Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany by J.P. Short (review)

When in 1908 Adolf Loos issued "Ornament and Crime," his manifesto of purified modern design, he famously opposed austerity of form to the tattoo, "cultural evolution" to the "primitive," and inscribed the temporalization of cultural difference in the polemical language of modernism. Not long after, Germany emerged as locus classicus of the new functionalist style. In Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Itohan Osayimwese aims to undercut this polarity, to find in Germany—"sacrosanct in architectural history as the birthplace of the Bauhaus" (5)—not purity and identity, but rather heterogeneity and difference. She sets out to revise the classic account of German architecture by recasting its context as global. Perhaps most surprisingly, she pursues this under the sign of colonialism—albeit colonialism "broadly construed" (18), from the 1850s into the 1930s. She aligns her book with the revised history of expressionism that foregrounds the colonial context of avant-garde primitivism: a reflection of the critique of European modernist appropriations of colonized cultures catalyzed by the seminal 1984 MoMA exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art. But her work is not a critique of the modernist elision of colonial ideology so much as an argument for the proximity of colonialism and architectural modernism; or, at its most far-reaching, a claim that colonialism is a constituent element of modernist form.

Osayimwese ties her revision of architectural history closely to the newer global history of the Kaiserreich. The idea is to "upend the image of German insularity," to see "a country deeply embroiled in global currents," and thereby "globalize the history of modern architecture" (20). Observing that architectural "experimentation was at a fever pitch" just as "the German empire was embroiled in the colonial fray," she "offers a history of modern architecture … that takes into account [its] formal colonial endeavors, informal imperial practices and deep involvement in global developments" (6). Osayimwese identifies five aspects of this history: architecture and colonialism in the universal exposition, ethnographic responses to indigenous architectures, a colonial architectural competition, prefabricated architecture, and the colonial pavilion at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne—a seminal event in the history of modern German architecture. But, in formulating her argument, she is mostly cautious, substantially deferring claims about flows of influence, exchange, or appropriation between metropole and colony in favor of simultaneity and proximity. Architectural reformism, in her restrained formulation, "became implicated with Germany's official colonial project" (4).

This hesitation no doubt reflects the limitations of her archive and the relatively marginal place of colonial architecture for Germans. The challenge appears already at the world expositions. Strikingly, Germany never had one, leaving Osayimwese to focus mostly on the German presence at the St. Louis World's Fair. Her constellation of colonial exhibits, applied arts, and exhibition architecture is compelling, but her conclusions remain tentative. She traces the strong influence of the exhibit of German applied arts, but not on colonial architecture, while her account of the German East Africa exhibit does not definitively connect it to modernist design. What emerges is but the "possibility" that the exhibit "furnished grist" for German architects (59). And, the account of "architect-ethnographers" is just as circumspect, protesting that any conclusions about influence might never be possible. That these traveling architects embarked mostly on modernizing programs in places like Japan and the Ottoman Empire, together with the focus on world expositions, suggests that globalization might have been more appropriate as a key concept than the less capacious colonialism.

But then, in 1913, the German Colonial Society agreed to cosponsor a competition for a model colonial house with the German Werkbund. Here, the spirit of reformism reflected a paradoxical marriage of "Heimatschutz," or architectural preservation, emphasizing the traditional and the local, and colonialism, ideologically predicated on modernization. The question is, as Osayimwese puts it, how "Heimatschutz as an ennobling of local practice" could "coexist with colonialism's devaluing of indigenous cultures" (122). A burgeoning anthropological science, which constructed the colonies as fields of ethnographic...