How did such an approach become dominant? Among the many possible answers to this question, one important strand of historical inquiry ties the alignment of design, governance, and the environment to events during the second half of the twentieth century. During the Cold War, a new regime of international development afforded architects, planners, and designers an implicit or explicit role in environmental management and governance of populations. In this context, architectural modernism often appears as a narrative of diffusion, with technical expertise fueling the increasingly environmental scope of design.

Despite its many merits, this narrative of a twentieth-century modernism becoming planetary forestalls an understanding of how the earth became an object of design in the first place. Such historical inquiry requires stepping away from global framings of architectural modernism. Instead of studying how new design ideas and practices travelled and transformed places and people across the globe, we need to ask which politics of life and land underpinned this process. Such an inquiry attends to ecological questions as much as to the global inequalities to which the design fields have historically contributed.

Every perspective of the world is situated; the focus of this historical study is imperial Germany between the 1880s and 1930s. The reason for this is not Germany’s supposedly pioneering role in environmental or design movements, but the intersection of these movements with settler colonialism and imperialist globalisation. To explore this intersection, The Earth That Modernism Built starts from conflicts over land in colonial Africa and the border regions of imperial Germany. This decentred vantage point allows for a recontextualisation of some canonical and lesser-known manifestations of architectural modernism. By placing these in an expansive discourse about humanity’s earthly constitution, planetary design becomes visible as the outgrowth of an intellectual project of soil, settlement, and race.

The entwinement of colonialism and capitalism over the past five centuries has wrought such havoc on the earth that the complicity and hubris of the design fields seem to be beyond question. Afterall, even if they remained relatively marginal in the production of the built environment globally, architects, designers, urban planners, and engineers provided some of the blueprints for how modes of dispossession, cultivation, extraction, production, and consumption were implemented and developed over time. What if the very conviction that we can design our way out of the resulting environmental and political crisis is equally bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth? What does it mean to design in the wake of modernism when modernism itself is but an afterlife of empire?

Standing in the semiarid landscape of the Southern Namib region of Namibia, Duwisib Castle attests to the colonial entanglement of environmental and design discourses (figure 1). The building was constructed between 1907 and 1909 for Hansheinrich von Wolf and his wife, Jayta Humphreys, daughter of the US consul, and today attracts European tourists on their way to the majestic sand dunes of the Namib Naukluft National Park. A few years earlier, the military commander had been called to the colony of German South West Africa to strike down the anticolonial uprising led by Herero and Nama pastoralists, resulting in what has become known as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Wishing to settle permanently in the colony, the couple acquired a slew of adjacent farmsteads in the area and commissioned Berlin-born Wilhelm Sander, one of the colony’s foremost architects (among few), to design the fortress. With its multiple towers, crenellations, cloister-inspired courtyard, and grand fireplaces, the building would be amusing in its absurd evocation of mediaeval architecture if not for the violence that haunts it.

The building reveals how the environmental violence of settler colonialism was sublimated in design discourse. Although many building materials were shipped from Europe, Sander insisted on the importance of including local materials. The red sandstone, coming from a local quarry, was integral to the designer’s ambition to create an architecture that would be bodenständig (literally, “rooted in the soil”). This aspiration corresponded to the ethos of a growing number of architects, designers, and critics — in Germany and across the imperial world. It was echoed by some colonial officials, who wished to replace the shoddy mishmash of prefab buildings in emerging towns such as Windhoek with an architecture they deemed to be more appropriate to the local climate and geography of their colonies. And it reverberated, later in the century, in the rhetoric of globally operating architects, who insisted that modern buildings should be adapted to local climates and vernaculars even as they were engaged in large-scale modernisation and industrialisation schemes that in fact devastated these environments and existing ways of life.

Designing a building to be aesthetically, materially, or functionally suited to its local or regional environment was a complicated if not fundamentally contradictory affair, especially in a colonial context. On the one hand, European colonialism was ideologically shored up by a firm belief in environmental determinism — the conviction that climate and soil determined racial character and cultural development. On the other hand, colonialism engendered far-reaching and destructive earthly transformation, which architecture, planning, and design helped facilitate. While colonialists and designers believed the environment shaped civilisational development, they also believed in their own ability to determine the transformation of that environment.

