Architecture and consumer culture, memory and the built environment, historiography, paper architecture and the unbuilt, fairs and expositions, themed landscapes, history of heritage and conservation planning, and architectural keywords.

Andy Shanken is an architectural and urban historian with an interest in how cultural constructions of memory shape the built environment (and vice versa). He also works on the unbuilt and paper architecture, themed landscapes, heritage and conservation planning; traditions of representation in twentieth-century architecture and planning; keywords in architecture and American culture; and consumer culture and architecture. He is interested in historiography, particularly of architectural history, and the intersection of popular culture and architecture. Since this is too much for one person, he is looking to clone himself.

Professor Shanken’s first book, 194X, examines how American architects and planners on the American homefront anticipated the world after the war. Broadly speaking, it is a cultural history of American architecture, planning, and consumer culture in this formative and strained moment for the architectural profession. His second book, Into the Void Pacific, looks at the architecture of the neglected 1939 San Francisco world’s fair. His third book, The Everyday Life of Memorials is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2022. He is currently working on the history of imagery in American urban planning. He teaches courses on most of these topics, primarily in the Department of Architecture, but also in American Studies.

He is currently the Director of American Studies, Faculty Curator of the Environmental Design Archives, on the Faculty Advisory Committee at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Global Urban Humanities. He has a joint appointment in American Studies.

ARCH 170A An Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism: Antiquity to the Renaissance

ARCH 179/Amerst 101: What Is This?!? A writing seminar on things

ARCH 179/Amerst 102: Writing on the Walls: Architectural criticism and the campus

ARCH 179/279 Architecture and Memory

ARCH 179/279 Urban Diagrams in History and as Theory

ARCH 179/279 Themescapes

ARCH 179/279 Researching California's Built Environment

ARCH 179/279 The Unbuilt

ARCH 279 Historiography of the Modern Movement

AMERSTD 102 American Themescapes (Co-taught with Kathy Moran)

BOOKS

Into the Void Pacific: The Architecture of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair,  University of California Press, 2015.

194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Homefront, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

The Everyday Life of Memorials (Forthcoming Zone Books, 2022).

ARTICLES + CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

“The Visual Culture of Planning,” Journal of Planning History 17, 4 (June, 2018): 300-319.

“Meet Me at the Plague Column: Monuments and Conservation Planning,” Future Anterior 14, 1 (Summer, 2017): 126-141.

Unit: A Semantic and Architectural History,” Representations 143 (Summer, 2018): 90-116.

"Glen Park BART," Archipedia (2017)

"FTM(TF): Allegories of Electricity from Edison to Wifi," Women's Studies 47 (June, 2017): 1-27.

"Plot Lines: A Story about Edmund Bacon,” OASE: Journal of Architecture 98 (2017): 9-20.

"Memory and Its Discontents: On the Fringes of the Memory Industry," in Marc Treib, ed., Spatial Recall, papers collected from the symposium held at the University of California, Berkeley, April 2007 (Routledge, 2009).

"The Fair that Never Was: Architecture and Urban Boosterism at the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair, " California History (2016).

“Losing My Religion in Oaxaca,” Room One Thousand (Fall 2015)

"Towards a Cultural Geography of Modern Memorials," in Jill A. Franklin, T.A. Heslop and Christine Stevenson, eds., Architecture and Interpretation: Essays for Eric Fernie (Boydell & Brewer, 2012).

“Keeping Time with the Good War,” American Studies Journal 59 (Spring 2015)

“The Tree in the System: Shifting Urban Paradigms in Mid-Century,” Perspecta 45 (2012): 143-152. (Not available online.)

"Preservation and Creation: Alfonso Rubbiani and Bologna," Future Anterior 7, 1 (Summer 2010): 61-81.

"Le case dei borghesi, 1879," Translation, Future Anterior 7, 1 (Summer 2010): 82-95.

"Breaking the Taboo: Architects and Advertising in Depression and War," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, 3 (September, 2010): 406-31.

"Guilt Architecture," in City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009)

"The Sublime 'Jackass:' Transgression and Play in the Inner Suburbs," Places 19, 3 (Fall, 2007) 50-55.

"Confederates on the Fairway: A Civil War Themed Subdivision in Rural Ohio," Landscape (September 2007).

"Better Living: Towards a Cultural History of a Business Slogan." Enterprise and Society (Sept., 2006).

"The Uncharted Kahn: The Visuality of Planning and Promotion in the 1930's and 1940's." Art Bulletin 88 (June, 2006) 310-327.

"Memento More: Putting the New Wave of Memorials into Context," Frameworks (Fall, 2005), the journal of the College of Environmental Design.

"Between Brotherhood and Bureaucracy: Joseph Hudnut, Louis I. Kahn and the American Society of Planners and Architects." Planning Perspectives 20, 2 (April, 2005)

"From the Gospel of Efficiency to Modernism: A History of Sweet"s Catalog, 1906-1947," Design Issues 21, 2 (Spring, 2005)

"Research on Memorials and Monuments," Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Est"ticas 84 (2004) 163-172.

"Planning Memory: The Rise of Living Memorials in the United States during World War II," Art Bulletin (March 2002): 130-147. Awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association, 2003.

"Critical Essay," Case Study Cleveland (in the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, May, 2002): unpaginated.

"Corporate Competitions and Bureaucracy, 1934-1945," Architectural Research Quarterly 3, 1 (1999): 43-54.