Min Kyung Lee Receives Book Award from The Society of Architectural Historians
Min Kyung Lee, associate professor of Growth and Structure of Cities, has been awarded the 2026 Spiro Kostof Book Award by the Society of Architectural Historians for The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris.
The award recognizes interdisciplinary studies of urban history that make the greatest contribution to the understanding of the growth and development of cities.
In The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris, Lee works across disciplines to examine mapping practices in the development of nineteenth-century Paris and the transformative role urban mapping had on the city’s modernization. Lee investigates Paris’s formation as a modern city, ultimately framing the practice of cartography as a catalyst for the emergence of new spatial and compositional theories.
Beginning with an examination of the emblematic urban plan that Napoléon III gave to the prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, in 1853, Lee explores the significance of the map itself; the means of its production through surveying; the methods of its use and reception by architects, engineers, and administrators; and its place in the visual culture of Paris’s modernization.
At the heart of this exploration is a focus on orthography in architecture and the new quality of exactitude in modern mapping practices. Throughout the book, Lee demonstrates that the precise grid structure of orthographic maps and plans evinced a sense of objectivity, yet it was not without political context and social consequences.
From the award committee
"The Tyranny of the Straight Line epitomizes the skills an architectural historian can bring to the broader historiography of cities. Her masterful synthesis of cartographic epistemology and historical analysis presents an exquisitely written story of decision-making technocrats, bureaucrats, and rulers who are looking at Paris as an object from new vantage points. Lee’s rigorously researched and compelling analysis of maps provided a new lens on representation through the anticipatory power of plans. Lee’s strategy of meticulously annotating existing maps to draw attention to the deliberateness of certain spatial alignments and patiently walking the reader through the cartographic materials through carefully sequenced thumbnails demonstrates an almost clinical precision in the use of visual evidence."
Lee will teach CITY B229 in the Cities department on the topic of transnational migrations and the built environment in Spring 2027. The class will explore histories of collective place-making practices by migrants under conditions of mobility and movement. The aim is to understand cities and landscapes not as fixed and stable but as dynamic, networked, and responsive to the people who arrive from elsewhere, leave for other places, inhabit them for a time, and care for them. This class, its readings, and assignments relate to her current research on sites of the Korean diaspora as well as the development of engaged research methods for migration histories of the built environment. A recent collection of essays on this topic that she co-edited can be found here.
Learn more about Bryn Mawr's Growth and Structure of Cities Department
Why Does Paris Look the Way it Does?
Q&A with Min Kyung Lee
Lee recently participated in Yale University Press's "Ask an Author" feature, answering questions about her work.