Designing Pan-America: US Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere

Designing Pan-America is an important survey of the architectural culture generated by Washington geopolitics for building the idea of the Western Hemisphere between the global expansion of US empire around 1890 and its seeming regression around 1970. It impressively demonstrates the synergy between diplomatic designs and the design of diplomatic sites. The visual research is vast and striking, a capacious trove vibrantly rendered in color. Consequently, this good read provides a fresh perspective on both the history of international ideas in action and the idea of the Americas in (mainly) the United States. However, its historiographical bridges are not as sturdy as they could be, and its historicizing landscape architecture is less extensive than its stimulating evidence deserves.One of Designing Pan-America's strongest features is its positionings of specific US localities. These case studies show how international relations is always a matter of particular geopolitics and geoeconomics, even when dealing, as this work mostly does, with US subjectivities. Moving across space and time — actualized hemispheric fairs held in New Orleans (1884), Chicago (1893), Buffalo (1901), and San Antonio (1968), similar-but-unrealized undertakings in Miami (between the 1930s and 1960s), the offshore expression of hemispherism in Santo Domingo's Columbus Lighthouse (conceived in 1931 and inaugurated in 1992), and the construction of Washington's Pan American Union building (inaugurated in 1910) — Designing Pan-America deeply describes the intentional inscription of inter-American ideology in the molding of public space and the application of internationalist rhetoric as architectural detail. However, in places, rich descriptions and lists of ancillary examples stretch across paragraphs without corresponding critical interventions or more empirically engaged contextualization. Sometimes less is more.But sometimes more is more. This work deserved more views beyond its buildings; better situating the edifices it surveys in the historical fields in which they were conceived and constructed would enable insights about the designs from important new angles, ones invisible to those who planned them. Also, proactively historicizing the place of the United States in the world might have allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the place of the Americas in the United States; for example, how did the renaming of Manhattan's Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas (p. 153) prove anachronistic by the time it happened? Getting off the narrative tour bus to historicize this geoculturally evocative Good Neighbor relic itself might tell us about competing North-South and East-West geocultures as World War II ended and the Cold War began; such analysis would have proven more productive than simply rolling on to mention that the renaming coincided with increased Dominican and Puerto Rican immigration to New York.North-South cannot be understood without relating it to East-West. Although this work reasonably circumscribes its primary investigations, its analysis of that rich research could have profitably pondered the longer-term development of the Western Hemisphere idea, part of the transatlantic dialogue foundationally sketched by Arthur Whitaker (whose work Robert Alexander González notes but does not fully consider), to assess what Walter Mignolo has called being “different from Europe but still within the West.” Such analysis would have wrestled with what is and is not different about the twentieth century as well as with the non-US origins of the US idea of the Western Hemisphere.Designing Pan-America's final substantive chapter demonstrates what it does exceedingly well and what it conspicuously lacks. “Gateway to the Americas” masterfully explains how local and regional interests dictated planning for fairs in South Florida and South Texas in the 1930s and 1960s, but it only perfunctorily links those histories to North-South geopolitics in the eras of the Good Neighbor policy and the Alliance for Progress; the endnote following this discussion indicatively provides no sources (p. 222n16). This is not a matter of subterranean auditing but of aboveground analysis that could and should engage relevant historiography in order to demonstrate what this book's innovative research revises across fields. Public culture also deserves more meaningful attention. For instance, repetitive listing of easily conjured pop-culture analogues — Carmen Miranda, The Three Caballeros, and I Love Lucy (pp. 11–12, 152–53, 199) — reads like prefabricated additions rather than purposefully architected analysis.In spite of — or maybe because of — its stated aspiration to “move beyond the colonizer and colonized framework by focusing on the imagined subject” (p. 8), Designing Pan-America avoids assessing power. Such (necessary) investigations need not be reduced to the Manichaean dichotomy proleptically rejected by the author. The idea of a Western Hemisphere developed in dialogue with Washington's global ambitions and limits. Accordingly, the geopolitical symmetry between where this book ends and where it begins, between San Antonio in 1968 and Buffalo in 1901, between Washington's respective East-West transpacific interventions in the Philippines and in Vietnam, are notable for how US empire's public culture demanded geocultural reconfiguration of a so-called Western Hemisphere. Considering Pan-America in this global context could expand our understanding of its articulation in imperial architecture.Designing Pan-America's analysis is not as expansive as its research is extensive. Its own architecture is overly self-contained; it needed more windows. One place this could have been done is its contemporizing epilogue, which could have productively considered the place of Canada — its long-term absence, across the length of much of this study, and its recent inclusion (the Organization of American States followed by the North American Free Trade Agreement) — in official visions of the post–Cold War Americas. Such a northern turn would have provided an occasion to contemplate the interplay of transatlantic and trans-American geocultures and, more importantly, questions about cross-border power, which always can and must be evaluated for absence as well as presence.

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