• 1 The Arab World is used here to describe the Arab nations of the Middle East, with a specific refer (...)

1Architecture, Environment, Development: The United States and the Making of Modern Arabia, 1949-1961 examines the ways in which the architectures of U.S. development programs sought to transform the social, environmental, and urban fabric of the Arab World in the mid-twentieth century.1 The period between the establishment of President Harry S. Truman’s Point Four Program in 1949 and President John F. Kennedy’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961 saw the genesis of a distinct global form of development, rooted in projects that divided regions into “rural” and “urban.” By examining four different projects in four nations (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Iraq), the dissertation aims to document this critical discourse, placing environment and development within the field of architecture, and tracing within them the emergence of (and resistances to) rural and urban models of development. The dissertation examines what these development projects looked like; what (and how) types of decisions were made; and what roles were played by architecture and environment in this development discourse. To weave together these narratives, the dissertation relies mainly on two disciplines: architecture and environmental history.

• 2 Aggregate: Architectural History Collaborative, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Po (...)
• 3 On the role of architects as experts during the postwar development era, see Ijlal Muzaffar, The P (...)
• 4 On petroleum and modernization, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age (...)

2Rooted in a distinctly architectural discourse, the dissertation builds on the growing body of literature that looks at non-canonical, non-authored architecture and the “organizational logics, processes, and systems that call them forth.”2 Implicit within this framework is the role that “expertise” plays in processes and systems that govern architecture. However, rather than address the role of architects and the dissemination of modern architecture, the dissertation examines the mundane architecture built and how it attempted to transform social, spatial, and environmental norms. Outside of architecture, the dissertation builds on the work of scholars who have looked at the role of aid during the Cold War.3 By focusing on the Arab World and within that field, U.S.-Middle Eastern relations, the center of several recent studies, the dissertation offers alternative regional insights, beyond nation states, into Cold War histories. Scholarship on the Middle East has generally tended to investigate either the role of petroleum in modernization or the process of nation-building in individual nations in the years after decolonization. More specifically, the postwar years saw the processes of nation and civic building for postcolonial states in which modernism’s seeming lack of political allegiances, its allusion to modernization, and its break from colonial architecture was adopted as the visual rhetoric to present these nascent nations on the global arena.4 This dissertation, however, shifts the lens to the un-authored, everyday architecture found in homes, factories, shops, and so on, which are often missing in the modernization and architecture discourses of the Middle East. These buildings are critical to understanding how U.S.-funded modernization attempted to transform society and its built environment, and how these efforts were received. Thus, the dissertation builds on these rich histories to offer another window into the role that architecture played as a tool of development.

• 5 See Patricio del Real, Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early (...)
• 6 Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III (eds.), Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North (...)
• 7 Diana K. Davis, “Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East: History, Policy (...)
• 8 See Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences (...)
• 9 Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission, Cam (...)

3In regards to U.S. development projects in the Arab World, the dissertation benefits from recent architectural scholarship that has looked at the role of U.S.-funded development projects in Latin America, Turkey, and Iran, as well as through a global lens.5 Building on these works, the dissertation offers a more expansive approach by examining four different projects in four nations to offer a clearer understanding of U.S. developmental projects by demonstrating how these projects blanketed on-the-ground social and spatial differences and nuances. Furthermore, by examining the house as a form of environment, the dissertation brings environmental history into the architectural canon. The dissertation’s analysis of architectural and environmental histories fills a gap within this nascent and robust field. The vast literature making up the field of environmental history is referenced throughout, with a specific focus on the work of Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III.6 According to Davis and Burke, an environmental imaginary is defined as “the constellation of ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape, usually local or regional, that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state.”7 The U.S. environmental imaginary of the Arab World was actively manufactured in the first half of the twentieth century through representations that conceptually distanced the region from the “West” by projecting an assumption that its peoples were unsophisticated, backward, and primitive. This projection helped future aid and development programs to enter the region by visually demonstrating that it met the established criteria of “underdevelopment” and thus, was susceptible to the encroachment of communism and in need of U.S.-funded aid.8 Equally, the environment (and ideas about it) enabled certain decisions founded on the concept of technological prowess and the ever-changing technological-environmental relationship to be made.9

• 10 Scholarship that examines suburban living through an environmental lens includes Daniel A. Barber, (...)
• 11 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2007; Lizabeth Cohen, A Co (...)

