Asma Mehan: Architecture in the shadow of oil.

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and scholar, Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University and director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab), about her edited volume, After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms, published by Springer in 2025.

In our conversation, Asma speaks about the close link between modern architecture, urbanism and the extraction, production and consumption of oil, what Peter Droege, I think, termed Fossil City. 

Asama – and the book – however, are concerned now with the next thing: as economies look to shift away from their reliance on oil, what should and can we do with oil’s infrastructure?

So intrinsic to the making of the present human condition, indeed to the social and cultural making of the last 120 years, are we not obliged to consider it a repository of history, like any other significant material culture? And nothing has been more important than oil, for sure, except perhaps the wars for it, so doesn’t it deserve some sort of memorialisation too? 

Asma can be found at work here; the book is linked above.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 

Image credit: Wikimedia. Pumpjack east of Andrews, TX (2009) by Zorin09.