Diana J. S. Martinez, historian of American architecture, joins faculty
The Department of Architecture is delighted to welcome Diana J. S. Martinez to the faculty as assistant professor in architectural history and theory. A scholar of the architecture of U.S. empire with a focus on the Philippines, she earned both her MArch and PhD degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Martinez comes to Berkeley from Tufts University, where she served as director of the architectural studies program while holding joint appointments in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Department of the Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.
Martinez began her educational career, and her engagement with the history of the built environment, at CED, where she received her BA in architecture in 2001. “I’m thrilled to be back at Berkeley, which shaped my scholarship in significant ways, long before I considered myself a ‘scholar,’” she says.
“At CED, it’s a given that architecture is socially oriented and should be in service of the public,” Martinez continues. “As an undergraduate here, I was encouraged to consider the totality of the built environment, not just architecture with a capital ‘A’ or Western building traditions. It wasn’t until I left Berkeley that I came to understand how special that was.”
“It’s wonderful to have Diana Martinez join the faculty,” says Lisa Iwamoto, chair of the Department of Architecture. “Her areas of expertise perfectly complement and expand scholarship in our History, Theory and Society program. She will undoubtedly be instrumental in helping shape its future for both our undergraduates and graduate students.”
Scholarship on the architecture and urbanism of U.S. empire and its legacy
Martinez began her exploration of the built environment of the Philippines under U.S colonial rule while she was a master’s student and realized it was an under-researched area of American architecture. Her first book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States’ Imperial Project in the Philippines, will be released next month from Duke University Press. It examines the use of concrete as a tool of colonialism and shows how the U.S. remade the built environment of the Philippines for the purposes of its global capitalist expansion.
Martinez ties the pervasive use of concrete in the Philippines during the U.S. colonial period — concrete monuments, canals, culverts, dams, standpipes, highways, schools, piers, customs houses, and markets transformed the built environment of the archipelago — to the project of empire itself and documents how this concrete infrastructure has outlasted the period of official colonial rule. The book is organized by chapters dedicated to a quality and/or agency of concrete: stability, salubrity, reproducibility, scalability, liquidity, artifice, plasticity, and strength.
“Nowhere else (in terms of its early history at the beginning of the twentieth century) was reinforced concrete used as pervasively as it was in the Philippines,” she writes. “Concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies.”
Martinez is currently working on the manuscript for a second book, Master Plans: The Colonial Roots of Urban Renewal, which grew out of previously unpublished scholarship focusing on Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Plan for Manila. For this second book, Martinez examines the Manila Plan as an expression of the ambitions and organization of U.S. empire and considers it in the broader context of Burnham’s planning practice. The book concludes with a re-reading of large-scale urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, and their racialization of urban planning, as a direct legacy of U.S. colonial practice.
A second current research focus is the Asian “super mall,” which Martinez analyzes as a new form of urbanism. In contrast to the U.S, where about 10 malls close each year, the mall in Asia is thriving. Some of the largest indoor malls worldwide are found in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and China, where they extend beyond retail to include cultural attractions, entertainment venues, and residences. Unlike Martinez’s other major research projects, which focus on the early to mid-20th century, this research focuses mostly on the urban spaces of the present day.
Opening new avenues of research into the history of the built environment
Martinez is looking forward to teaching alongside designers again in a professional school of architecture, and especially one situated within a public research university with robust humanities scholarship. Her research aligns with the interdisciplinary nature of the department’s History, Theory, and Society program, where all PhD students select a second disciplinary area of focus. Martinez anticipates collaborating with faculty in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, among others.
Martinez will teach in the ARCH 170 sequence, the required two-semester history of architecture and urbanism survey, as well as specialized seminars on topics related to her research. This fall, her seminar focuses on the architecture of U.S. empire, considering the ways the nation has projected its power both abroad and onto the land now bound by its territorial borders.
“I’m also looking forward to working with PhD students to tell stories that have not yet been told and open new avenues of research,” Martinez says. “And Berkeley is, I believe, the best place to do that.”