This book project complements my previous monograph Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity (U. of California Press, 2006), which also dealt the nexus between technology, architecture, and the politics of culture. The current project is more geographically ambitious, however, tracing its subject across three principle sites (the US, Japan, and Singapore) over half a century (roughly 1925-1975). My argument is that architecture turned strongly toward technology as a strategic professional and symbolic tool in an atmosphere of crisis, and one which had much to do with a collective sense of lost masculinity. The technology I am most interested in is prefabrication, which promised to turn building - particularly the crucial housing market—into a mass-production industry over which a newly-revitalized architectural profession would have creative control.