ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical relations between Native American, Latin American, and liberal theories of economic development through a critical reading of two projects spearheaded by US Steel in the early post-World War II period: a series of prefabricated steel houses for Palm Springs, California, and the iron-ore mining settlement that would become Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela. The projects illustrate how architectural expertise structured US Steel’s postwar operations—from production and consumption to resource extraction and distribution—as a fungible infrastructural system critical to the United States’ bid for hegemony in the Cold War. However, the projects were located on Indigenous lands, posing questions of Native sovereignty, ecological destruction, and racialized segregation often neglected by development theories. The architects and planners designing and rationalizing these projects displaced these issues through an architectural discourse on regionalism that reworked colonial architectural devices—namely, the grid and the patio—to enact a “transition” from rural to urban life and from noncapitalist societies to capitalist modernity.
