried in 1880 with the laborers cutting away and nearby outcropping of granite Reeds rock and transforming it into the ashler coursing of the pyramid Here the material proximity of land and architecture is evident But the other way to foreground the question of land is through property law Commissioned by union pacific stockholders the stone pyramid was paid for and was the property of that company As for the land upon which it was built well that land had been alienated from its indigenous inhabitants by the federal railroad Acts which had incentivized the trans incentivize the transcontinental railroad's construction with land grants For 10 miles each side of the rails later 20 in a checkerboard pattern The odd numbered sections disposed in the township grid of the land ordinance were made the property of union pacific Richardson did not visit wyoming but he and the Ames brothers selected the site with two two criteria its proximity to the rail line and its elevation A small rise near the small depot of sherman wyoming in the northwest quadrant of section six Township 13 north was the highest point visible from the adjacent tracks When Oliver Ames and his wife traveled from Denver to this on the spur from Cheyenne in 1882 to inspect the result He was reportedly quote well pleased Evidently less well pleased was a correspondent in the Cheyenne weekly leader who declared it was quote a massive pile of rocks And a very massive pile of rocks it required to build it some 200,000 200,000 dollars and it yet it has not the grand appearance which so much money ought to buy end quote This exchange of rocks for rocks had more the temper of gold than of granite connoisseurs of railway land grants I'm sure there are many in the room may have spotted a problem with the location of the Ames monument in section six Of the township in the upper left The federal government granted odd numbered sections to union pacific not even numbered ones Whether error or entitlement union pacific had built upon land it did not own There are reports journalistic ones that a resident of larrymy wyoming named billy murphy had his own opinion of the monument and its potential Could it not be used for advertising? Taking advantage of its visibility to the train passengers riding by Given the remoteness of sherman from areas of non-indigenous settlement And the small ridership of the transcontinental railroad circa 1885 this idea of billboard advertising may be hard to picture But apparently prominent features of the western landscape the cuts the countcroppings were already used for this purpose One near sherman was painted with large inscriptions for plantation bidders and also for sozadant, which was a popular tooth powder Both rock is land and rock is architecture could be turned to the same end as media calibrated for the passing eyes staring out the windows of the train Billy murphy saw his chance checked at the land office and quickly filed for title He set aside his advertising idea in favor of simply shaking down union pacific for bounty A visit by railroad lawyers presumably used to that kind of business Proved intimidating enough that murphy settled for an exchange of two building lots in larrymy By 1904 union pacific did have full title to the land according to the patent records that i've been able to find But a new problem arose when the railroad railroad line was diverted south to a more expedient route Within not very many within not very many years Sherman was abandoned and there was no stop near enough for curious rail passengers to quickly visit the monument Plans mooted in the early decades of the 20th century to move the whole monument to the new tracks were never realized And so the aims monument is encountered today as an isolated architecture a strange pyramid rooted to its land in the wyoming landscape There's just one final thread. I want to trace out by traveling a bit south to the city of denver Settled in the wake of the colorado Gold rush a decade after the one in california denver was founded in one more of those numerous acts of indigenous dispossession The revision of the 1851 treaty of fort larrymy extracted the denver land from cheyenne and arabic grants By 1921 denver was one of the largest cities in the western united states That was the year that a 26 year old architect named temple hoyn buell arrived He had moved from chicago to denver to recover from tuberculosis He stayed and established a large building a large practice building works across the mountain west in denver around colorado and up through wyoming You know your benefactor better than i do so i won't detail his biography Though i think there's significance to this geographic location in the mountain west working within a distinct landscape of frontier ideology I do want to raise the question of legacy the legacy of the buell center for the study of american architecture Of course, which we're here to mark but legacy in the legalistic sense as well There's been substantial and successful effort in denver to win recognition for buell surviving buildings with historic preservation protection One of his buildings the paramount theater is on the national register of historic places What if we address a building like during standby i'll continue to restart that What if we address a building like that as a legacy not in the conventional terms a material trace of the life and mind of temple buell But as a legacy revealed through instruments of law connected to the preceding century of dispossession Okay, i can't see it, but i'll trust it's there um The national register of historic places a federal program administered by the national park services is an inventory of buildings monuments and archaeological sites across the us That are assessed as valuable by local agencies or private groups It was created by the national historic preservation act in 1966 a legislation passed in the context of changing perceptions of economic