Aaron Cayer | California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (original) (raw)

Books by Aaron Cayer

UC Press, 2025

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than... more By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in most cities, and rented offices in more nations than comprised the UN. Within them, architects were designing not single buildings but urban systems, including the multinational infrastructures, legal codes, and financial mechanisms on which those systems came to depend. However, despite the extraordinary power of these architects, their histories remain shrouded in myth and concealed—by design.

This forensic analysis traces a history of architects at one such firm, AECOM, as they assembled their own multinational corporation and embedded themselves in the operations of American empire after World War II, shielding themselves from the instabilities of a postwar political economy. Incorporating Architects reveals how architects, through their businesses more than their drawings or buildings, modulated the political economy, gripped the reins of their profession, and produced the global injustices that define our neoliberal present.

In between teaching, writing, and researching, this book emerged while working outside of work: i... more In between teaching, writing, and researching, this book emerged while working outside of work: it is the product of nearly six months of dialogue and debate, over 500 essay-length e-mails exchanged, a half-dozen group calls, and coordination across three different time zones. As members of the US-based Architecture Lobby, the book was initiated from the position of architectural workers advocating for the value of architectural work in the general public and in the discipline. Interested in how the Lobby’s stance on architectural practice might apply to questions of history and theory both in the US and globally, we drafted and circulated a call for submissions. We sent follow-up requests—some never replied, others were too busy—and insisted that the essays be personal and polemical. The end result, Asymmetric Labors: The Economy of Architecture in Theory and Practice, is a book with nearly fifty texts by workers who discuss the social, economic, and political value of their labor. They are architectural historians, writers, researchers, professors, students, and practitioners.

Papers by Aaron Cayer

Ardeth, 2023

In the mid-1990s, urban sociologist Robert Gutman argued that the field of architecture was compr... more In the mid-1990s, urban sociologist Robert Gutman argued that the field of architecture was comprised of two discourses. In universities, one discourse centered on the history, theory, and culture of architecture, and at firms, another centered on pragmatic issues of construction and business. The strength of architecture as a field, he suggested, was predicated on bridges between the two. This article considers the rise of three different "university" initiatives within architecture firms that complicate Gutman's observed divisions, including "Gensler University," "Albert Kahn University," and "SHoP U" at SHoP Architects. By considering the history and scope of these initiatives in tandem with changes to accreditation criteria of architecture schools in the United States, the article makes visible some of the misalignments between academia and practice, and it raises new questions about what it might take to educate architects who can transform a profession otherwise gripped by the hands of corporate capitalism.

Architectural Histories, 2023

By the early 1970s, concern about the rise and prominence of large conglomerate corporations had ... more By the early 1970s, concern about the rise and prominence of large conglomerate corporations had fully saturated economic discourse in the United States. As products of a brief yet powerful merger mania during the 1960s, large industrial organizations began to restructure the economy by aggressively merging with and acquiring firms in disparate industries and geographies in order to obtain what business executives referred to as 'geopolitical' power. With hundreds of diverse subsidiaries, many of these military-sponsored conglomerates-from Union Carbide to Litton Industries to Teledyne-demanded new laboratories and office buildings that seemed to defy modernist tendencies of material standardization, reproducibility, and homogeneity, since the rates and directions of their future growth were indeterminable. The buildings produced for conglomerates between the 1960s and 1980s have been described by urban geographers and historians as the aesthetic and material epitomes of postmodernism, since they were often designed with highly reflective, hermetic surfaces that protruded, curved, and folded-simultaneously revealing and concealing the late capitalist logics that undergirded them. This article considers how conglomeration was viewed as a geopolitical act that challenges existing histories and theories of postmodernism, which reduce the aesthetic conditions of these buildings to abstract representations of late capitalist economics. Instead, the article draws on the laboratories designed by architects César Pelli and Anthony Lumsden for conglomerates during the late 1960s in order to reveal how these aesthetic conditions were responses to the particular geopolitical practices and structures of conglomerate business, including the imperialist acts of 'acquiring' people, land, and other businesses.

