Papers by Nikki Moore
Architecture in Development, 2022
This chapter examines the breakdown of the campus of the National School of Agriculture at Chapin... more This chapter examines the breakdown of the campus of the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, Mexico, designed by William C. Brubaker of Perkins + Will, in partnership with Augusto H. Álvarez and Enrique Carral Icaza of Mexico City, between 1963 and 1968. Caught between the interests of Mexico’s national agronomists who held to the land restitution aims of the Mexican Revolution, those who saw those interests best served through the alignment of Mexico’s First Nations with the goals of the Comintern, and the international development aims of the Rockefeller’s Green Revolution scientists, Brubaker, Alvarez, and Carral attempted to design scientifically neutral answers to intrinsically political agricultural development questions. Orienting Plan Chapingo toward neither the Mexican Revolution, the Red Revolution, nor the Green Revolution, the architects proposed a heliotropic approach, grounding the campus plan in the revolution of the earth around the sun. When this solution failed to unite Chapingo’s agricultural factions, less than 20 miles away the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) set the stage for Rockefeller and Ford-funded agricultural schools and institutes throughout the Global South, as the divided campuses of the first site of the Green Revolution were replicated in facilities around the globe.
Architectural Theory Review, 2017
Maximising returns on one of the world's most efficient solar converters, for over four centuries... more Maximising returns on one of the world's most efficient solar converters, for over four centuries, the sugar industry on the island of Hispaniola has shaped the people, architecture, and landscapes of what is now the Dominican Republic. Drawing a through-line from the design of the sixteenth-century to early nineteenthcentury slave ships and sugar mills to the development of modern sugar refineries and labour camps under North American occupation (1916)(1917)(1918)(1919)(1920)(1921)(1922)(1923)(1924) and the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961, this article argues that slaves as well as modern Haitian and Dominican labourers were bonded to the architecture of sugarcane processing, as subordinate, interchangeable parts. At the same time, it proposes that as escaped slaves and later batey residents seized momentary openings on idle land to shape landscapes of resistance, these same communities pushed back against the drive of agrilogistics-an environmentally appropriative thought loop as old as humanity's first agricultural gestures.
Across Space and Time: Architecture and the Politics of Modernity
This paper investigates a global moment between 1925 and 1948 in which Le Corbusier’s work aligns... more This paper investigates a global moment between 1925 and 1948 in which Le Corbusier’s work aligns with eugenics. From his formulation of universal type-needs, to his Modulor and its normative human body--architecture was made complicit in a genetically inspired program that mirrored eugenics attempts on the human race.
Architectural Design, 2010
Much of what is currently regarded as 'green' is predicated on a pre-modern, even Romantic, notio... more Much of what is currently regarded as 'green' is predicated on a pre-modern, even Romantic, notion of nature; with sustainable design often overtly seeking to readdress the balance in nature by countering man's destructive forces. Here Fabiola Lopez-Duran and Nikki Moore pursue a more nuanced view of sustainability and architecture through a lineage of ideas, embedded within Lamarckian eugenics - the early 20th-century movement that sought the advancement of the human race through the transformation of the environment
Thresholds, 2005
There are many ways to introduce a man. Yet to introduce Jacques Martin as just a man is both inc... more There are many ways to introduce a man. Yet to introduce Jacques Martin as just a man is both incomplete and inaccurate: as, among other things, he is at once a symbol, a schizophrenic, an absence, a mirror and a past friend of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. Viewed as a friend. Martin's relationships with Foucault and Althusser began at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in the ig40s. In this context, Jacques Martin is the little known figure who influenced Foucault and Althusser in their identities, in their choices, in their writing and in their work. Viewed strictly from Foucault's worl<, Martin is an absence of work, a critique of Kant's formulation of work in the Critique of Pure Reason, a symbol of the breakdown between madness and reason in the collapse of metaphysics. As Martin the schizophrenic, Martin is the embodiment of that breakdown; from his inability to produce coherent thought to his inability to distinguish rationality from the mad voices in his head. Sharing these mad voices, Louis Althusser introduces Martin as this symbol, this absence and this schizophrenic in a retelling of his own autobiography, in which he takes on memories of Martin's childhood, his sexuality and his purported illness as his own.' Therefore without recourse to proper introduction, in what follows I will nonetheless introduce an important figure in Foucault's critique of Kant's theory of work, an important influence on Louis Althusser's road to Marxism' and an absence in the collaboration of three men whose presence attempted to recreate something analogous to that which Martin, in the annihilation of his work and the demolition of himself in suicide, both created and destroyed. Jacques Martin: Jacques Martin: to single out his name in print is to give deceptive clarity and singularity to a figure seen only through the lens upon lens of others. Cited in the works of Louis Althusser and silently influencing Foucault's writings on reason and madness, the varying views that create what we
Talks by Nikki Moore
EAHN 2024 Athens, 2024
In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the fields of the nation’s Central Valley became the subst... more In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the fields of the nation’s Central Valley became the substrate for a series of experiments in decoloniality. The first occurred between 1922 and 1932, as corn geneticist Pandurang Khankhoje and Mexican Modernists Diego Rivera, Tina Modotti, and Xavier Guerrero partnered with Mexica and other First Nations farmers to augment corn yields for communal subsistence and thereby restore ancestral land claims. Working with farmers of all ages and genders, more than thirty Free Schools of Agriculture were designed to proclaim the Nations’ productivity. The project melded modern seed sorting practices to procure more robust harvests with ancestral techniques that, long before Spain’s colonization and México’s pre-revolutionary dictatorship, helped maize evolve into one of the world’s most robust and calorie-rich food sources.
