enclosing the american frontier: residential architecture, claims, and investments [2026]
[AT THE UCLA DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN]
My dissertation investigates residential architecture as it appeared in and was formed by United States property law and town planning, beginning with the Homestead Act of 1862 and ending with the Housing Act of 1934. It shows that, in the “Land of the Free,” a house or a home has never been a mere place to live: Rather, it has served as the settler’s claim to land and the government’s unofficial military base, the citizen’s investment in the nation and the government’s primary disciplinary institution. By examining houses and homes on once-rural, later-urbanized homesteads on opposite coasts of the country, I complicate historical binaries of the agrarian West and the industrial North to understand the American frontier not only as a space of political and ideological expansion but also as a space of economic and social enclosure.
I argue that residential architecture embodied the United States’ processes and policies of economic and social enclosure, first, by identifying the nineteenth-century claim house on a 160-acre homestead in a rural township as that which unlocked land value for white settlers and, second, by identifying the twentieth-century single-family home on a one-acre lot in a suburban community as that which increased land value for American citizens. While existing scholarship largely isolates the study of residential architecture from property law and town planning, especially before the New Deal, my dissertation overlaps legal research and spatial analysis in a double comparative study of two settlements in Greater Miami and two townships in Greater Los Angeles between 1862 and 1934, elucidating houses and homes in these locales as intermediaries not only between Indigenous occupation and white settlement, common and property, subsistence economy and market economy but also between Black dispossession and white possession, subdivision and consolidation, agrarian capitalism and industrial capitalism.
Township 54 South, Range 41 East of the Tallahassee Meridian in Dade County, Florida (i.e., Coconut Grove) in 1845 (left) and 1937 (right).
Township 53 South, Range 41/42 East of the Tallahassee Meridian in Dade County, Florida (i.e., Lemon City) in 1845 (left) and 1937 (right).
Township 1 South, Range 15 West of the San Bernardino Meridian in Los Angeles County, California (i.e., Benedict Canyon) in 1889 (left) and 1937 (right).
Township 2 South, Range 13 West of the San Bernardino Meridian in Los Angeles County, California (i.e., Florence) in 1868 (left) and 1937 (right).