The architectural-imperial complex

Hello from Chicago, where I’m participating this weekend in the opening festivities of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, directed this year by my friend Florencia Rodriguez. If you’re in town, I hope you’ll stop by my panel tomorrow afternoon, with Florencia, Samuel Medina, and others, at the Graham Foundation.

And if you’re enjoying Punch List so far, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support will help us add new features and bring the voices of more writers into the mix. And now for this week’s dispatch:

Aaron Cayer’s “Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire” (UC Press) began as his dissertation at UCLA, where his committee included Michael Osman, Sylvia Lavin, and Dana Cuff. It is one of those debuts with the potential to help turn architectural scholarship, if not that loftier, opaque category of “discourse,” in a promising new direction. Cayer rightly argues that historians, critics, and architects themselves have spent too much time treating the profession’s best-known figures as solitary creative geniuses and their buildings as standalone (if photogenic!) “aesthetic objects.” His book instead follows the trajectory of a single firm—formed in 1946 in Santa Maria, Calif., as Daniel, Mann, and Johnson Architects and later known as DMJM, or “Dim-Jim”—as it systematically amasses size, power, and political connections, thanks in part to the work of architects like Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden.

By the time it renamed itself AECOM in 1990, the firm was a hydra-headed conglomerate working on a range of architectural and infrastructural projects, secret and otherwise, for various arms of the U.S. government, including the CIA. Earlier this year AECOM, which now describes itself as “the trusted global infrastructure leader committed to delivering a better world,” joined McCrery Architects and Clark Construction on the team building Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, the subject of an earlier Punch List post.

This focus on the structure and evolution of a single firm turns out to be an effective way for Cayer to tell a larger story about the growth of American empire in the second half of the twentieth century, and its attendant corruption and cronyism, while also addressing what he sees as historians’ “relative lack of attention to the collective enterprise of architecture and engineering.” His path to get there wasn’t easy. Many of AECOM’s archival materials are stored at Iron Mountain, the Fort Knox of paperwork. Cayer was repeatedly rebuffed by the firm’s lawyers and had to devise number of creative research strategies, some outlined below, to get the story.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I was one of three people who reviewed the manuscript for UC Press before it was published. (It was back then called “Conglomerates,” which I have to say I think is the better title.) Though I did so anonymously—I appear in the acknowledgements as, essentially, Unnamed Reviewer Number Three—I’ve since unmasked myself to Cayer. In its final form the book, published in June, alternates between a historical analysis of AECOM’s growth and first-person accounts of what was required to unearth the documents (as well as testimonies from retired firm executives) that give scholarly weight to the tale. It’s an engaging mix; as Kate Wagner put it in her review, the book “at times even feels like a spy thriller.”

Cayer, now on the architecture faculty at Cal Poly Pomona, was kind enough to answer a few questions by email this week about how the book came to be. Our conversation serves as a counterpoint of sorts to my recent review of Michael Meredith’s new book, “Smaller Architecture.” Here is Bigger Architecture—Biggest Architecture, really—in all its rapacious and power-mad glory.

Christopher Hawthorne: What was it about this one firm—DMJM, which became AECOM—that suggested to you that it might be emblematic of so many aspects of postwar economics, politics, and culture?

Aaron Cayer: I first became interested in the organization and culture of architecture firms while an intern architect in the 2010s. At the time, I was struck by how little scholarship existed about architects’ work—the most recent books about architectural practice dated back to the 1980s and focused on small firms. My initial questions centered on how globalization and new technologies were reshaping the conditions of architectural work, and how the increasing size of firms—by then they were employing thousands—was transforming both the profession and the built environment.

As I began studying postwar firms—Albert Kahn, Gensler, CRS, TAC—I kept hearing about DMJM. The architects I was interviewing described it as an “instigator” and a “model.” In the 1960s and 70s, for example, CRS sent architects to DMJM for help with government contracts and computer lessons; Welton Becket’s firm turned to them for computing power; and Los Angeles mayors celebrated them as an economic bellwether for the city.

Following these threads, I found that DMJM’s history was defined by military contracts and political alliances that reached as high as the presidency. It revealed a far more complex story of architectural practice than I had imagined. It also began to explain how, by the end of the twentieth century, architects had ceded much of their professional identity to the machinery of governance.

There’s a certain irony at the heart of the book: AECOM has grown into one of the world’s largest conglomerates, with a workforce that has approached 100,000 people, and has its name plastered along the top of the downtown skyscraper that serves as its L.A. headquarters. Its clients have made up a who’s who of powerful institutions and government agencies. And yet it seems to have been hiding for all these years in plain sight, poorly understood by the general public (to the extent that they think about it at all) and long “unnoticed” by scholars, as you put it, at least until you came along. What do you think explains this? 

In my view, there are several reasons for this oversight. First, it stems from the character of the firm’s projects themselves. Firms like AECOM are both embedded in and producers of vast infrastructural networks—electrical grids, military bases, highways, airports—making them easy to ignore. Many of these projects are also commissioned by the government and are classified as “secret,” meaning that the documents and processes used to produce them are carefully guarded. 

Second, the firm’s leaders were remarkably effective at writing themselves out of the official record. Corporate structures made this easier: the shift from “DMJM”—an acronym tied to the names of its founders—to “AECOM,” which reduces the practice to a list of generalized services (architecture, engineering, construction, operations, maintenance), deliberately obscuring leadership and accountability.

Finally, there is a disciplinary bias. Architects and architectural historians, who should be best positioned to study such firms, have, at least in the U.S., long been trained to focus on buildings as aesthetic objects and on architects as creative geniuses. This orientation has left them—the most consequential forces shaping the global built environment—largely immune from scrutiny. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.