In high relief, in 1942, just ten years after the last inauguration of the Free Schools, the first seeds of the Rockefeller Foundation’s twentieth-century Green Revolution--otherwise known as the technoscientific transformation of global agriculture--arose in Mexico’s same Central Valley. While the Free Schools focused on ancestral maize grown on communally held parcels, the Green Revolution’s resource-extraction and market-driven methods required a new, expansive research facility to boost Mexico’s standing in the global market. Designed by Chicago-based architect William Brubaker, executed by México City’s Augusto Alvarez and Enrique Carral Icaza, and funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Center for the Improvement of Corn and Wheat (CIMMYT), in El Bátan, México was marketed and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as it promised the cure for world hunger. The site, however, tells a very different story of Indigenous erasure in deed, design, and operations, as the CIMMYT did to seeds what the International Style did to architectural regionalism.
Society of Architectural Historians International Conference, 2021
Paper presented for the Labor and Landscape panel, chaired by Jay Cephas, Northeastern University... more Paper presented for the Labor and Landscape panel, chaired by Jay Cephas, Northeastern University, and John D. Davis, Ohio State University
Buell Dissertation Colloquium, 2019
My dissertation—The Aesthetics of the Green Revolution: Art, Architecture and the Agrilogistics o... more My dissertation—The Aesthetics of the Green Revolution: Art, Architecture and the Agrilogistics of Transnational Aid from the United States to the Caribbean Region, 1930-1978 — connects the Rockefeller Foundation’s cultural agenda to the science behind the Green Revolution by arguing that the same aesthetic and epistemological lens shaped the art, architecture and landscape transformations of this Cold War development strategy and its signature Nobel Peace Prize-winning genetic experiments. Thus, Chapter III: “To Which Revolution” examines the architecture of Plan Chapingo, the first site of the Green Revolution in Texcoco, Mexico, designed by C.William Brubaker of Perkins + Will, and Mexican architect Augusto H. Alvarez. Emerging from complex political and economic negotiations between North American and Mexican institutions, between pre-colonial modes of agriculture and the Green Revolution’s techno-scientific transformation of the world’s agro-commodities, the Chapingo campus is not only the accretion of its history. Leveraging bio-sensitive planning in an attempt to resolve heated opposition between proponents of divergent national and international models of agricultural development, Plan Chapingo illustrates precisely how the built environment, utilizing a seemingly apolitical, scientific method of architectural problem solving, stakes a highly political claim for the shape of post-Bretton Woods development.
Structural Instabilities: History, Environment and Risk in Architecture, 2018
Between the 1940s and 1960s, Malthusian fears of overpopulation and rampant starvation were seepi... more Between the 1940s and 1960s, Malthusian fears of overpopulation and rampant starvation were seeping into the North American imagination. While subtitles such as “Population control or the race to oblivion?” reflected, for many, the only possible courses of action, propelled by the interests of U.S. agribusiness, grounded in Nelson Rockefeller’s Cold War politics and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, agronomist Norman Borlaug and his team of genetic engineers had long been at work on what they saw as the third, and only, ameliorating option: the global industrialization of agriculture now known as the Green Revolution. When, in 1970, Borlaug accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for genetic advances in wheat, maize and rice sufficient to turn escalating global populations from futures of famine to futures of plenty, he located the success of the Green Revolution in the fields and laboratories of three key Latin American sites.
