htc.Workshop February 6, 2008, 2-5pm

Itohan Osayimwese, University of Washington

Prolegomena to an Alternative Genealogy of German Modernism: The Impact of World Cultures on German Architects ca. 1900

Reading the canonical texts on German architecture in the twentieth century as well as current scholarship on the topic, one could be forgiven for believing that Bruno Taut was the only German architect before World War II to have become fascinated with non-European architectural traditions, traveled beyond the boundaries of the West, and changed his worldview and design praxis as a consequence. Recent scholarship on German colonial architecture in Africa, China, Micronesia and Melanesia lays this assumption to rest. In addition, a number of scholars have pointed out cases in which well-known personalities such as Gottfried Semper and Mies van der Rohe flirted with ideas and forms derived from non-Western cultures. These examples, however, are presented as anomalous and episodic, and as a function of the influence of avant-garde artists on the architects who operated at their margins. 

In this paper and the larger project of which it is part, I propose that the well-known personalities’ seeming flirtations with the “other” reflected a broader, well-established constellation of practices framed by the imperialist milieu in which they lived. Drawing on the biographies of several lesser-known architects, I argue that the fascination with the architectural traditions of an invented Africa and imagined Orient predated the brief phase of expressionist architecture between the wars. I contend the interest in the “other” had multiple roots including the emergence of the discipline of ethnography, itself informed by centuries of German exploration and travel writing; a predisposition towards travel as a tool in architectural education in the form of the grand tour; and the nineteenth-century reorganization of architectural occupations and consequent demand for new professional markets for architects from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Likewise, art-history’s developing theoretical interest in non-European artistic traditions, and the opening up of regions previously inaccessible to Germans via colonial annexation contributed to making non-European cultures objects of architectural desire.  

Unlike other research that has focused on the disproportionate impact of expatriate German architects on the design cultures of their host societies, however, I invert the “imperialist gaze.” I posit that the dissemination of knowledge within Germany about “other” architectural cultures in the form of “architectural-ethnographic” texts published by repatriates was a necessary condition for the development of German modernism.