Designing The Authority: Dams, High Modernity, and Colonial Temporal Containment

Abstract

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s dams are the culmination of a high modern design ideology, spatio-temporal land-use imaginary, and geography of containment. Many hydroelectric dams were erected in the 700-mile watershed. The energy fueled the manufacture of bombers, missiles, and the atomic bomb. The Authority had unprecedentedly broad purview, from constructing fertilizer factories, coal-fired plants, and nuclear facilities to becoming involved in education and public health. The Authority model crafted a developmental reasoning for militarized involvement across the Earth. The dams were called a pathway to liberal democracy, yet environmental devastation, racism, and Indigenous displacement were inherent, as documented by the NAACP, and the flooding of Indigenous cities. MoMA’s 1941 exhibit named the settler-colonial infrastructure an art object. The dam is a hydraulic monument to coloniality. Art institutions, engineers, and designers are implicated. As these containers decay, we must begin to see once-modern futures as already breached, leaking, shattered.