Tracking the use of Malthusian tropes of impending world hunger to construct support from narratives of urgency and instability, this paper interrogates the early architecture of the Green Revolution, from Augusto H. Alvarez’ expansion of the Autonomous University of Mexico’s Agricultural school at Chapingo, to Jorge Gongora’s plan for the Inter-American Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and finally the work of Leopoldo Rother for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.
Between 1940 and 1964, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted a series of agrilogistical experiment... more Between 1940 and 1964, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted a series of agrilogistical experiments in Mexico, using architecture, agriculture and genetics as its primary tools. The aim: to reformulate the arrangement of carbon chains and proteins comprising both humans and their food sources, in the service of a more perfect, productive, utopian future. While researchers at Cal-Tech and Rockefeller University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, pursued new ways to transform human bodies at the molecular level through the emerging science of microbiology, their Foundation supported counterparts at the Autonomous University of Mexico at Chapingo applied knowledge of this new science to the transformation of seeds, soil conditioners and fertilizers. Pairing high profile genetic and crop yield laboratories in Chapingo, Mexico, designed by Augusto H. Alvarez, with the more modest agricultural architecture-or agritecture-of grain silos and harvesting facilities, the Rockefeller Foundation first fostered the techno-scientific criteria and practice of the global industrialization of agriculture we now call the Green Revolution. Through a close reading of the Mexican Agriculture Project's first research, testing and educational facilities, known as " El Horno , " (The Oven), in Chapingo, this paper asks how experiments to create universal, homogenous, high yield grains, echoing Mexican theories of race which championed human hybridity, informed the architecture at the origins of the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution.
Tracing the deep history of the architecture of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic, thi... more Tracing the deep history of the architecture of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic, this paper analyses the instrumentalization of the region's earliest prime commodities-namely sugar and slavery-marking continuities from the design of sixteenth century ingenios (sugar mills) to dictator Rafael Trujillo's twentieth century industrial sugar processing facilities, or centrales. Connecting the origins of the Dominican sugar trade to contemporary practice, from the formal architecture of early slave ships to the informal living conditions of bateyes (sugar slums), this paper argues that the agrilogistical drive to produce at any cost drew sugar, Haitians and transnational politics into the very architecture of the Dominican sugar industry. Taking an object oriented approach, this work highlights the biological as well as the cultural seductions of sugarcane, as both the world's most efficient photosynthesizer and a generator of new architectural forms and spaces, from the bateyes of the Dominican Republic to the parlors and soda fountains of twentieth century fancy. Finally, this paper suggests that though the formal means of production seems to improve with each technological leap in capacity and speed, the living entities inside the structures of production still carry the weight of over 400 years of epistemological stagnation. 60-80 Word Bio: Nikki Moore is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Rice University. Her current research focuses on the industrialization of food-based commodities in modern Latin America, focusing on their symbiotic relationship to art and architectural practice.
The first one who, having enclosed a field or bit of land, decided to exclude everything there, w... more The first one who, having enclosed a field or bit of land, decided to exclude everything there, was the true founder of the following historical era. Agriculture and culture have the same origin or the same foundation, a white spot that realizes a rupture of equilibrium, a clean spot constituted through expulsion. – Michel Serres, The Parasite (1980). Between 1868, when meat production facilities were expelled by decree from the city of Buenos Aire, and 1940, just a few years after the Great Depression, Argentina became one of the largest producers of meat in the world. Revealing the convergence of two usually separated movements-hygenics and eugenics-the meat industry in the province of Buenos Aires created a scientifically supported arena for the biopolitical appropriation of land and resources, including human and non-human animal bodies, bearing out a unified ideology of purification, medicalization, aestheticization and productivity. The movement to eradicate blood, offal and stench from the city's waterways and streets was paralleled by industrialists' desires for productive land on the Pampas (cleansed of its native " unproductive " inhabitants), and echoed in the fear of death and disease displaced onto immigrant populations in this story of commodification, industrialization and modernization. Appropriating the iconic gaucho (or cowboy) traditions of the Argentinian pampas, a globalized appetite for meat worked, almost invisibly, to transform the city of Buenos Aires and the natural resources of its surrounding countryside into an industrial commodifying machine of global proportions. The division of human and non-human animals required for the bulwarking of culture, alongside the dual processes of taming and bestializing populations undergirded Argentinean elites' civilizing agenda which begins this story of modernization through pastoralization.
