Eight free-to-read stories that explore power struggles in US architecture

This Fourth of July marks the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. For many, the date is a moment to reckon with the country’s complicated past and the present challenges of its slowly eroding democracy.

In this reading list, the AR turns its attention to eight stories that investigate the complex power struggles and inherited imperialism in the United States.

Curated from the AR archive, these eight free-to-read stories reflect on how architecture in the United States reconciles with histories of dispossession, control and inequity. From the surveillance of protest and the policing of borders to the slow violence of wildfire and flood. Together they ask what it means to build, and to keep building, in a nation whose founding promise of liberty has always sat uneasily alongside its instruments of exclusion.

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Outrage: Donald Trump’s Arctic expansions, AR February 2025, Jan-Werner Müller
‘Greenland holds great potential for what the political theorist Tristan Hughes calls techno‑colonialism’

Surveillance space: urban infrastructures of control, AR July/August 2024, Shannon Mattern
‘Columbia’s students were demanding the shift from a spatial politics enacted through surveillance, distrust, imperialism and repression to one shaped by recognition, inclusion and care’

Outrage: Living with wildfires, AR September 2025, Martha Dillon
‘Hotter, drier conditions are extending “fire season” into a nearly year‑round problem, while increasingly mild, wet winter periods stimulate fuel build‑up’

Cost of care: reflections on the Skid Row Housing Trust, AR September 2023, Mimi Zeiger
‘These buildings have garnered awards and exhibitions but, more importantly, they changed the conversation of how design might best serve those who are most vulnerable’

Revisit: James R Thompson Center in Chicago, US by Helmut Jahn, AR May 2024, Zach Mortice
‘This cocaine‑boardroom behemoth bellows “1985!” with the swagger of a Huey Lewis and the News chorus’

Border sands: policing in the Sonoran Desert, AR October 2023, Juanita Sundberg
‘A new violence came to this land in the form of a boundary enforcement strategy which instrumentalised the desert as a “natural barrier”’

Right to remain: Community stations in San Diego, US, and Tijuana, Mexico, by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, AR October 2025, Michael Snyder
‘Critics have accused Cruz and Forman of romanticising precarity; in practice, though, their work understands architectures of marginalisation, conceived as scaffolds and systems, uniquely well adapted to this kind of instability’

East side story: East Side Coastal Resiliency project in New York City, US by BIG, ONE Architecture & Urbanism and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, AR February 2026, Peter Lucas
‘The grief is understandable, but ultimately pales in comparison to the necessary flood mitigation provided’

Lead image: Kristi McCluer’s 2017 photograph of the Eagle Creek wildfire in Washington, seen from the nearby Beacon Rock Golf Course. Credit: Kristi McCluer/REUTERS