The Earth That Modernism Built

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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 Bodenstèandigkeit--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 Francâe 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"--