Arte de São Paulo).1 Tavares' Vitrines, made of glass, stainless steel and marble, are physically... more Arte de São Paulo).1 Tavares' Vitrines, made of glass, stainless steel and marble, are physically empty, except for the transparent photographic images of virgin nature, printed to their glass surfaces. In her vitrines, the artist seems to capture the tropical jungle, its mountains and waterfalls and with them, nature itself–the very threat to modernity. At that time, I was writing about the dramatic demolition of the Morro do Castelo in Rio de Janeiro, a populated mountain at the center of the city that, when totally razed in the early 1920's, displaced hundreds of " undesirable " inhabitants, ostensibly for medical but also aesthetic reasons. Tavares's Vitrines, like clinical devices —like architecture as I began to understand it at the time—were instruments of anaesthetizing nature. I realized I was in front of an artwork capable of being both a synthesis and an activation of the dichotomies of purity and contamination, nature and artifice, heredity and environment that were at the center of the eugenics movement in Latin America. And so our story begins... Fabiola López-Durán Oppositions 1: Nature-Nurture 1 Reinventing the space and display elements of gallery installations in 1968, following the completion of her architectural vision for the MASP, Lina Bo Bardi mounted paintings from the museum's predominantly western art collection on large vertical panes, that were, like Tavares' Vitrine Series which they inspired, fixed to concrete, rectilinear bases. Giving each work an almost suspended quality, these museographical elements and their location in the space offered the museum visitor the opportunity to create a self-guided tour of the amassed collection, as one piece could be seen through the glass of another, without official pathways to narrate each new encounter. The formal and political bravery of Bo Bardi's vision is one to which contemporary artists are still aspiring.
Grants + Awards by Nikki Moore
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Talks by Nikki Moore
In high relief, in 1942, just ten years after the last inauguration of the Free Schools, the first seeds of the Rockefeller Foundation’s twentieth-century Green Revolution--otherwise known as the technoscientific transformation of global agriculture--arose in Mexico’s same Central Valley. While the Free Schools focused on ancestral maize grown on communally held parcels, the Green Revolution’s resource-extraction and market-driven methods required a new, expansive research facility to boost Mexico’s standing in the global market. Designed by Chicago-based architect William Brubaker, executed by México City’s Augusto Alvarez and Enrique Carral Icaza, and funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Center for the Improvement of Corn and Wheat (CIMMYT), in El Bátan, México was marketed and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as it promised the cure for world hunger. The site, however, tells a very different story of Indigenous erasure in deed, design, and operations, as the CIMMYT did to seeds what the International Style did to architectural regionalism.
Tracking the use of Malthusian tropes of impending world hunger to construct support from narratives of urgency and instability, this paper interrogates the early architecture of the Green Revolution, from Augusto H. Alvarez’ expansion of the Autonomous University of Mexico’s Agricultural school at Chapingo, to Jorge Gongora’s plan for the Inter-American Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and finally the work of Leopoldo Rother for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.
Grants + Awards by Nikki Moore
In high relief, in 1942, just ten years after the last inauguration of the Free Schools, the first seeds of the Rockefeller Foundation’s twentieth-century Green Revolution--otherwise known as the technoscientific transformation of global agriculture--arose in Mexico’s same Central Valley. While the Free Schools focused on ancestral maize grown on communally held parcels, the Green Revolution’s resource-extraction and market-driven methods required a new, expansive research facility to boost Mexico’s standing in the global market. Designed by Chicago-based architect William Brubaker, executed by México City’s Augusto Alvarez and Enrique Carral Icaza, and funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Center for the Improvement of Corn and Wheat (CIMMYT), in El Bátan, México was marketed and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as it promised the cure for world hunger. The site, however, tells a very different story of Indigenous erasure in deed, design, and operations, as the CIMMYT did to seeds what the International Style did to architectural regionalism.
Tracking the use of Malthusian tropes of impending world hunger to construct support from narratives of urgency and instability, this paper interrogates the early architecture of the Green Revolution, from Augusto H. Alvarez’ expansion of the Autonomous University of Mexico’s Agricultural school at Chapingo, to Jorge Gongora’s plan for the Inter-American Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Turrialba, Costa Rica, and finally the work of Leopoldo Rother for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.