This research investigates built objects as evidence for the projection of power, authority, and influence. Specifically, my doctoral dissertation studies the architectural resolution of imperial-colonial expansion throughout history. The assumption that governance is an invisible and immaterial force ignores the physical manifestations of power. As facts on the ground, built objects can link a polity to its claimed domain, asserting governance spatially through structure, appearance, function, siting, and scale. Still, architectural techniques have rarely been subjected to theorizing throughout the history of imperial-colonial expansion. The question is how built objects have been employed to legitimize governance through which bodies and spaces were made subjects. This question guides my research, which hypothesizes the possibility of tracing back the historical origins of architectural techniques that have shaped how built objects are used to legitimize expansion. In its larger aim, my research seeks to untangle how material conditions embody social imaginaries and relations in space. These can become apparent through seemingly minor or banal architectural techniques with often nevertheless enormous implications.