The Great Southwest: Trade, Territory, and Regional Architecture is the first study of an architectural region long forgotten in public memory. Between the 1870s and the Great Depression it extended from St. Louis and Kansas City to Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and as far south as Panama. Defined by railroads and shaped by trade, the Great Southwest was a region of disparate climates, populations, and heritages. Its architecture was grounded not in a common style, material, or heritage, but in a set of trade relationships that fostered a regional cultural economy. This book project analyzes the region's railroad network as a web that linked residential, industrial, civic, and consumer landscapes across state lines and national boundaries. Along these rail lines traveled bankers, architects, engineers, clients, and contractors, building a common landscape aligned by business and personal connections.

Educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania, Paula Lupkin is an architectural and cultural historian with a special interest on the architecture and built environment of capitalism. Her scholarship analyzes the broad effects of this economic system on the form of cities, housing, shopping and consumption, leisure, and workplaces. Her first book Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture was published in 2010 by the University of Minnesota Press. In the works are two new book projects. The first reinterprets the regional architecture of the southwest, and the second focuses on beer. Its title is The Lager Landscape: German Beer and the American Built Environment. This research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Quadrant Program at the University of Minnesota, the Texas State Historical Association, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies at Southern Methodist University. Lupkin has taught at Denison University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Colorado College, and Washington University in St. Louis. In fall 2013 she will join the faculty in art history at the University of North Texas.