Architectural historian Lucia Allais’s work sits at the crossroads of architecture, politics, culture, and aesthetics, her scholarship charting the rise of internationalism, architects’ influence on political culture, and the history of governance. In her first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Allais examines mid-20th-century efforts to preserve cultural monuments — the Parthenon, the temples of Abu Simbel, the Bamiyan Buddhas — and how these projects led to the creation of today’s “World Heritage” sites. Arguing that, in this period, destruction became an agent of design, she asks two fundamental questions: how did culture shape these architectural sites, and how, in turn, did architecture shape the idea of global culture? An associate professor at Columbia GSAPP, Allais has worked as an architect in Europe and the United States, is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative — devoted to advancing research in the history and theory of architecture — as well as an editor at Grey Room, the MIT Press journal where architecture, art, media, and politics intersect.