UCLA AUD Spring 2025 Events: Aaron Cayer (PhD ‘18) presents "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire"

June 2, 2025, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design PhD alum Aaron Cayer (PhD '18) returns to launch his first book, Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire (UC Press, 2025).

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.

Aaron Cayer is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. Prior to Cal Poly, he was an Assistant Professor of Architecture History at the University of New Mexico (2018-2023), and before that, a Senior Research Associate at cityLAB-UCLA (2012-2017).

His research has been recognized and supported by awards and fellowships that include a 2024 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a 2021 Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and the inaugural Kristine Fallon Prize by the International Archive of Women in Architecture in 2022.

Cayer is trained as both a historian and architect: he received his PhD in Architecture from UCLA as well as undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Norwich University in Vermont. Outside of the academy, he serves on the Board of Directors of The Architecture Lobby as well as on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architectural Education.