2024-2026 Land, Space, and Identity in the Americas Fellow
Michael P. Moynihan's research focuses on the global history of housing during the Cold War/development era and broader questions about politics, technology, and expertise in architectural practice.
He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Systems Will Prevail: Global Housing and the Decline of the Professional Architect, which explains why in the 1970s a quarter of the world’s architects suddenly found themselves unemployed and contextualizes how a shift in expertise related to international housing policy has shaped the education, careers, and salaries of architects in the past five decades. Rather than emphasizing episodes when architects were excluded from the production of housing, this book looks at exceptions when some architects working in national housing ministries recognized their loss of agency and tried to resolve the situation by creatively engaging in the newly emerging information systems.
With the support of the Land, Space, and Identity in the Americas Fellowship, Michael is working on a second book project focused on the relationship between architectural practice and artificial intelligence. This research is a prehistory to our current fascination with decision-making software by examining the popularization of information science in international development policy in the 1970s. During this decade, architects and other experts were asked to contribute research at a global scale that abstracted and oversimplified complex cultural and political realities. The categories of data used in algorithms that would come to define international housing policy such as exploding populations, food exports, housing scarcity, unemployment, and pregnancy rates served less to improve conditions than to entrench already existing assumptions. This book will argue that this was not simply a problem of technological immaturity in the 1970s. Experts who create these decision-making tools today continue to hold certain values and views of the world and these technologies have the effect of reinforcing geopolitical hierarchies and expanding social inequality.
Before coming to Texas, Michael taught architectural history and theory at Cornell University and Syracuse University. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Clarence Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. At Cornell, his dissertation was awarded a citation of special recognition for the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D., Cornell University, 2024
- MA, The Bartlett, UCL, 2014
- BEnvd, University of Colorado, 2010