development and land use and national identity That's an extensive history won't rehearse, but that latter dimension national identity That was stipulated in the findings that opened the legislation Quote the congress finds and declares that one the spirit and direction of the nation Are founded upon and reflected in its historic heritage and two The historical and cultural foundations of the nation Shall be should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development In order to give a sense of orientation to the american people end quote A sense of orientation to the american people This then is the legacy of the architectural works on the national register Not a valorization of architects, but the production of future value valuation that purportedly The unwieldy contingent flows of american history Architectural history participates quite centrally in this project of course offering authoritative judgments to support nominations To the register. This is the paramount theater register. You can see there's even a line for us on the form In participating the procedures of the register. What else does architectural history participate in? The governor's mansion in san sacramento designed by nathaniel goodell after the gold rush That's also on the register and the aims monument. That too is on the register a very early nomination made only a few years after the 1966 act In this inclusion of the aims monument We can perhaps think about the entanglement of architecture and land not only in the past historical moment I described but as a present recapitulation and reassertion of that event that now draws architectural histories into its transactions If we see the register not as a set of individuated monuments, but as a legal instrument with a territory of jurisdiction Then its resemblance to other instruments such as the 1785 land ordinances or the railway act of 1862 comes into view Like these instruments and their summonings of jurisdiction the register disposes land Using architecture as one of its primary techniques The land ordinances and the railway act those oriented the american people westward in an explicitly geographical sense But implicitly in a cultural sense towards a series of effective displacements Displacements of peoples displacements of the subterranean to the extra terranean The register orients similarly through displacement In its collective appropriation of resources to a nation it sublimates the earlier act of dispossession denaturalizing those acts of depossessions as a heritage and producing the fiction of a commons But the register in its function is strongly attached to land In reality and in its effects thereby concealing that any other land proceeded it In this it is more akin to property held fee simple total and absolute in its denial of another commons lost in a chain of displacements architecture for gold And gold architecture for gold dust and gold dust for architecture This transaction consists of a series of displacements that endeavor to fix things more in place Superficialities rendered over therefore concealing their structures of support Eldorado Eldorado gothic It's a term that echoes the historical illusion of discovery of possession of boundless wealth Eldorado gothic might be a way of naming a condition of american architecture something fictitious That has nevertheless shaped the real Thank you. That was great. That was really interesting. Thank you. Um, I want to thank uh, lucia and timothy for inviting me to participate I'll do my best to keep it short and I'm juggling multiple commitments. So I'm actually going to have to run off I don't mean it to be rude. I'm actually really interested in hearing Your responses to you know, what my responses to you and maybe we can continue this over, you know We're in another way so At the heart, I think this is for me such an extremely interesting project to think about The architecture of colonialism from in the relationship of tools and implements to the structure overall And that to me is really fascinating And there are two core questions I think I'd begin with and then I'll lay out some kind of Sub-questions arising from those and and the two core questions To follow Tim, would you present it to us one is to how can we understand? The structure and its relationship the the implement the tool that's creating The structure and being being transformed by the structure. How can we understand this in as emerging in reaction to indigenous life The particularities of indigenous life in the particular places that you're charting sacramento The site of the biomon monument denver And how and in in relation to this how can we see the relationship between the tool Moving from the tool to the structure. How do we see assertions of sovereignty and jurisdiction? Not only in the forms of property law and the claims of property law and the the contestations of those but sovereignty Let's say an assertion of settler sovereignty or colonial sovereignty above and against The sovereignty of of or the the autonomy the self-determination of of indigenous nations um You know one way to think about this is the a quote I pulled out from your talk the the shovel marked the claim So how does that tell us something about the relation to indigenous nations that are here? So I think we can for me My mind wants to take this in in two directions in terms of scope One is to expand it to an international scope to think of gold rushes simultaneous particularly taking place in australia In southern africa and in in western africa In what ways do we see similar sets of relations in these places? In what ways are they different for example in western africa? What the place that event that became renamed as the gold coast? In the british conquest of the ashanti empire Their their gold fields in the interior of what's now the interior of gana. How was that? How did that set of that history and that set of social relations? Emerge