Norwich University Alumni and Current Cal Poly Pomona Architecture Professor Aaron Cayer Named 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellow

NOTE: This announcement was released by Cal Poly Pomona and written by Samantha Gonzaga

Aaron Cayer, assistant professor of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, has been awarded a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship — one of just 26 recipients nationwide and the only Fellow selected from the field of architecture. Often called “the brainy award,” the fellowship recognizes Cayer’s influential work at the intersection of architecture, labor and politics.

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, administered by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, provides the most generous stipend of its kind — offering up to $200,000 to support high-caliber scholarly research focused on the most pressing issues of our time. This year’s cohort will focus on advancing solutions to political polarization in the United States, a challenge of critical national importance. Several past recipients have gone on to earn major accolades like MacArthur Fellowships and Pulitzer Prizes.

At Cal Poly Pomona, Cayer teaches about the history and theory of architects and their profession, including the ways that they contribute and respond to global inequities. With his $200,000 award, he and his students will examine the ways that architecture, engineering and construction firms — and the buildings they produce — influence politics in American communities.

“The architecture profession, like most design schools today, clings to ideas that architects shape the world mainly through their signature designs or aesthetics,” Cayer explains. “But their greatest economic and political power has historically come from the infrastructural projects and business models we tend to overlook. I think it’s important to understand these projects — and the policies and companies behind them — because they produce and sustain the inequities and divisions that then determine our politics.”

Cayer’s selection highlights his significant contributions to understanding how the built environment shapes political and social discourse. His research often explores how designers use buildings and business together as tools of power and governance — an especially timely lens as the nation grapples with widening ideological divides.

“Aaron's study of architecture and power resonates as our nation grapples with an increasing ideological divide,” says Soraya M. Coley, president of Cal Poly Pomona. “I have every confidence that his research will bring us closer to the answers we need to help our nation heal.”

Cayer, a historian and architect by training, is the author of Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire, forthcoming this June, which examines how post-World War II American architects increasingly incorporated their businesses and formed alliances with governments. In it, he investigates how architecture firms function as global conglomerates, shaping politics, economies and militarized spaces through the management of labor, resources and infrastructure.

Cayer’s research has been recognized and supported by awards and fellowships that include the 2024 Rome Prize, one of the most distinguished honors for architects, artists, scholars and designers; and the inaugural Kristine Fallon Prize from the International Archive of Women in Architecture. In 2020, he was named to the Architecture League of New York’s American “Roundtable” for his research on Maine’s rural communities and their economies. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Architecture Lobby and the Advisory Board of the International Archive of Women in Architecture.

Cayer grew up in Rumford, Maine. He earned his B.S. and M.Arch from Norwich University and his Ph.D. in architectural history from UCLA.