This tension between environmental determinism and environmental determination is central to the analytical thrust of the book. In his influential 1952 essay, “The Living and Its Milieu,” Georges Canguilhem showed how a wide range of nineteenth-and-twentieth-century scientific disciplines, from biology and ethnology to psychology and geography, engaged with the question of what constitutes life through the concept of environment (milieu).¹ His work of historical epistemology highlighted geography, particularly the work of German geographers, culminating in the anthropogeography of Friedrich Ratzel, for developing an explanatory model of humanity as informed by its distribution on the planet. Canguilhem regarded it as a deterministic approach, in which “doing history consists of reading a map.”² But he also argued that with the growing awareness that “man is . . . a geographical factor,” this environmental determinism would ultimately harbour its own reversal, and a new school of thinkers would come to assert that “in a human Milieu, man is obviously subject to a determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial constructions.”³ Canguilhem went on to analyse how other scientific fields, including animal behaviour studies, subsequently took up such environmental thinking during the twentieth century, but he did not address architecture, planning, or design — leaving us to question what their contribution was to “artificial constructions.”

Architecture, however, has been not only a privileged terrain of experimentation with artificial constructions of the environment but also a field for its conceptualisation. Architectural historians have demonstrated that ecological conceptions of life played a key role in the articulation of architectural functionalism. The conception that humans are organisms immersed in environments that can be precisely qualified or quantified means that their behaviour may be predicted and potentially transformed by altering those environments. With this assumption, modernist architects transposed a biological conception of function, particularly as developed by the Austro-Hungarian biologist and soil researcher Raoul Heinrich Francé, into the analysis and design of spatial, aesthetic, social, and technical arrangements. This conceptual approach informed the pedagogy of Bauhaus designers such as Oskar Schlemmer and Hannes Meyer, who famously theorised building as a techno-biological process. It also found application in the design of housing estates and public and institutional architecture. Approaching design as the shaping of the human through the environment added power to the self-assigned task of modernist architects to engineer the social.

Inspired by Canguilhem’s historical epistemology, this book traces the geographic discourse undergirding such architectural projects to “design the human.”⁴ To better understand how it became possible for architects to assume the capacity to remake the human by shaping the environment, I suggest, requires analytical attention from modernist conceptions of the human body, as exemplified by Schlemmer’s drawings for his Bauhaus course Der Mensch (figure 3), to that body’s earthly constitution.

Even if the designer seemed to limit the influence of the earth on the human body to “magnetism,” thus shifting away from older convictions about the determining influence of the soil, the notion of environment on which his conceptual drawing rested is rooted in nineteenth-century European science. This foundation helps explain how the building and dwelling cultures imagined and promoted by avant-garde designers and self-styled visionaries were thought to engender both a “new human” and a “new world.”

Key to this inquiry is the German notion of earth-boundedness (Bodenständigkeit), or the quality of being rooted in the soil. In the late nineteenth century, German-speaking architects and designers referred to earth-boundedness as a desirable quality that could be found in traditional villages, old farmhouses, and rural landscapes. This conviction was fueled by an awareness that as a result of widespread industrialisation, the German countryside was rapidly changing. Factories, roads, depots, railway yards, garden allotments, rental barracks, billboards, power stations, and sewage farms increasingly marked the once-rural landscapes around many cities. An increasing number of middle-class, educated Germans became active in a movement to preserve forests and river landscapes as well as traditional, vernacular architecture. This growing awareness was channelled in discourses of Heimat, an untranslatable term associated with the conviction that Germans have a unique relationship with their local and regional “homeland.”

Centred on the Heimatschutzbewegung (literally, “homeland protection movement”), this environmental preservation and architectural reform movement has been extensively studied as a staple of romantic nationalism and as a key to the formation of modern architecture and industrial design. Its advocates argued that new buildings and residential areas, especially those in Germany’s rapidly urbanising countryside and imperial borderlands, should be designed as a natural continuation of tradition rather than in “foreign” or “imported” styles. This conviction was popularised by Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s best-selling Kulturarbeiten (Cultural works) book series.⁵ The architect was a foundational figure in the Heimatschutz movement as well as the Deutscher Werkbund. Established in 1907, this association of architects, designers, and industrialists is considered to have been formative to modern architecture in the German context, even though it was also concerned with traditional customs and folklore, tourism, local history, and regional identity.

