Diana J.S. Martinez

Architecture history and theory.

Diana Martinez (BA Architecture 2001) is an architecture historian. Her research on the architecture of United States empire focuses on the built environment of the Philippine Islands. Trained as an architect, she received her MArch from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) in 2006 and a PhD from Columbia's GSAPP in 2017.

Martinez's first book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States' Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025) exposes the immense impact of a single (hybrid) material on the United States colonial venture in the Philippines. In doing so, she links the history of U.S. empire to the political, social, economic, and environmental transformations that simultaneously took place in the colony and the metropole.

She is currently working on the manuscript for a second book, Master Plans: The Colonial Roots of Urban Renewal, which places Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Plan for Manila within a history of early 20th-century city planning. She examines the Manila Plan in conjunction with Burnham’s plans for Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., and with various plans for Philippine and U.S. cities designed by William E. Parsons (the executor of the Burnham Manila Plan). Close readings of these plans reveal a frank expression of the ambitions and organization of U.S. empire. The book concludes with a re-reading of large-scale urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, most notably New Haven’s nine square plan and the Government Center in Boston’s West End which are, she argues, the direct legacy of U.S. colonial practice.

ARCH 179/279 – Architectures of U.S. Empire
ARCH 170B – An Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism

Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States' Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025)