Details

Subject(s)

• Architecture, Colonial—Political aspects—Germany—History [Browse]
• Imperialism and architecture—Germany—History [Browse]
• Settler colonialism—Germany—Philosophy—History [Browse]
• Modern movement (Architecture)—Political aspects—Germany—History [Browse]
• Modern movement (Architecture)—Philosophy—History [Browse]
• Modern movement (Architecture)—Social aspects—Germany—History [Browse]
• Architectural design—Germany—Philosophy—History [Browse]
• Germany—Colonies—History [Browse]

Series

• Lateral exchanges [More in this series]
• Lateral exchanges: architecture, urban development, and transnational practices [More in this series]

Summary note

"In The Earth That Modernism Built, architectural historian Kenny Cupers provides an intellectual history of the relationship between modernism and the project of colonial settlement in the context of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. In particular, he explores the ways that early twentieth-century modernist architects transposed nineteenth-century ideas from realms such as biology and soil research into the analysis and design of spatial, aesthetic, social, and technical arrangements. The key concept for much of his discussion is Bodenständigkeit--earth-boundedness or rootedness in the soil. The project of making buildings look as if they were bound to the earth was not just a matter of aesthetics, he argues, but came to serve in efforts to define what and who was natural, who belonged and who did not. He writes, "Earth-boundedness developed as a concept informing academic research, a rallying cause for cultural and environmental reformers, a design ideal, and a flexible political technique. How could such disparate interests as natural preservation, folklore studies, architectural style, settlement planning, and territorial claims become enmeshed under this category? And how, in this constellation, was design empowered to remake relationships between land and people?" Across four main chapters, Cupers explores how the ideal of earth-boundedness informed settlement design in the countryside and building culture in Namibia, Germany's "premier settler colony"; he examines how research on vernacular architecture, craft traditions, and traditional villages was weaponized in Prussian internal colonization to settle and govern racialized and classed populations; and he investigates how the soil and plant science of figures like Raoul Heinrich Francé gave rise to the idea of building as a biological process. Drawing on a broad range of sources and a host of governmental and private archives in Namibia, Germany, Poland, and Tanzania, Cupers ultimately gives us a much fuller understanding not just of German architecture and colonialism, but of the complex roots of modernism itself"-- Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Introduction. The earth as an object of design
• From determinism to determination
• Earth-boundedness as (anti-)modernism
• Geopower and biopower
• Deployments of settlement
• Racializing the rural
• A constellation of relationships
• Rooting life in land
• Settlement between colonialism and reform
• Theorizing cultivation as colonization
• Designing earth-boundedness
• Conflicts and failures of transplantation
• Earth-boundedness in the wake of genocide
• Arts and technics of internal colonialism
• Nativizing the farmhouse
• Reading landscape, making race
• Biopolitics of the vernacular
• Designing colonial order
• Building logistics and imperial regionalism
• Technifying the soil, designing the human
• From soil science to social order
• Gardening as domestic colonization
• Grounding biological functionalism
• Infrastructure as planetary design
• Empire's technological nature
• Design and geopolitics, a wartime alliance
• Geopolitics after empire?
• World order by design
• Engineering continents to uphold supremacy
• Infrastructural specters
• Epilogue. Spaceship Earth.

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ISBN

• 9781477329818 (hardcover)
• 1477329811 (hardcover)
• 9781477330210 (paperback)
• 1477330216 (paperback)

LCCN

2023048948

OCLC

1412153324

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