This dissertation examines the architectural history of the doctrine of disease eradication from the 1920s to the 1960s across the Americas, exploring its spatial manifestations and connections with capitalist extractivism and colonial relations of race and labor. The dissertation shows how a variety of spatial, environmental, and sanitary infrastructures were designed at the time to integrate rural areas and their populations into resource extraction activities. It argues that eradication and extraction were practiced and imagined as interconnected spatial processes; that this was a hemispheric phenomenon; and that architecture, medicine, and environmental exploitation developed as closely related fields of modern expertise.

Focusing on the interconnected history of oil extraction and malaria eradication in Venezuela as a distinct locus of enunciation of these ideas, and seeing to their impact across the hemisphere, the dissertation draws from architectural and medical archives—looking at the histories of "healthy" homes and landscapes, medical schools, and energy exhibition pavilions—to trace how public health experts sought to improve landscapes and bodies through architectural and infrastructural interventions guided by sanitary engineering.