However, the project of making buildings look as if they were bound to the earth was not only a matter of style or environmental sensibility. It closely related to a reformist aspiration of affectively reconnecting Germans with the land. Architecture, residential planning, and landscape design became instrumental in efforts to define what and who was natural, what and who belonged, and what and who did not. In this project, the earthly environment — from its substance and ownership to its cultivation and perception — figured as both a determinant substrate and an instrument for reforming culture and shaping society. This investment in the power of the environment was articulated by an influential group of turn-of-the-century intellectuals (including Francé), who mobilised against what they understood as destructive, mechanistic worldviews. Under various labels, including holism, neovitalism, biocentrism, and monism, they argued that the earthly environment harboured a vital energy and should thus guide the formation of life. This conviction had a significant impact on Germany’s cultural and artistic movements, and through the work of Francé, it also influenced modernist architects — even as they came to revile the designs and arguments of Schultze-Naumburg and consorts.

The attribution of agency to the earthly environment spurred various kinds of social and artistic experimentation as well as academic research. In this latter context, the notion of earth-boundedness offered a powerful lens for reading material culture, history, and human difference from the land. Geographers, folklorists, and historians approached the history of humanity as a geographic process of settlement, a gradual rooting of people in the soil. Such conceptions thus affected forms of knowledge production and mobilised research for political claims. Academics marshalled studies of villages and farmhouses as evidence of a historical process that made certain people legitimate owners of the land. The material culture of rural life, from domestic interiors, roof shapes, and the layout of farmhouses to the land use plans of rural villages, thus became an instrument that could be harnessed to claim territory and govern the populations within it.

This instrumentalisation of the vernacular far exceeded efforts to create national community or “German form” in industrial design for global export; indeed, it was part of a larger imperial project to remake the relationship between people and land. The significance of this project for architectural modernism may be better understood when approached from a perspective attentive both to its epistemological context and to what could be called settler colonial epistemology. Heimatschutz advocates not only sought to preserve their local villages and landscapes but also approached them as the result of a historical process of “colonisation.” Others used similar arguments to legitimise German settler colonialism overseas. After all, more than just being a call to reform, the notion of Kulturarbeit referred to the “civilising mission” of German colonialism.

Such correspondences suggest we relate the discourse of Bodenständigkeit to that of another, more nefarious environmental concept: Lebensraum. During the nineteenth century, this term had referred primarily to an animal’s habitat. Under the influence of Darwinism, Ratzel adopted the term to formulate “universal” laws of geography and to legitimise German imperial expansion.⁶ He asserted that people claimed their living spaces by turning land into productive agricultural landscapes instead of through any preexisting Indigenous claims to territory or through mercantile control. They would do so as a unified people, or Volk, rather than as individuals. Through this process, they would gradually become more rooted in the soil and thus legitimatelyclaim a political territory.

Ratzel approached the mutually determining relationship between humans and the earth as the result of a dynamic process of colonisation, based in the cultivation of land and an assumed aggregation of individuals in groups. This conceptualisation of planetary inhabitation was both inspired by and instrumental to German settler colonialism and imperialist expansion. It obscured Indigenous forms of stewardship of the land and the fact that although German male farmers and settlers were heroised, agricultural work across the empire was mostly done by female migrant or forced labour. By the 1920s, Ratzel’s theory had engendered an academic field and public debate under the banner of Geopolitik (geopolitics), which informed Nazi expansionism, as is well known, but also occupied a wide range of designers, reformers, and intellectuals across the political spectrum.

This imperialist matrix of earthly thinking suggests the need for a sustained focus on the epistemological conditions in which earth-boundedness came to acquire its various meanings and roles. Earth-boundedness developed as a concept informing academic research, a rallying cry for cultural and environmental reformers, an artistic ideal, and a political technique. How could it mobilise such disparate interests as nature preservation, folklore studies, architectural style, settlement planning, and imperialist expansion? By answering this question, the book shows that the aspiration to design buildings and environments adapted to the local and regional contexts appears as neither an antidote for nor a reaction against modernism, but rather as one of its foundations. Architectural historians have tended to portray regionalism as a force of resistance against the globalising forces of a modernism asserting itself as universal. But regionalism, as it travelled across the imperial networks of nineteenth-century globalisation and shaped the colonial world, was a globally pervasive phenomenon — perhaps more so than the International Style, for that matter. As it reshaped Germany’s imperial borderlands, regionalism fed the movement toward standardisation, typification, and normalisation — hallmarks of architectural modernism.

