052-0852-21L  Topical Questions in History and Theory of Architecture: Apartheid Modernism

SemesterSpring Semester 2021
LecturersH. A. Kennedy
Periodicityyearly recurring course
Language of instructionEnglish


AbstractThis course brings a decolonizing perspective to spatial histories of German modernism. It offers a critical history of modern architecture in Germany as framed by the global networks of European, and specifically German, colonialism, which gave shape and form to the 19th and 20th centuries, and which continue to contour the world today.
ObjectiveThis seminar introduces students to methodologies drawn from several intersecting fields: postcolonial history and theory; critical studies of race and ethnicity; settler colonial studies; critical geography; and global history. While we focus on historical developments at the crossroads of colonial and architectural culture in German-speaking Europe, this seminar will also take up key questions of the present, as we wrestle with the meanings and violence of the modern colonial past: Namely, how to identify the endurance of colonial practices and colonial thinking in the present, with a focus on architectures, institutional formations, infrastructures, and territories. Here we will engage the theories of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who uses the term Coloniality to describe “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjectivity relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.” Emphasis will also be placed on learning to read architectural historiographies from the perspective provided by Maldonado-Torres, critically engaging the concept of Coloniality.

Upon the completion of this course, students should be able to: Demonstrate a critical understanding of colonialism, colonial practices, nationalism, imperialism, and concepts of the racial in the history of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and territory, as well as demonstrate the central themes related to the spatial history of German colonialism; understand how architecture evolved as a discipline in the context of national, imperial, and colonial formations (including movements seeking to reject or counter those forms of rule), and to understand architecture’s modern development in relation to adjacent disciplines, professions, and cultural practices; identify blind spots in received narratives of German modernism; develop an analytical response to assigned readings and to organize brief image-based presentations that open up and provoke discussion; conduct in-depth architectural historical research, and to demonstrate a facility with interdisciplinary critical analysis.
ContentThis course brings a decolonizing perspective to spatial histories of German modernism. It offers a critical history of modern architecture in Germany as framed by the global networks of European, and specifically German, colonialism, which gave shape and form to the 19th and 20th centuries, and which continue to contour the world today. This seminar takes up the work of Itohan Osayimwese, focusing on how colonial encounters and imperial entanglements affected architectural developments within Germany itself, and responds to the imperative of postcolonial studies to “provincialize Europe.” A core objective of this seminar will be to understand how liberal humanist thought was informed by European colonial expansion in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and how in the revolutionary era, concepts of alterity—what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls an "analytics of raciality"—came to be embedded within Enlightenment aesthetics, when concepts of historicity and globality were refigured in prevailing notions of the nation and the racial.

We will also consider the transnational mechanics of imperialism, tracing the translation of “territorializing” techniques across geographies in the form of media-technological, human-corporate, material-ecological, urban-architectural, financial and infrastructural interventions. These interventions shaped colonial space, as white European settlement was superimposed on to indigenous territories across the globe through the creation of material architectures of reclamation, occupation, extraction, and development. Crucially, this process of territorialization will be understood through the dynamics of multidirectional frontier entanglements. Using this multidirectional and decolonial approach, we will seek to foreground local, non-European, and indigenous agencies within these histories, placing emphasis on the role of mass resistance among indigenous polities in the shaping of the colonial built environment.
LiteratureLink
Prerequisites / NoticeThose who would like to enroll in this seminar must submit a short statement (PDF) that outlines why you are interested in taking this course. Please send the statements to the instructor, Dr. Hollyamber Kennedy, (Link) no later than Wednesday, 17. February. I will notify those who are admitted to the course by Friday, 19. February. Please include your name, ETH e-mail, program, department, and year on your statement.

Seminar Zoom Link: Link