Main entry:

Cupers, Kenny, author.

Title & Author:

The earth that modernism built : empire and the rise of planetary design / Kenny Cupers.

Edition:

First edition.

Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024.
©2024

Description:

xiii, 373 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Series:

Lateral exchanges: architecture, urban development, and transnational practices

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-352) and index.
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.

Summary:

"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.

ISBN:

9781477329818 hardcover
1477329811 hardcover
9781477330210 paperback
1477330216 paperback
electronic book
9781477329825
9781477329832

Subject:

Architecture, Colonial Political aspects Germany History.
Imperialism and architecture Germany History.
Settler colonialism Germany Philosophy History.
Modern movement (Architecture) Political aspects Germany History.
Modern movement (Architecture) Philosophy History.
Modern movement (Architecture) Social aspects Germany History.
Architectural design Germany Philosophy History.
Architecture coloniale Aspect politique Allemagne Histoire.
Impérialisme et architecture Allemagne Histoire.
Colonialisme de peuplement Allemagne Philosophie Histoire.
Mouvement moderne (Architecture) Aspect politique Allemagne Histoire.
Mouvement moderne (Architecture) Philosophie Histoire.
Mouvement moderne (Architecture) Aspect social Allemagne Histoire.
Design architectural Allemagne Philosophie Histoire.
Architectural design Philosophy
German colonies
Imperialism and architecture
Germany Colonies History.
Germany

Form/genre:

History

Added entries:

Lateral exchanges.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 321899
Call No.: 321899
Copy: 1
Status: Available