4Building on this literature, the dissertation describes how technological advances were used in the home and the landscape to represent the U.S. ability to transform a landscape and a society. Suburbs and the suburban home, which have strong historical ties to U.S. modernization in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, became a model that was exported to the globe in a myriad of forms.10 The dissertation posits the study of architecture, specifically the domestic sphere, as another environment: one that is imagined, manipulated, managed, and ultimately, transformed. The self-contained house (and its kitchen) was used to portray the “Good Life” of U.S. modernization and as such, the modern house and what it contained in the form of amenities, consumables, and excess became a commodified image.11 The house was not an inanimate, apolitical, neutral object but a place in which ideology was curated, taught, and maintained, and where gender roles, ideas of publicity and privacy, and citizenship were negotiated. As an environment, the house could be imagined, transformed, and harnessed through technological and architectural advances into a certain image that reconfigures bodies, ecosystems, and socio-spatial practices. Ultimately, the house served as a strategic tool to reshape societies under the guise of development.

• 12 The literature on Arab Nationalism is vast, as it relates to the dissertation, see Karen Culcasi, (...)

5The dissertation analyzes four different projects in four nations (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq) to illuminate the ways in which the regional approach of postwar U.S. development programs overlooked the heterogeneous spatial, national, and cultural on-the-ground dynamics. The regional approach constructed the “Arab World” as a homogeneous region during the Cold War years, and the construction of an “Arab Homeland” by local Arab leaders was a direct response to externally imposed divisions and political boundaries. While the nations and projects differ, the role that Arab Nationalism played in the reactions to these U.S. development projects and the role that the projected U.S. environmental imaginary enabled allows these stories to be told in unison.12 The dissertation follows a loosely chronological sequence, with one chapter per country, serving as an independent case study. Linking the chapters together is the central theme of the domestic sphere as an environment, the role of the environmental imaginary in subsequent design decisions, and the various roles played by “experts,” in a variety of forms. Equally prevalent is the fact the U.S. created the need for development, envisioned what this development would look like, and then physically produced this vision. Chapter I both sets out the main arguments of the dissertation and provides the historical backgrounds for the following chapters. The chapter examines the construction of the Middle Eastern environmental imaginary through several channels: Christian missionaries; the New Deal; postwar U.S. development projects; and Pan Arabism.

• 13 See Daniel A. Barber, “The Casablanca Solar House,” in Eva Franch i Gilabert, Amanda Reeser Lawren (...)
• 14 See Kevin W. Martin, “‘Behind Cinerama’s Aluminum Curtain’: Cold War Spectacle and Propaganda at t (...)

7Chapter III moves to examine a series of U.S. pavilions at the Damascus International Fair in Syria during the decade of the 1950s. Between 1956 and 1964, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) participated in trade fairs in Damascus, Casablanca, Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis. The pavilions used modern architecture to depict the U.S.’s neutrality and its distance and difference from the colonial enterprise.13 The concrete pavilions outfitted with full-scale kitchens and farms centered around the domestic and rural spheres. In the scenes thus staged, U.S. ideology directly confronted the Soviet, because trade fairs were the only places in which both modernization processes were simultaneously on full display. To understand the broader social, ideological, and architectural tools used, the chapter focuses specifically on the USIA Pavilions at the 1950s Syria International Fairs to show how the U.S. curated its self-representation around domesticity, consumerism, and rurality in places where direct aid was rejected.14

• 15 See Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East, Philad (...)

8The transposition of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is the subject of Chapter IV. This chapter closely studies how both the Near East Foundation (NEF) and the U.S. Point Four technical assistance program created an environmental imaginary of Jordan that mimicked the rural landscapes of the Southern U.S.. By conceiving both environments as similar, the NEF reproduced rural-based education as the solution to the growing number of refugees in the early part of the century. In 1951, Point Four entered the nation with a large-scale hydrological project, the Jordan Valley Authority (JVA), modeled on the TVA. The JVA introduced new architectures, body politics, identities, and understanding of space that included “rural” housing to settle Bedouins (nomadic tribespeople), home economics programs for women, and “masculine” activities for men based on strategies developed during the New Deal. This chapter unearths the long histories of postwar “development” programs within U.S. conservation programs and missionary ambitions.15