sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 11

Kenny Cupers: The Earth That Modernism Built

The ambition of modernist architects to reshape society through design is uncontested in architectural historiography. While many excellent studies have examined modernists' aspirations to create the "New Man," much less attention has been paid to similarly far-reaching plans to transform the environment, which preoccupied many of the same canonical figures in the history of architecture. By recovering the historical ties binding together these two transformative projects, Kenny Cupers' latest monograph offers an ambitious reconceptualization of modernism. Drawing on architectural discourse in Germany between the 1880s and the 1930s, Cupers' study raises a provocative question - "What does it mean to design in the wake of modernism when modernism itself is but an afterlife of empire?" (3). At the core of this framing lies the relationship between modernism, land, and racialization, which Cupers' monograph is devoted to exploring.

Cupers' main theoretical proposition lies in reframing architectural modernism as a movement intent on shaping not only human subjectivity, but also the relationship between humans and their environment. Furthermore, Cupers maintains that this ambition stemmed from Germany's imperialist ventures. Colonization, he holds, inspired intellectuals in the metropole to speculate on the relationship between "soil, settlement, and race." (2) The basis for this new conceptualization of the sphere of human action stemmed from the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1894) and the Swedish philosopher Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), who is credited with coining the terms "biopolitics" and "geopolitics." While in historical studies both Ratzel's and Kjellén's writings have heretofore been approached primarily as precursors to Nazi Lebensraum ideology, Cupers judiciously argues in favor of adopting a wider historical perspective. [1]

The study draws on interdisciplinary scholarship while centering architectural design as a main historical source. Chapter One opens with a discussion of Bodenständigkeit (earth-boundedness), an organicist concept widely associated with conservative cultural criticism around 1900. Cupers' generative engagement with the term exemplifies his methodology throughout the book. Parsing out the ambiguities of the concept, Cupers notes that it underpinned not only attempts by private enterprises to relocate workers in seemingly healthful rural Siedlungen (settlements), but also the introduction of architectural designs deemed typically German in the settler colony of German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia). In the latter instance, the settlers' preoccupation with traditional German design as a means of acclimatization is contextualized in relation to the genocide of the Nama and Herero people (1904-1908).

Chapter Two explores the racial politics of indigeneity closer to the metropole, by showing how a series of architectural ethnographies undertaken in the early 1900s in West Prussia asserted the region's German cultural heritage and inspired architectural designs for the expansion of German settlement in the area until its incorporation into Poland in 1918. Moving forward in time, Chapter Three thematizes Weimar-era discourse on allotment gardens and suburban settlements in relation to fears of food scarcity triggered by Germany's loss of colonial possessions after the defeat in World War I. Lastly, Chapter Four is devoted to architect Herman Sörgel's Atlantropa - an idiosyncratic proposal for transportation infrastructure linking the European and the African continents, reworked between 1928 and 1952. In this last chapter, Cupers reflects on the continuation of imperialist relations of exploitation after the demise of colonialism proper and its racist underpinnings post-World War II. Throughout, the study engages with the history of land tenure and labor regimes to shed light on the project of racialization in imperialist policy and ideology. It situates architecture and urban planning as chief technologies in the re-structuring of these social relations to subjugate people deemed ethnically "foreign."

One of the book's main merits resides in its broad historical and geographic scope. Indeed, the study's wide-ranging source material is itself evidence of the emergence of what Cupers terms "planetary design." (2) While the author is working almost exclusively with sources stemming from Germany, the connections he traces between metropolitan proposals and colonial interventions - or anxieties developed in the colonies which subsequently informed domestic policies - demonstrate that architects' biopolitical and geopolitical ambitions expanded far beyond the nation-state. From a historiographical perspective, the book aptly demonstrates that looking beyond Europe does not simply expand or complement the canon, it significantly revises it. In this respect, one of Cupers' most insightful discoveries traces landscape architect Leberecht Migge's (1881-1935) advocacy of Weimar-era allotment gardens back to the prospect of food scarcity after Germany's colonies were appropriated by the Entente powers in 1919.

However, this last example also points out a slight tendency to extrapolate generalizing conclusions from the musings of a few, albeit prominent, theorists. As the author acknowledges, these ideological constellations ought not be placed in a causal relationship but are instead constitutive of a worldview shaped by both domestic and colonial ambitions, and specifically by the transfer and repurposing of ideas across these contexts (35). With regards to working-class Siedlungen, for instance, a closer look at what factions supported which proposals, and to what ends, could have strengthened the argument that modernism functioned, by and large, as a corollary of imperialism. [2] In such instances, politics is noticeably absent from Cupers' account, as the environmentally-deterministic logic ascribed to modernism appears to have gained pace uncontested throughout the twentieth century.

Ambitious in its scope, The Earth That Modernism Built is a generative contribution to architectural historiography and modern German history alike. Alongside scholars such as Itohan Osayimwese, Cupers zooms out from the intense scholarly focus on modernism's entanglements with fascism to shed light on a longer history of imperialism's violent ambitions. [3] Examining modernism through this wider lens exposes the ambivalence of concepts that have long been structured as binary dichotomies in architectural discourse and historiography. These include the presumed oppositions between regionalism and standardization, anti-urban utopias and veiled attempts at bio-engineering, or leftist politics and biological determinism. With these insights, Cupers charts a far-reaching reassessment of the imbrication of architecture and urban planning in previously unsuspected ideological and structural ramifications of imperialism.

Notes:

[1] Cf. Thomas Lemke: Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, New York 2011.

[2] Cupers offers a specific analysis of patronage in relation to the resettlement of West Prussia in Chapter two. For an investigation into the social and political dynamics of German imperialism, see Woodruff Smith: The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, Oxford 1986.

[3] Itohan Osayimwese: Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburgh, PA 2017.