About

Andrew Herscher is a Professor of Architecture and a faculty member in Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. His fields of study include land history, Indigenous and settler colonial architectural history, architectures of migration, displacement, and self-determination, as well as design justice. He is based at 3700 Haven Hall, 505 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045. His work focuses on understanding the intersections of architecture with Indigenous issues, colonial histories, and social justice, contributing to academic discussions and research in these areas.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economic growth
• Geography
• Literature
• Economics
• Archaeology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Psychoanalysis
• Visual arts
• History
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Anishinaabe Forests, American Lumber, Settler Balloon Frames

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2025-11-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The balloon frame is commonly viewed as a nineteenth-century construction innovation that enabled rapid house building across the United States. This article recontextualizes the balloon frame in relation to U.S. settler colonialism. This recontextualization proceeds through an examination of the harvesting of white pine timber on Anishinaabe homelands in Michigan, which provided much of the lumber from which balloon frames were constructed in the nineteenth century, and the use of the balloon frame by squatters and settlers on Anishinaabe and other Native homelands at the same time. The article also addresses the ways in which Anishinaabe communities engaged the lumber industry and the balloon-frame construction that this industry made possible, in both cases to support continuing inhabitation of their homelands. In the context of this historicization, the balloon frame appears as both a colonial technology for the seizure and plunder of Anishinaabe land and an Anishinaabe technology of survivance and sovereignty.

  PublisherDOI

• Exhibition as Occupation: Detroit Resists at the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture Ausstellung als Okkupation. Detroit Resists bei der Architektur- Biennale Venedig 2016

  2024-03-05

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Exhibition as Occupation: Detroit Resists at the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture Ausstellung als Okkupation. Detroit Resists bei der Architektur- Biennale Venedig 2016 was published in Exhibiting Matters on page 82.

  PublisherDOI

• Under the Campus, the Land

  2024-04-17

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On Architecture and the Greenfield

  2024-11-27

  book

  In the face of the ongoing climate emergency, can humanity keep chipping at its food sheds via urbanization? This is the paradoxical question raised by residential forms of urbanization: On the one hand, housing settlements across the world devour thousands of hectares of arable fields at the periphery of growing cities. On the other hand, housing is a human right. This publication investigates these complexities. After On Architecture and Greenwashing (2024), it is the second volume in the series The Political Economy of Space and presents a cross-section of positions on architecture and its political economies from different perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

• The Chicago Cultural Center and the Settler Colonial City

  RIBA Publishing eBooks · 2024-12-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Chicago Architecture Biennial – one of the pre-eminent architecture biennials in the US – has been sited, since its inception in 2015, in a building that is currently known as the Chicago Cultural Center. Originally constructed in the late 19th-century as a public library and monument to a Civil War veterans organisation, the building is celebrated in the city as a ‘people’s palace’: ‘made for everyone and welcom(ing) everyone’, according to renowned Chicago journalist MW Newman. 1 This framing of the biennial’s location not only celebrates its supposed public availability, but also presupposes its architectural status – the location is a ‘palace’, one building amidst the many others that make up downtown Chicago.

  PublisherDOI

• Biennial Melancholy. Biennalen-Melancholie

  2024-03-05

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• En la frontera de la decolonización

  ARQ · 2022-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Resumen: En las últimas décadas nos hemos acostumbrado a entender América del Norte y América del Sur como dos mundos diferentes. Este ensayo vuelve a unir a nuestro continente como una sola entidad al observar en ambos hemisferios los instrumentos de ocupación colonial, en particular las fronteras y las grillas, ya sea por colonizadores europeos o por Estados-nación americanos ya establecidos. Así, si el colonialismo es un acto violento de delimitación, de transformación de tierras indígenas en propiedades inscritas y gravables, entonces una de las posibles claves para la decolonización, sugieren los autores, sería repensar las herramientas y los argumentos tras la creación de diferentes tipos de fronteras.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Global Shelter Imaginary

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2021-06-01 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• SETTLER COLONIAL URBANISM:

  2021-10-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Global Shelter Imaginary

  Forerunners · 2021-06-01

  bookSenior author

  Prompted by a growing number of refugees and other displaced people, intersections of design and humanitarianism are proliferating. From the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter to Airbnb’s Open Homes program, the consumer economy has engaged the global refugee crisis with seemingly new tactics that normalize an institutionally sanctioned politics of evasion. Exploring “the global shelter imaginary,” this book charts the ways shelter functions as a form of rightless relief that expels recognition of the rights of the displaced and advances political paradoxes of displacement itself.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Monk

  9 shared

• Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

  5 shared

• Lucía Allais

  4 shared

• M. Ijlal Muzaffar

  4 shared

• Swati Chattopadhyay

  3 shared

• Mark Jarzombek

  3 shared

• Miriam Ticktin

  3 shared

• Ana M. León

  3 shared

Labs

• Native American StudiesPI