Overview

An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis. The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition. Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.

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9781477329818

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In this pathbreaking book, Kenny Cupers forcefully shows how our understanding of architectural modernism in Germany benefits from placing it in a larger postcolonial framework. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, The Earth That Modernism Built skillfully connects metropolitan Germany, Namibia, and the Prussian borderlands, thus revealing how developments in architecture and urban planning were bound up with concepts of Lebensraum and imperial notions of space. Eye-opening. -- Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin, author of What is Global History? The Earth That Modernism Built revisits one of the most fundamental presuppositions of modernism, that reshaping the built environment will transform humanity and engineer a new world. Ambitious in scope, while providing nuanced accounts of significant, situated projects, both familiar and relatively unknown, this kaleidoscopic study reveals how environmental and geopolitical thinking have been written into modern architecture and planning by way of racialized discourses regarding land, soil, and settlement. Through this astute shift in perspective on the recent outpouring of studies tracing the colonial histories of modernity, Cupers offers instead an incisive and previously overlooked history of architectural modernism’s coloniality. -- Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture

Author Information

Kenny Cupers is a professor of architectural history and urban studies and co-founder of the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel. He is the author of The Social Project: Housing Postwar France and co-editor of Neoliberalism on the Ground: Archutecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present.

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