Research Expertise and Interest

memory, visionary architecture, the unbuilt, paper architecture, heritage conservation, architectural representation, urban representation, diagrams, history of professions, historiography, world's fairs, expositions, California architecture, themed environments

Research Description

Andrew Shanken is a professor in the Department of Architecture and the American Studies Program at UC Berkeley.  His current work focuses on memorials, architecture and consumer culture, and the language of architecture and urbanism. His first book, 194X, explores American architecture, planning, and consumer culture on the American home front. Into the Void Pacific (2015) is a history of the architecture of the 1939 world's fair in San Francisco, where modernist, Beaux-Arts, and regionalist architects made an uneasy peace on the 400 acre tabula rasa of Treasure Island. The Everyday Life of Memorials (Zone Books, 2022), an inquiry into memorials as ordinary parts of urban life. Breaking the Bronze Ceiling (Fordham University Press, 2024) is an edited volume of essays on women and memorials. He writes extensively on issues of memory and the built environment and is interested in the semantic history of architecture, as well as the history and theory of heritage, preservation, and patrimony. At Berkeley he teaches general surveys of architectural history and specialized seminars in the above areas of interest, in both Architecture and American Studies. Trained as an art historian at Princeton University, Professor Shanken works at the intersection of art, architecture, and urban history, as well as in the historiographical and methodological traditions in architectural history. He is currently the Director of American Studies.