The Earth That Modernism Built - Kenny Cupers

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Résumé :
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. ...

Biographie:

• List of Illustrations
• 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
• Chapter 1: 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
• Chapter 2: 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
• Chapter 3: Technifying the Soil, Designing the Human
  • From Soil Science to Social Order
  • Urban Gardening as Domestic Colonization
  • Grounding Biological Functionalism
• Chapter 4: Infrastructure as Planetary Design
  • Empire’...

    Sommaire:
    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. ...