Carrie recently received her PhD in architectural history from Princeton University. Her work explores building production and management processes that gave shape to the US federal government in the early twentieth-century. She is currently working on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, titled Rationalizing the State: Financialization, Federalization and Building at the US Capital. Carrie holds teaching positions at Pratt Institute in New York and Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a licensed architect. She will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin in the Fall.

For more information on Carrie Bly, please see here. 

Abstract:

Debates about effectiveness and efficiency have long shaped popular critiques of the US federal government. Since the Progressive Era, critics have pointed to problems ranging from corporate influence and patronage politics to bureaucratic fragmentation and regulatory “red tape.” At their core, these debates highlight the close relationship between business ideals and the operational structure of government. Yet architectural histories of Washington, DC often treat the spaces of the state and those of business as though they exist in separate realms, obscuring key moments or fractures in their realignment. This presentation examines a major shift in federal building practices that occurred in the early 20th century through the work of the Public Buildings Commission (1913–1933). My analysis reveals how the Commission fused labor management and organizational ideals of industrial production processes with the development of the federal city and expansion of the federal executive branch, of which the Federal Triangle is a prominent result. Reframing the familiar history of civic art, beauty, and monumentality in Washington, DC through the logic of big business, I show that public buildings were conceived not only as instruments of cultural reform, but also as a transformation of the state’s business model.