Benjamin Flowers is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the different ways politics, culture, and power intersect with architecture to form the built landscape. Within this broad field of inquiry, he is currently engaged in three major projects. In Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Flowers explores the role of culture and ideology in shaping the construction of skyscrapers and the way wealth and power have operated to reshape the urban landscape. Flowers narrates this modern tale by closely examining the creation and reception of three significant sites: the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, and the World Trade Center. He demonstrates how architects and their clients employed a diverse range of modernist styles to engage with and influence broader cultural themes in American society: immigration, the Cold War, and the rise of American global capitalism.

Flowers’ second research project explores the intersection of race and space in the discipline and practice of architecture seeking to uncover how divisions of race were materialized in the built environment of the twentieth century, and how the practices of architecture and urban planning variously confronted, assuaged, and elided these divisions. In particular his research looks at the work of John Nolen as a planner and landscape architect in the “New South.” Research on this topic was supported by two successive research grants from Cornell University. Projects produced by students in his design/build course “Race, Space, + Architecture” have been published in the Journal of History and Culture.

The third research area of interest for Flowers is the role of architecture in shaping sporting and urban identity in the world’s most popular game: football. For many football is at its core a game about space, where a player’s quality is measured by his skill at moving a ball through space with a feint, a dribble, or a pass. Indeed Johan Cruyff, one of the greatest players of the postwar era, was called “Pythagoras in boots.” And yet, although analysts and observers have long commented on the use of space by the players on the pitch, far less critical attention has been paid to the nature of the designed space in which that activity takes place: the stadium. This research project mines the visual iconography of the football stadium and the ways it is used as a way of cultivating and communicating the identity not just of a club but of a place. A paper emerging from this research will be published in a forthcoming special issue on “The Visual Turn in Sports History” in the International Journal for the History of Sport.

In 2008 Flowers was awarded the Outstanding Teacher Award from the College of Architecture. Flowers received his Ph.D.  from the University of Minnesota and his BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. He spent his childhood in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Bulgaria, Romania and Washington, DC.