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.

In this pathbreaking book, Kenny Cupers forcefully shows how our understanding of architectural modernism in Germany benefits from placing it in a larger postcolonial framework. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, The Earth That Modernism Built skillfully connects metropolitan Germany, Namibia, and the Prussian borderlands, thus revealing how developments in architecture and urban planning were bound up with concepts of Lebensraum and imperial notions of space. Eye-opening. - Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin, author of What Is Global History? The Earth That Modernism Built revisits one of the most fundamental presuppositions of modernism, that reshaping the built environment will transform humanity and engineer a new world. Ambitious in scope, while providing nuanced accounts of significant, situated projects, both familiar and relatively unknown, this kaleidoscopic study reveals how environmental and geopolitical thinking have been written into modern architecture and planning by way of racialized discourses regarding land, soil, and settlement. Through this astute shift in perspective on the recent outpouring of studies tracing the colonial histories of modernity, Cupers offers instead an incisive and previously overlooked history of architectural modernism’s coloniality. - Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture

• 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’s Technological Nature Design and Geopolitics, a Wartime Alliance Geopolitics after Empire? World Order by Design Engineering Continents to Uphold Supremacy Infrastructural Specters Epilogue: Spaceship Earth Acknowledgments Notes Index

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.

In this pathbreaking book, Kenny Cupers forcefully shows how our understanding of architectural modernism in Germany benefits from placing it in a larger postcolonial framework. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, The Earth That Modernism Built skillfully connects metropolitan Germany, Namibia, and the Prussian borderlands, thus revealing how developments in architecture and urban planning were bound up with concepts of Lebensraum and imperial notions of space. Eye-opening. - Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin, author of What Is Global History? The Earth That Modernism Built revisits one of the most fundamental presuppositions of modernism, that reshaping the built environment will transform humanity and engineer a new world. Ambitious in scope, while providing nuanced accounts of significant, situated projects, both familiar and relatively unknown, this kaleidoscopic study reveals how environmental and geopolitical thinking have been written into modern architecture and planning by way of racialized discourses regarding land, soil, and settlement. Through this astute shift in perspective on the recent outpouring of studies tracing the colonial histories of modernity, Cupers offers instead an incisive and previously overlooked history of architectural modernism’s coloniality. - Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture

• 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’s Technological Nature Design and Geopolitics, a Wartime Alliance Geopolitics after Empire? World Order by Design Engineering Continents to Uphold Supremacy Infrastructural Specters Epilogue: Spaceship Earth Acknowledgments Notes Index

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.

In this pathbreaking book, Kenny Cupers forcefully shows how our understanding of architectural modernism in Germany benefits from placing it in a larger postcolonial framework. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, The Earth That Modernism Built skillfully connects metropolitan Germany, Namibia, and the Prussian borderlands, thus revealing how developments in architecture and urban planning were bound up with concepts of Lebensraum and imperial notions of space. Eye-opening. - Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin, author of What Is Global History? The Earth That Modernism Built revisits one of the most fundamental presuppositions of modernism, that reshaping the built environment will transform humanity and engineer a new world. Ambitious in scope, while providing nuanced accounts of significant, situated projects, both familiar and relatively unknown, this kaleidoscopic study reveals how environmental and geopolitical thinking have been written into modern architecture and planning by way of racialized discourses regarding land, soil, and settlement. Through this astute shift in perspective on the recent outpouring of studies tracing the colonial histories of modernity, Cupers offers instead an incisive and previously overlooked history of architectural modernism’s coloniality. - Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture

• 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’s Technological Nature Design and Geopolitics, a Wartime Alliance Geopolitics after Empire? World Order by Design Engineering Continents to Uphold Supremacy Infrastructural Specters Epilogue: Spaceship Earth Acknowledgments Notes Index