In recent years AECOM has employed a very small proportion of architects—less than two percent of its workforce, according to one source you cite. Does it still make sense to think of it as an architecture or design firm in any meaningful sense?

In short: yes. When I first visited AECOM’s office, I was asked a similar question by the firm’s executives: “You study architecture, so why are you interested in studying us?”

Drawing on scholars such as Arturo Escobar and Albena Yaneva, who describe architecture and urban development as processes unfolding over time (from land acquisition and infrastructure to buildings and maintenance)—and on scholars of capitalism who chart its stages from early competition to imperialism—I find it useful to view architecture firms in a similar way. The architects and engineers who first imagined AECOM were not only envisioning a firm that would produce buildings; they were also designing the firm itself as a kind of architectural project. In corporate charters, memos, and manuals, they specified how the firm would be assembled, how it would expand, and how it would generate new disciplines over time (for instance, construction management and building maintenance).

In this sense, AECOM can be understood as a kind of “late”- or “high”-stage architecture firm. By now, architecture is everywhere, yet architects themselves are administrators, often nowhere to be found.

You were repeatedly stonewalled by AECOM in your efforts to access its archives. How did you work around that obstacle to find the materials you needed?

After months of back-and-forth with AECOM’s administration, the company’s counsel ultimately denied me access to its archives, claiming that clients retained rights to the drawings and documents and so they could not be shown without permission. At other points, they said that records could not be located, that they no longer had employees who knew how to access them, or that boxes (thousands!) stored in off-site vaults were unlabeled and unindexed.

One workaround was to follow the firm’s “paper trails” wherever they surfaced in public repositories—the National Archives, public libraries, and university collections. I also filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain documents held by federal agencies including the CIA, the Air Force, the Army, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

In parallel, I conducted interviews with current and former employees, as well as relatives of DMJM’s founders and its second generation of leaders who eventually created AECOM. These oral histories proved invaluable: not only did they illuminate the culture and decision-making of the firm, but they also led me to forgotten caches of records tucked away in attics, closets, and garages. By assembling fragments from across these sources, I constructed a “historical ethnography”—a story that not only reconstructs institutional histories but also captures the lived experiences that animated them.

One of the sentences in the book that really struck me was your assertion that it is “in the making of the most physically unremarkable buildings—the plants, airports, highways, and offices —where we have found the [architecture] profession’s most politically remarkable acts.” Can you expand on this idea, and can you suggest some examples of what you mean?

When most architects in LA think of DMJM or AECOM, they point to familiar buildings—school buildings from the firm’s early years, or the mirror-glass office towers by Cesar Pelli and Anthony Lumsden that helped define postmodernism. But if you look at the projects that actually sustained the company, and the impacts of those projects on the broader U.S. political economy, the story is very different.

From the 1950s onward, DMJM built airfields for the Korean and Vietnam wars, among others, that enabled the U.S. to bomb and destroy entire communities. They went on to design ballistic missile and nuclear testing facilities central to the Cold War. That military work opened the door to a global market in “redevelopment” and “reconstruction.” Through USAID contracts, DMJM exported American expertise abroad, designing dams, ports, highways, power grids—even running aerial “surveillance missions” with their own retrofitted World War II plane.

This well-known cycle of destruction and development proved lucrative for many U.S. firms. And the cycle continues today: AECOM has designed power plants and infrastructure in countries from Russia to the Middle East. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the USAID briefly hired AECOM to manage reconstruction. And more recently, the company advertised job positions and renderings for a proposed reconstruction of Gaza—even as bombings continue. And at home in Los Angeles, after the devastating 2024 Eaton and Palisades fires, AECOM won a contract to manage rebuilding there, too—while simultaneously being named the city’s “infrastructure partner” for the 2028 Olympics.

You end the book with something of a call to dismantle huge conglomerates like AECOM. How exactly do you think this might be accomplished, and what kind of architectural practice, and architecture culture, can you imagine taking its place?

Despite the somewhat naïve assumptions I began with—that “big firms” were radically different from small firms—I’ve come to see that distinguishing firms by size or output is not especially productive. What matters today are the specific practices and labor conditions within them. Size-based distinctions rely on a nineteenth-century industrial model, when labor inputs correlated directly with capital outputs: more workers meant more drawings and more profit. That logic also reinforced the assumption that “small” firms produced creative, award-winning architecture by identifiable “genius” designers, while “big” firms churned out generic, profit-driven work.

But those correlations no longer hold. Today, both small and large firms can earn massive profits through speculative development or advanced computational work—forms of immaterial or postindustrial labor. Many small firms also present themselves as critical or cultural producers, even while acquiring subsidiaries, exploiting workers, or expanding globally in ways once thought to be the domain of twentieth-century conglomerates.

For me, then, the path toward dismantling corporate power in architecture begins with moving beyond these outdated binaries. Following sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, I suggest that the real conflict within cultural production lies between those “in it for the money” and those “in it for social or cultural good.” That recognition allows us to see more clearly which practices serve public interests and which reinforce inequities in the name of self-preservation.

And once we frame the problem this way, the strategies for dismantling concentrated corporate power become clearer. As the late Jane McAlevey and others have argued, the history of corporate greed has become the very playbook for its undoing: lessons for collective bargaining, unionization, cooperativization, and forms of accountability that can make exploitative practices untenable. Most architects in the United States already work outside of massive corporate offices, though as individuals they have little leverage. By organizing, banding together, and insisting on accountability, they can help to build a different architectural culture—one rooted not in the growth imperatives of conglomerates, but in forms of practice that prioritize social responsibility, equity, and cultural value.

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