from a different set of structures and the use of shovels or other implements in different ways And another way taking it out of the gold rush to to follow the pathways of new england again in the same period There's the expansion I would think of as culturally even architecturally certainly excuse me certainly Religiously or spiritually from new england to hawaii Carrying some of the same houses of the the frame houses with them. What connects the gold fields of Of california in the air of the rush, which as you write and I agree very much as overseas territory of the united states What connects that to hawaii another overseas territory or soon to be overseas territory of the united states? So that's the international scope and then if we move to the local And really drill down on the local level Who are the indigenous peoples of the gold fields right in sacramental? This would be payuts. This would be payut lands and winamaka writes about this In her book she writes about sacramental What is what are their tools what tools have they been using to live in the great basin? In the interior lands of california Um And what what is their architecture? How is their architecture shaping the architecture of the of the gold rush camps? Or the towns and cities that are arising in in the in the outskirts the The peripheries of the of the the placer mines In this way to return to my my first question How can we understand this on the local level as a reaction to payut and other forms of life? If we look at the gold fields there's also The context of phases of the gold rush the initial phase which is Much like you described of people coming in and finding River beds areas that are that seem particularly rich And they're kind of ad hoc groups of just people coming together. It's somewhat anarchic And there is a sense of anarchic possibility But that very rapidly within the space of a few years those Those rich places get pretty much mined out and Then what's required for gold mining after that is a huge amount of capital and machinery And steam engines and such So in that transition, you know, what happens To these sets of relations and the uses of tools And who controls the tools this is also at the same time the context of an extremely acute genocide The recent there's there's recent scholarship That's that's kind of laying this out clearly One book that comes to mind is the book murder state. It's a university california book I didn't know the author. I don't have the the author, but this is a A In the space of a few years the estimates at the lower end or the loss of hundreds of thousands of indigenous lives It's a concerted organized Intense phase of genocide which again is interesting to think about this occurring In in an expansion of a new england. I think this is one of the reasons why that particular history is taken so long to really Start to be recognized And denver also brings this to mind as well Denver Coming out of it's it's silver rush Also was the site of the sand creek genocide The sand creek massacre one of the most notorious massacres in north american history in 1864 So I wonder about Not just this kind of expanded scope of gold fields but the phases Of uh, gold of gold mining. It's something we see very rapidly in southern africa as well and then also the connection of These phases of the gold rush or silver rush to genocide And that impulse that we that we seem to see in different areas of gold rush with genocide And I want to end With a book that came to mind reading your Your paper and it's a book I studied really carefully in Doing the work in particular on pawny histories So this would be nebraska the nebraska lands at the union pacific railroad pass through and one of the classic standard ethnographies Of pawny's is a book called lost universe the lost universe by an anthropologist named gene wealth fish Gene wealth fish was in was a graduate student here at columbia a really really fascinating scholar and activist she actually Was put on trial by the u.s. The federal government along with dubois for her activism against the korean war. She was put on trial as Supposedly as an unregistered agent of a foreign country Something that maybe seems resonant with the moment that we're in you know with your invocation at the very beginning In this book the lost universe the the beginning of the book is an ethnography of pawny life You know how food is produced how education takes place family structures Religious structures, but what's really what comes to mind for me is the very end of the book when I when I read it first And I still find it so fascinating and I wish people would write about it I haven't yet found time and maybe one day I will The end of the book she wrote she wrote this in world war two And the end of the book is a proposal for public housing in new york And it's based off of the structures of pawny houses the the the actual houses There are households communal households multi-generate Multi-generational households of family structures oriented around sisters So these are women centered and women headed households that are multi-generational And she's writing in here in world war two the city's largely been emptied of men We're a city of family households of women that live that are living and Figuring out ways to live communally and collectively And that these pawny earth homes That were built and so suited to those nebraska lands actually could provide a model For building public housing here in new york city in the in the mid 1940s. It's a fascinating to me just a fascinating Direction of the argument And it's that kind of direction. I think that I that i'm wondering most about here What lessons are there from the indigenous social forms and the indigenous structures? That that have been built through those social forms and the tools that they use To help us understand with greater clarity The social relations of the gold fields themselves. Thank you