Book Talk: Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines (2025), by Diana Jean S. Martinez (After Speed / After Time sub-theme)

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Concrete Colonialism traces how reinforced concrete became a material instrument of the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines, linking construction to ideas of modernization, progress, permanence, and futurity. The book reveals how architecture can impose particular temporalities by materializing a vision of the future while displacing existing ways of building and inhabiting. In relation to After Speed / After Time, Martinez’s work asks whose futures architecture constructs, whose temporalities it privileges, and how ideas of technological progress become embedded in material and spatial practices. The book invites us to reconsider architecture’s relationship to time beyond speed, efficiency, and linear notions of progress.