The Temple Hoyne
Buell Center
for the Study of
American Architecture
at Columbia University

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Chelsea Spencer
2025-27 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow 

Project: "The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building"

While at the Buell, Spencer will work on her current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building. This work, which builds on Spencer’s dissertation, traces how building became contracting in the United States during the nineteenth century. General contractors dismantled the world of craft building and reconstituted it as the modern construction industry, thus laying the foundations of modern American architecture by operating at the inflection point between projection and materialization, paper and concrete. General contractors offered their investment-minded clients a completed building, for a fixed price, on a guaranteed schedule. Unearthing the ideological and institutional foundations of today’s construction industry, the study reveals how nineteenth-century thinking about freedom, value, and risk shaped the architectural building contract and the limits of the architecture profession.

Spencer will begin at Columbia on August 1, 2025. As part of the Buell Fellowship, she will join a cohort of fellows at the The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, as well as the faculty team teaching the GSAPP’s landmark course, “Questions in Architectural History.”
 

Biography

Chelsea Spencer is an architectural historian and editor. Her research examines the practice and production of architecture—broadly construed—in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on architecture’s interactions with technical media, law, and economic life. Spencer received a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, an MDes from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA from Emory University. Before joining Columbia she was a CERCL postdoctoral fellow in architecture at Rice University. She has taught writing at the Pratt Institute and was previously the managing editor of Log. Her writing can be found in Grey Room, Places, and Log, among others.
 

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Exchange room in the Master Builders’ Association of Boston. Engraving after a rendering by John A. Fox (architect of the renovated exchange building), published in “The Boston Builders’ Exchange,” Carpentry and Building 12, no. 7 (July 1890): 168.

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Sonali Dhanpal
2024-26 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow

Project: “Caste and the City”

While at the Buell, Dhanpal will draw from her dissertation to work on “Caste and the City: Spatial Politics in Colonial and Princely Bangalore,” a project that examines the persistence of caste in urban South Asia. Destabilizing the myth of monolithic colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, the book will offer a close spatial analysis of a princely capital city, Bangalore, in the critical decades between 1880 and 1920. Far from disappearing, caste power hardened onto new regimes of property, labor, and control. By focusing on housing and on land reform that came after pressure mounted for the exhibition of monumental colonial/princely power, the study shows how rentier capital materialized caste in built form by analyzing the third plague pandemic, the rise of urban landed castes in state politics, and missionaries as unlikely Dalit salvationists. Dhanpal will also begin work on her second project, “Empire Comes Home: Housing Race Relations in Britain,” which intends to bring colonial legacies of the welfare state into conversation with the vast scholarship on the architect-planners who led the postwar construction boom in Britain (1950-1980). 

Dhanpal will begin at Columbia on September 1, 2024. As part of the Buell Fellowship, she will join a cohort of fellows at the The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, as well as the faculty team teaching the GSAPP’s landmark course, “Questions in Architectural History.”

Biography
Sonali Dhanpal is an architect, a built heritage conservationist, and a historian of modern architecture and urbanism who specializes in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and inequality from the 1800s to the present. She earned a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the Dayananda Sagar School of Architecture, an M.A. in Conservation Studies from the University of York, and a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Newcastle University. Her research has been supported by a number of awards and fellowships, including from the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London; the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art; the Society of Architectural Historians; and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Her work has appeared in the journal Planning Perspectives and the edited volume New Planning Histories.

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The Superintendent's Bungalow that operated as the Headquarters of the Mysore Mines, Dec 1894. Picture Courtesy: LLewlyn Hancock, Clare Arni/Henry Martin Collection.

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The ‘princely’ ruled Bangalore City while the “British” controlled the Civil and Military. Courtesy: P.R Cadwell, Report on the Outbreak of Plague in the Civil and Military Station, Bangalore 1898-99, India Office Records, The British Library.

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Maura Lucking
2024-25 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow

Project: “Settler Campus”

While a Buell Fellow, Lucking will work on a book-length architectural history of the public college movement in the 19th century United States. The project is based on her dissertation, “Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929,” which examines three school typologies—the land grant college, the industrial institute, and the Indian boarding school—through a settler colonial framework. Lucking innovatively shows the role played by architecture, industrial design, and design pedagogy in rights-based legal outcomes for various racialized groups that were educated in these institutions. By emphasizing students’ self-sufficiency and manual labor, and often by involving them in campus construction projects, architectural education aligned design outcomes with narratives of respectability, freedom, and individual property. Lucking uncovers the links between this school-building habitus and social and economic ideals, from the immediate aftermath of the US Civil War, when social cohesion was understood to be under threat, into the 20th Century when educational models were exported to new geographies in Liberia and the Philippines.

Lucking will begin at Columbia on January 1, 2024. As part of the Buell Fellowship, she will join a cohort of fellows at the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center, as well as the faculty team teaching the landmark course, “Questions in Architectural History” at GSAPP.

Biography  
Maura Lucking is an historian of architectural modernism and empire in the 19th- and 20th-Century United States. She received her PhD in Architecture from UCLA in 2023, and is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, Huntington Library, Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute, and been published in Grey Room, Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and Journal of Architectural Education.
 

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Students and instructors in a staged publicity photograph for donors to Tuskegee Institute, 1909 (LOC)