Adam Longenbach is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. His research focuses on moments in which architectural knowledge and planning practices have, counterintuitively, functioned as instruments of destruction and violence. In his dissertation, Adam investigates the mid-twentieth century entanglement of wartime policies, government agencies, private sector collaborations, and mass media technologies that led to the rise of military “mock villages.” These so-called “laboratories of war” were sites where US military operations were repeatedly tested, analyzed, and refined before their deployment in actual theaters of war. His work connects this history to the ongoing production and operation of mock villages by militaries and police forces around the world, questioning what it means to replicate the built environment for the purpose of enacting violence in and against it.