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

AbstractHow 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.Keywords: Indigenous governancedesert modernismsettler colonialismjurisdictionhistoriography Notes1 The author would like to thank participants of the University of California’s “Decolonizing Regionalism” working group for their comments on an early draft of this paper: Can Bilsel, Swati Chattopadhyay, Zirwat Chowdhury, Dana Cuff, Muriam Haleh-Davis, Miloš Jovanović, Nancy Kwak, Ayala Levin, Juliana Maxim, Kelema Lee Moses, Stephan Miescher, Patricia Morton, Albert Narath, Ginger Nolan, Michael Osman, and Keith Pezzoli.2 This is a problematic as old as the discipline itself, but of continued urgency in the field. See for example, Swati Chattopadhyay, “Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, no. 1 (2022): 5–20; Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Introduction: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 3 (2020): 495–506; Kelema Lee Moses, “Indigeneity, Contingency, and Cognitive Shifts,” Ardeth 6 (2020): 121–34; Dell Upton, “Architectural History or Landscape History?” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4 (1991): 195–99.3 Chandra Mukerji, “Jurisdiction, Inscription, and State Formation: Administrative Modernism and Knowledge Regimes,” Theory and Society 40, no. 3 (2011): 223–45.4 Lorraine Daston, “Ancient Rules: Straightedges, Models, and Laws,” in Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 23–47.5 Paul C. Rosier, “‘They Are Ancestral Homelands’: Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945–1961,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1300–26. On “desert modernism” as a symptomatic architecture of post-war American hegemony, see Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Lyle Massey, “Troglodyte Modernists,” in The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment, ed. Lyle Massey and James Nisbet (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 79–99.6 Joseph Rosa, Albert Frey, Architect (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1990); Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900–1970 (New York: Rizzoli, 2010).7 Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Introduction: Architecture and Technics,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), xvii.8 Çelik Alexander, “Introduction,” xvi.9 Çelik Alexander, “Introduction,” ix.10 Çelik Alexander uses “jurisdiction” in a metaphorical sense while glossing John Harwood’s essay on logistics: “Harwood imagines the possibility of another way of conceptualizing architecture’s epistemic jurisdiction by reading into such seemingly mundane details as those of the third rail in the Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.” Çelik Alexander, “Introduction,” xvii.11 Modernism Week, “About Us,” https://modernismweek.com/pages/about-us. For the Palm Springs–Hollywood connection, see Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).12 Julius Shulman: Desert Modern, dir. Michael Stern (Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Art Museum, 2008); Dan Chavkin, Unseen Midcentury Desert Modern (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2016).13 To wit, Elizabeth A. T. Smith’s Case Study Houses (Cologne: Taschen, 2016) monograph is the best seller on Amazon USA’s “Architectural History” booklist at the time of writing. On Shulman’s architectural significance, see Friedman, American Glamour; Simon Niedenthal, “‘Glamourized Houses’: Neutra, Photography, and the Kaufmann House,” Journal of Architectural Education 47, no. 2 (1993): 101–12.14 Not to be confused with modernist claims to universality, I use the term “generalisable” to describe tools for scaling design and construction, such as standardisation, prefabrication, and protocols and operations governing the division of design and construction work. For a useful discussion of generalisability in colonial and anti-colonial contexts, see Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 152–56. With this usage, I am also building on Michael Osman’s insights on architectural generality: “Specifying: The Generality of Clerical Labor,” in Design Technics, 129–58. See also Jessica Garcia Fritz’s mobilisation of Osman’s argument for a decolonial material history: “The Specification as an Instrument for Colonizing Oceti Sakowin Lands,” History of Construction Cultures 1 (2021): 256–61.15 Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, “Designing ‘Post-Industrial Society’: Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Palm Springs, California, 1876-1977” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2019). Agua Caliente had successfully navigated Spanish and Mexican colonisation beforehand. See, for example, Francisco Patencio, Stories and Legends of the Palm Springs Indians (Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1943).16 See Ryan M. Kray, “The Path to Paradise: Expropriation, Exodus, and Exclusion in the Making of Palm Springs,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (2004): 85–126; Ryan M. Kray, “Second-Class Citizenship at a First-Class Resort: Race and Public Policy in Palm Springs” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009).17 Shiri Pasternak, “Jurisdiction and Settler Colonialism: Where Do Laws Meet?” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29, no. 2 (2014): 145–61, 152; Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). See also Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (New York: Routledge, 2013); Sally Engle Merry, “Legal Pluralism,” Law & Society Review 22, no. 5 (1988): 869–96; Richard T. Ford, “Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction),” Michigan Law Review 97, no. 4 (1999): 843–930.18 Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4.19 Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 4.20 Dorsett and McVeigh, “Technologies of Jurisdiction,” in Jurisdiction, 54–80.21 See for example, Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 63–66; Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 91–92; Ford, “Law’s Territory,” 870.22 William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).23 Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 23–34; Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).24 Lowell John Bean with Jerry Schaefer and Sylvia Brakke Vane (Cultural Systems Research), Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Ethnohistoric Investigations at Tahquitz Canyon Palm Springs, California, Prepared for Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District (Menlo Park, CA, 1995), V–94. Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.25 Patencio, Stories and Legends of the Palm Springs Indians, xi.26 Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, “Designing Terra Nullius: Midcentury Modernism and Settler-Colonial Leisure” in Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt, ed. Panayiota Pyla, Sibel Bozdoğan and Petros Phokaides (London: Routledge, 2022), 52–68.27 Vyola J. Ortner and Diana C. du Pont, You Can't Eat Dirt: Leading America's First All-Women Tribal Council and How We Changed Palm Springs (Santa Barbara, CA: Fan Palm Research Project, 2011), 57, fn. 142.28 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.29 On the Cahuilla’s land stewardship, see M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).30 Stephen Leet, Richard Neutra’s Miller House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 169.31 Hines, Architecture of the Sun; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-war America (New York: Knopf, 2003).32 Quoted in Kray, “Second-Class Citizenship,” 219.33 For example, HR 7598 (1922) and HR 7450 (with S. 2589): A Bill to Authorize the Sale of Part of the Lands Belonging to the Palm Springs or Agua Caliente Band of Mission Indians, and For Other Purposes, HR 7450, 75th Congress (June 8, 1937).34 Palm Springs and the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation: An outline of their relations, and suggestions for improvements and betterments, prepared by the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce, for submission to Hon. John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1. Earl Coffman Papers, box 3, folder 56: 22–23, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.35 Senate Bill 1863 (1937 and 1941); Kray, “The Path to Paradise,” 100–101.36 Kray, “The Path to Paradise,” 92.37 Public Law 322, 1949.38 Vine Deloria Jr., “The Disastrous Policy of Termination,” Custer Died for Your Sins (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 54–77.39 Letter from Agua Caliente to John Collier, April 15, 1939, 1. Earl Coffman Papers, box 3, folder 54, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.40 This proposal was received with panic by the Chamber of Commerce. “Memorandum,” May 6, 1939. Earl Coffman Papers, box 3, folder 50, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.41 Sean Milanovich, “The Treaty of Temecula: A Story of Invasion, Deceit, Stolen Land, and the Persistence of Power, 1846–1905” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2021); Florence Connolly Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks: Southern California Indian Land Tenure, 1769–1986 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).42 Allotment, or the privatisation of Native land under US law, was/is a contentious issue among Native American nations. See Heather Ponchetti Daly, “Fractured Relations at Home: The 1953 Termination Act's Effect on Tribal Relations throughout Southern California Indian Country,” American Indian Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2009): 427–39; Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien, eds., Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).43 Arenas v. United States, 322 US 419 (1944).44 Paul Weeks, “Palm Springs ‘Slum’ Plan Probed by State,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1967, E18.45 See, for example, “City Council Proposes Restricting ‘Carbon Copy’ Homes, Sizes of Lots: Architectural Review Board is Planned,” Desert Sun, April 28, 1959, A1.46 In 1968, California Deputy Attorney General, Loren Miller Jr., published a report denouncing that Palm Springs had subjected its own citizens to a “City-engineered holocaust.” Loren Miller Jr., Memorandum on Palm Springs, Section 14 Demolition. Office of the Attorney General, Department of Justice, May 31, 1968. Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.47 Victor Gruen & Associates, Indian Lands Palm Springs—14 (1957). Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archives.48 US Department of the Interior, Palm Springs Task Force, Report on the Administration of Guardianships and Conservatorships Established For Members Of The Agua Caliente Band Of Mission Indians, California (March 1968). Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.49 Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” 88.50 Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal ‘Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory,” Social & Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (2009): 139–57.51 Osman, “Specifying,” 134–36.52 See Max Weber, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 956–58; Mukerji, “Jurisdiction, Inscription, and State Formation”; Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: Monopolies of Competence and Sheltered Markets (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013); Andrew Delano Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).53 L. C. Dutcher and J. S. Bader, Geology and Hydrology of Agua Caliente Spring, Palm Springs, California (Washington, DC: US Govt. Print. Off., 1961), 16, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.54 “Palm Springs Spa, Inc.” Letter from Sam Banowit, May 15, 1958, 1–2. Spa History Project Collection, box 1, folder 5, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive. Local architects William Cody in collaboration with Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison were the designers of the project.55 “Palm Springs Spa, Inc.,” 2.56 “Spa Construction Like Giant Jigsaw,” Desert Sun, January 21, 1960, 2.57 See letters between associate architect Philip Koenig, developer Sam Banowit, Agua Caliente Tribe, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, and USGS, in the period 1958–1960. Spa History Project Collection, box 1, folder 5, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.58 Chairwoman Olinger remarked: “A year ago we spent three weeks in Washington and came away with 16 objections from the Secretary of Interior. We got those cleared up and then had 15 objections from the local office. Then we had 11 objections from the area office at Sacramento.” George Ringwald, “PS Indian Spa Leased for $Million Resort,” Daily Enterprise, February 14, 1958. Spa History Project Collection, Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, History Background Summary, 2. box 1, folder 7, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Archive.59 Though they are not actually immutable, the idea, logic, and technologies of canonisation seek to produce foundationalism and immutability. Daston, “Ancient Rules: Straightedges, Models, and Laws,” 23–47.60 At stake is “the historian's own subject and craft. For all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.” Eric Hobsbawm, ed., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12.61 Historic Resources Group, City of Palm Springs: Citywide Historic Context Statement & Survey Findings, Final Draft for City Council Approval, December 2018, https://www.palmspringsca.gov/government/departments/planning/historic-resources/citywide-historic-survey.62 “Context: Native American Settlement to 1969,” Citywide Historic Context Statement & Survey Findings, 29–34.63 In 2014, the Tribe demolished their mid-century Palm Springs Spa building, to the dismay of Modernism Week’s constituents. See: Shvartzberg Carrió, “Designing Terra Nullius,” 52–68.64 Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein. “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016), 1.65 See, for example, Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017). On the expansion of nation-state sovereignty as a ruling epistemology of global governance in the seventeenth century, see Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 34–36.66 On these complex articulations, see Shannon Speed, “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala,” American Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2017): 783–90; Manu Karuka, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).67 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Shvartzberg Carrió, “Designing Terra Nullius,” 52–68.68 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism,” in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015); Rosier, “‘They Are Ancestral Homelands’,” 1300–26.69 See Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, ed., Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (New York: Routledge, 2022); Mary S. Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).70 Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 57.71 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).72 Lauren Benton, A Search For Sovereignty: Law and Geography In European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).73 Pasternak, Grounded Authority, 12.74 Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).75 Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: the Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 287–323.76 Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History: Dialectical Universalism & the Geographies of Class Power in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1492-2022,” Nordia Geographical Publications 51, no. 2 (2022), 140.77 Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 55–56.Additional informationNotes on contributorsManuel Shvartzberg CarrióManuel Shvartzberg Carrió, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently working on his first monograph, Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism, Modern Architecture, and the Rise of American Hegemony, which explores how modernist architecture became a fundamental technology for governing Empire through Indigenous land and migrant labour, while also becoming a critical medium for Indigenous projects of self-determination.