Towards an Architectural Theory of Jurisdictional Technics: Midcentury Modernism on Native American Land

Abstract

How should we do the history of US midcentury modernist architecture—a period marked by intense campaigns of Native American dispossession in the face of organised Indigenous resistance? The spatial development of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians’ ancestral lands in Palm Springs, California, offers an illustrative case study for these intersections; a history of colonial settlement both enabled and constrained as much by canonical architects like Albert Frey and Richard Neutra as by the Agua Caliente’s own highly influential political activism. This history challenges the perfect model of nested state jurisdiction—seamlessly connecting territory and expertise—to show a tangle of jurisdictional relations of various degrees and kinds of opacity, marked and mediated by architecture. This article explores these entanglements as the effects of “jurisdictional technics,” or how architecture organised relations of authority among and between competing regimes of order.