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Covert Capital

Review by Rob Madole

On the outskirts of Washington, DC, a strip of pastoral suburbia stretches from the Pentagon, situated across the Potomac from America’s capital, to Dulles International Airport twenty-five miles to the west. Rural and undeveloped before the 1950s, this swath of Northern Virginia has since transformed into the logistical center of America’s covert military infrastructure. Home to the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, and countless quasi-private military contractors, the region (often referred to as the “Dulles Corridor”) also serves as the domestic setting for thousands of agents employed by America’s security state.


In his compelling 2013 account of the corridor’s multiple transformations, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia, Andrew Friedman reframes this unremarkable suburban landscape—where many features of postwar suburbia were pioneered—as the site of America’s “covert capital.” The book, in Friedman’s words, traces “how the geography of empire established abroad by the US reproduced itself at home in architecture and spatial relations, and how that home front, in turn, incubated the empire.”

With a vast arsenal of primary sources, Friedman takes a transdisciplinary approach to this “co-constituted landscape.” But for historians of architecture, Covert Capital should be of particular interest. It argues that suburban sprawl and America’s modernist legacy be reconsidered in the light of its imperial project abroad—an argument that resonates with Stephan Trüby’s investigation into the ties between state architecture and military strategy in ARCH+ 217.

Among the numerous provocative case studies in Covert Capital, Friedman’s treatment of the CIA headquarters in Langley stands out. Designed in 1958 by Wallace K. Harrison of the architectural firm Harrison & Abramovitz (whose landmark commissions in New York City include Rockefeller Center, the United Nations complex, and Lincoln Center), the headquarters is treated as a “hidden entry into the canon of corporate campuses.” Indeed, the Langley office was among the very first examples of this new typology. (One of its predecessors was the GM Technical Center outside Detroit, designed by Eero Saarinen—the same architect responsible for the iconic main terminal of Dulles Airport, built with significant input from the CIA.)

Friedman details how Harrison accommodated the CIA’s organizational principle of “compartmentation” whereby information is segregated according to a “need to know” basis, while designing a building that facilitated the flow of information necessary for an intelligence-gathering operation. By bisecting the headquarters’ enormous eight-story central block with two smaller, t-shaped wings, Harrison’s design segregated the structure into five discrete office towers where information could be passed vertically, connected by arrays of corridors where information could be released horizontally under guard—essentially, an “apparatus for corridors.” The built solution for the problem of compartmentation devised by “the Company” (as the CIA liked to refer to itself), Friedman suggests, would become paradigmatic in an era of corporate secrecy, as private corporations ranging from pharmaceuticals to energy firms grew into active participants in (and beneficiaries of) America’s imperial project.

Although Friedman’s book contains many such illuminating case studies, it is worth stressing that Covert Capital’s focus is not on individual buildings or architects, but rather on the history of Northern Virginia’s suburban landscape—how a single modernist housing tract might begin as a swinging residence for young CIA recruits, transform into an immigrant destination for exiled collaborators from the South Vietnamese government in the 1970s, and finish the 1980s as a slum for refugees of CIA-sponsored wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. It is a history of agents retiring from organizing coups in Iran and Guatemala to speculate on real estate and run for local office, of former mass murders turned deli proprietors. (The remarkable second life of Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the gunman in Eddie Adams’ iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War, is alone worth the read.) And in a world increasingly shaped by such scarcely legible architectures of covert power, as Edward Snowden’s revelations have made startlingly clear, Friedman’s is a history that might well prove seminal for future studies on the impact of covert power in our daily lives.

This article was published in German in ARCH+ 219

Author: Andrew Friedman
Publisher: University of California Press, Berkeley
432 pages
ISBN: 9780520274655