Inland Empire

Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Southern California

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Architecture
• Print ISBN:
  9781478039273
  9781478034315
• Subtopic: History of Architecture
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062882

In Inland Empire, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how modernist architecture and urban design structured US settler colonialism and capitalist hegemony in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs's settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and other reservations in inland Southern California, he shows how architecture became a key technology for governing empire at the height of the state's drive to terminate Native American sovereignty. Through extensive archival research and dialogue with Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and other Tribal community members, Shvartzberg Carrió offers a new architectural history of modernism. Carefully placing the work of seminal California architects within the genealogy of manifest destiny, he demonstrates how their designs over settler and Native housing, prefabrication technologies, the logistics of migrant construction labor, community development plans, and environmental infrastructures offered new ways of managing Indigenous resistance—a spatial turn in Native American administration that constituted a veritable workshop for neoliberalization policies later sponsored globally by the United States. Charting Indigenous nations' responses to these momentous challenges, Inland Empire details how they deployed novel modes of resistance grounded in Native architectural histories, spatial practices, and epistemologies of land.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Gallery
• Introduction. Midcentury Modernism: Architectures of Termination and Survivance
• 1. Sovereignty: The Ramada and Architectural Type
• 2. Property: The Spatial Turn and the Birth of Neoliberalism
• 3. Logistics: Prefabricating Architecture and Expulsing Labor
• 4. Jurisdiction: Designing Environment and Rationalizing Extraction
• Coda. Hegemony: Beyond Regional Modernism
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index