Timothy Hyde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces an architectural arc that begins in the nineteenth-century mining camps of Gold Rush-era California, and proceeds to the transcontinental ambitions of monuments in the American mountain west, to arrive at the contemporary legal registers of preservation and historical recording. This itinerant American architectural history reveals a mineralogical provenance of architecture, motivated not by materiality but by valuation: from gold dust to architecture and from architecture to gold dust. The talk is part of the OCCAS Higher Seminar series.