ABSTRACT
Beginning in March 1942, the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese American communities living on the west coast, Alaska and parts of Arizona in concentration camps authorized under Presidential Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) on February 19, 1942.1 The incarceration was one of the largest domestic projects for the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army (Western Defense Command) stationed in the Presidio of San Francisco and responsible for the major parts of the Pacific theater during World War II. The planning, design, and construction of the concentration camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II is generally imagined by the public, the media, and academic scholars as an event managed by the U.S. military with little input on the part of professional architects. The War Department modeled the physical construction of spaces to confine Japanese and Japanese Americans using their standard designs for military camps, including the barracks and guard towers that circulate as the most common visual tropes for representing this incarceration. The U.S. Army used a type of temporary “theater of operations” barracks-cantonment or troop housing designed for rapid construction and for housing troops at the rear of combat zones-for residential housing for civilian families.2
