David Sadighian researches and teaches histories of the built environment with an emphasis on architecture’s intersections with empire, capitalism, and material culture in the modern Atlantic world. His current book project examines how the global circulation of Beaux-Arts design practices contributed to the formation of international world order, 1867-1938. David has also published on topics including the architecture of international finance, theories of public space, the museum typology, and the spatial politics of development. Support for his work has been provided by the Social Science Research Council, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK Paris), the American Historical Association, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Graham Foundation, and other institutions. After completing his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 2023, David joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. 

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David Sadighian about his dissertation “The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design and Internationalism in the Age of Empire, 1867-1914”, which was awarded with the Theodor Fischer Award 2025:

This dissertation explores how the transatlantic and colonial dissemination of Beaux-Arts architecture shaped the rise of international order during the Age of Empire. During the second half of the nineteenth century, waves of aspiring architects from Europe, the Near East, and the Americas traveled to the Paris École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) for its elite design methods, which they used in a wide variety of commissions around the world. Scholars have focused on the school’s prominent alumni and their designs for state institutions in discrete national contexts. My approach departs from nationalist frameworks to resituate Beaux-Arts design within a parallel phenomenon: the rise of “universal” systems to bolster connections between nation states and colonial empires. Using perspectives of global history, I analyze the circulation of the school’s key design method known as composition, asking how its protocols of spatial organization dovetailed with changing hierarchies at scales ranging from the supranational to the hyperlocal. Case studies span buildings, cities, and landscapes across a dynamic geography including Paris, the Reconstruction-era American South, colonial Algeria, the Argentine Pampas, Rio de Janeiro, and the Hague. By exploring the fraught contradictions within Beaux-Arts composition—combining universalist ideals with practices of imperial domination—this dissertation offers a new understanding of architecture as an instrument of polity between and beyond states.

[Caption: Aerial rendering of the “World Centre of Communication,” 1912, heliogravure print after an architectural drawing by Ernest Hébrard and draftsmen, published in Hendrik Christian Andersen et al., Creation of a World Centre of Communication (Paris 1913)]