Made of Maize
Co-written with Laure Nolte79th Annual International Conference, Society of Architectural Historians
Mexico City, Mexico, 17 April 2026
“Made of Maize” argues that the corn plant is a spatial medium that has actively produced territory — tracing how Indigenous polyculture, cadastral survey, the steel plow, genetic hybridization, and rail infrastructure assembled the North American Corn Belt over two and a half centuries as an engineered landscape whose geometry and typologies are inseparable from the biological history of the plant.
Photo: Paul Mosley.