Aaron Cayer is a historian, writer, and professor of architecture based in Los Angeles, California.
He is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where his teaching, research, and service work focus on architecture firms, labor, and urban political-economy. He received his Ph.D. in Architecture History from UCLA as well as undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Norwich University in Vermont. Prior to Cal Poly Pomona, he was an Assistant Professor of Architecture History at the University of New Mexico, from 2018-2023.
He is the recipient of several international research awards, prizes, and fellowships, including the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome in 2023, the Barbara Thom Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Huntington Library in California in 2020; the Kristine Fallon Prize by the International Archive of Women in Architecture in 2022; and he was named to Architecture League of New York’s “American Roundtable” in 2020.
He is currently finishing his first book about the rise of corporate architecture firms in the US and their impact on the profession, titled From A to AECOM: Architecture Practice at the Twilight of Professional Tradition, which is set to be published by UC Press in 2024. His research about architecture firms and architectural education has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Urban History, Places, Thresholds, Architectural Research Quarterly, Ardeth, Log, ARQ (Chile), and in several edited volumes. Outside of the academy, he has been an active member of The Architecture Lobby since 2015. He formed chapters in Los Angeles and New Mexico, and he served as the Lobby’s National Content Coordinator in 2020. More recently, he was a founding organizer of the Lobby’s “Architecture Beyond Capitalism” summer school in 2020, which is now in its third year.
