Research Bio

Diana Martinez is an architectural historian whose work examines the architecture, urbanism, infrastructure of US Empire, focusing on the US colonial period in the Philippines. Her teaching considers the agency of architects, institutions, and materials in the construction and constitution of the built environment, paying special attention to issues of race and racialization.  Her research considers the aesthetics, politics, and technics of architectural design, and draws upon a diverse set of archives, in order to develop new readings and analyses of the built space that surrounds us. 

Her first book, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the United States' Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025) exposes the immense impact of a single (hybrid) material on the United States colonial venture in the Philippines. In doing so, she links the history of U.S. empire to the political, social, economic, and environmental transformations that simultaneously took place in the colony and the metropole.

She is currently working on the manuscript for a second book, Master Plans: The Colonial Roots of Urban Renewal, which examines the Manila Plan in conjunction with Burnham’s plans for Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., and with various plans for Philippine and U.S. cities designed by William E. Parsons (the executor of the Burnham Manila Plan). Close readings of these plans reveal a frank expression of the ambitions and organization of U.S. empire. The book concludes with a re-reading of large-scale urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, most notably New Haven’s nine square plan and the Government Center in Boston’s West End which are, she argues, the direct legacy of U.S. colonial practice.

Prior to Berkeley, Martinez taught as an Assistant Professor at Tufts University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department for the Study of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. She has contributed to a number of publications on US architecture and urbanism. 

 

 

 

Research Expertise and Interest

architecture, Philippines, race and empire, United States history, race and ethnicity, material culture and ethnic identity