Modernism is a uniquely overdetermined concept. Within the many definitions of and approaches to modernism, this book builds on analytical frameworks rooted in historical scholarship on Wilhelmine and Weimar architecture. It places this formation in an imperialist context in which some subjects were tied to the land while others were dispossessed from it. This recontextualisation reveals how projects to root people in the land could fuel, rather than counter, the modernist belief that the human and planetary environment could be moulded by design. Architectural historians of Weimar modernism have long relied on the framework of “internationalism” that prominent Bauhaus architects proffered and seemed to be confirmed by their emigration following the Nazi rise to power. This book explores instead how the avant-garde’s ambition to build a “new world” can be understood from the perspective of what Florian Krobb and Elaine Martin have called “Weimar colonialism.”⁷ They and other historians have explored how German culture and politics continued to be shaped by colonial consciousness and aspirations even after the forced abdication of colonial territories in 1919.

Drawing from a body of both familiar and unknown primary sources and a range of government and private archives in Namibia, Germany, Poland, and Tanzania, the book brings actors and experiences that tend to be considered marginal or even antipathetic to modernism into dialogue with some of the canonical figures of the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. Farmers, communitarian vegetarians, Nazi ideologues, allotment gardeners, feminist colonial activists, geography professors, colonial builders, biologists, rural reformers, settlers, state bureaucrats, and anticolonial leaders appear alongside architects and designers as agents of change. The book follows them as they move into and out of Germany, from the imperial borderlands to the hallways of government, and from the working-class districts of industrial cities to newly built villages of the countryside.

Tracing the effects of colonialism on architectural modernism requires attending to the interrelations between settlement projects, both outside and within the boundaries of the German Empire.⁸ This study focuses on Germany’s primary “settler colony,” Namibia, as well as the vast program of internal colonization in eastern Prussia and accounts for their global entanglements as well as their impact on provincial Germany. Settler colonialism shaped environmental reform and design in imperial and Weimar Germany in multiple ways. The discursive figure of settlement circulated in the chambers of government, reform, and art. New settlements (Siedlungen), including early “garden cities” like Hellerau, were more often called colonies (Kolonien). Following the anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler’s argument that the “semantic slippage” of the notion of colony is revealing for the workings of imperial power, the book traces the discursive and material deployments of settlement.⁹ While state institutions, reformers, and artists established new settlements as paths to reform or to foster new, at times emancipatory or experimental, social spaces in the countryside, colonial lobbyists presented overseas settlement as an opportunity for German empire-building or a way to resolve the social problems of industrial capitalism. The book shows how these different deployments of settlement not only coexisted but were entangled — often in spite of diverging political ideologies and programs.

Imaginaries of settling oriented the desires for colonial expansion and the experiments of various design visionaries, many of whom did not have direct experience in the colonial world. Settlement was the business of colonial governors as well as architects and urban planners, academic geographers, amateur folklorists and local historians, landscape designers, ecologists, revolutionaries, and social reformers. Surely, establishing an artist colony or a vegan commune in the German countryside had little to do with the racist violence of settler colonialism in Africa. Yet the idea of settlement as renewal shaped the self-understanding of both metropolitan artists and colonial settlers. Instead of reading the new villages and residential areas built in the German countryside and on the outskirts of cities as direct manifestations of colonialism, this study explores how the ambiguity and pervasiveness of settlement banalised colonialism and occluded its violence. Analysing the slippages and deployments of settlement thus shifts our understanding of architectural modernism: rather than emerging from the ashes of empire, it built on the arsenal of settler colonialism.

Bio

Kenny Cupers is a researcher and educator. He leads the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel. Besides The Earth That Modernism Built, Cupers is also the author of The Social Project: Housing Postwar France and co-editor of Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present.