Itohan Osayimwese – författare

Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany's built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany's colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself.Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.

This book explores the malleability of race as a construct, one subject to continuous redefinitions in different times, cultures and places. While race has been deployed historically to establish hierarchies in a modern-colonial world, it also has acquired the capacity to challenge those hierarchies, enabling critical engagements with epistemic positions that have been excluded from univocal Eurocentric architectural narratives.The volume expands the discourse on racializing concepts and categories beyond the traditional Africa–North America axis, examining many issues that have been overlooked in the field of architecture. This broader range of topics provides for a more comprehensive understanding of how race is constructed and represented in architectural theory and practice globally.Written by an international and influential cast of contributors, the structure of the book permits a detailed revision of the most current theoretical debates on race. Each part deals with a specific challenge at a particular scale. Ultimately, the book embraces discussions about theory, urban and regional debates, architectural design at the scale of the building, history and education, exploring the concept of race in all aspects of the discipline. It is essential reading for anyone studying or working in the built environment.

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa’s cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight.German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany.The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today.This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.