Author(s): Cayer, Aaron | Advisor(s): Cuff, Dana | Abstract: During the last three decades of the... more Author(s): Cayer, Aaron | Advisor(s): Cuff, Dana | Abstract: During the last three decades of the twentieth century, architects in the United States expanded and made fluid the geographical, professional, and economic scope of their practices. In many large firms, architects were no longer fixed to their drafting tables upon which they produced drawings for single buildings, nor were they defined by work in a single firm. Instead, they worked in multinational and multidisciplinary corporations, comprised of several diverse firms, and their work supported the production of entire cities—from buildings to infrastructure to the financial systems that made each possible. This dissertation examines the historical emergence of this expanded form of architecture practice, including the ways in which these new definitions and compositions of work precipitated, and were precipitated by, a series of broad, yet interrelated social, political, and economic shifts in the US between 1960 and 1990...

Spatial Practices: Modes of Action and Engagement with the City, Nov 7, 2019

Architecture Research Quarterly , 2019

Decades before the Shibuya ward in Tokyo was defined by its commercial high-rises and bustling tr... more Decades before the Shibuya ward in Tokyo was defined by its commercial high-rises and bustling transportation hub, Miyashita Park was a narrow strip of green space that stretched along the Shibuya River and was designated during the 1930s as akichi, or ‘open land,’ for everyday use. During the 1960s, the early 2000s, and yet again in the 2010s, the park was redesigned and increasingly built up—each time provoking a new debate about the definition of ‘public’ in Tokyo and in Japan more broadly. This paper examines the practices of a group of homeless art activists who rejected the proposed redesigns and the definitions of ‘public space’ each represented. The paper reveals how, through art installations, writings, impromptu concerts, ad-hoc sporting events, and bodily protests, the activists revived alternative definitions of ‘public’ as spaces of activity and asylum. While at first glance, the work of the activists operated peripherally to architectural discourse, this paper argues that the spatial and material tactics of the activists align with the interventions of several Japanese architects, including Arata Isozaki and Teiji Ito, who critiqued prevailing definitions of democratic public space during the 1960s. The art activists and politically-engaged architects of the 1960s both demonstrate how maintaining spaces of informality as well as the rights of marginalized populations to urban spaces serve as important forms of critical architectural production. Together, they suggest that the social, political, and ideological tools of the architect are—not unlike those of the art activists—prime for challenging and critiquing hegemonic frameworks of public space.

Journal of Architectural Education, 2019

The history of the multinational architecture and engineering firm, AECOM, provides a powerful ac... more The history of the multinational architecture and engineering firm, AECOM, provides a powerful account of the transformations taking place within architecture practice during the end of the twentieth century. The firm grew from a small profit-sapping partnership named Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall (DMJM) during the mid-1940s into the largest architecture, engineering, and urban planning conglomerate in the world. This paper describes how conglomeration—the acquiring of diverse and existing firms—was predicated on fundamental shifts in the definition and value of architecture labor that broadened the domain of architectural work and enabled architectural practice to take on the shape of entire urban economies.

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Reflecting a commitment to public service and an interest in abiding investments, life insurance ... more Reflecting a commitment to public service and an interest in abiding investments, life insurance companies after the Second World War were responsible for the construction of an unprecedented number of housing developments across the United States. They were able to help alleviate housing shortages, elevate the standards of postwar housing, and offer new forms of modern living. This article examines the practices of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and its developing of Parklabrea (now Park La Brea) in Los Angeles during the 1940s. As the largest housing community west of the Mississippi River, Parklabrea stands prominently in the center of the city, though it is elided in histories of California housing. Against the backdrop of postwar public housing, which failed in part due to a disregard for urban context, Parklabrea's history reveals how life insurance companies were increasingly attuned to the social, physical, and economic contexts of postwar cities.