Kenny Cupers - "The Earth That Modernism Built" - Andrei Pop & Cecilia Resende Santos
Kenny Cupers will discuss The Earth That Modernism Built. He will be joined in conversation by Andrei Pop, chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, and Cecilia Resende Santos, Ph.D. student in modern architecture and planning at Columbia University. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
Presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Department of Art History
Website: https://arthistory.uchicago.edu/
Facebook: University of Chicago Department of Art History
At the Co-op
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About the Book:
An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis.
The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition.
Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth.
About the Author:
Kenny Cupers co-founded and leads the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel. He is committed to the development of the architectural and urban humanities through collaborative pedagogy and engaged research. He has published widely on modern architecture, public housing, and planning history. Grounded in primary research, his scholarship analyzes spaces and landscapes in order to answer questions about power and historical change. He is Cupers is the author of the multiple-award-winning The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014), co-author of Spaces of Uncertainty (2002), focused on the importance of leftover spaces for public life in Berlin, and the editor of numerous volumes on architecture and critical urbanism.
About the Interlocutors:
Andrei Pop is the chair of the Art History department and Frumkin Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. He is interested in how art, politics, and philosophy combine and interact in modernity across a variety of media.
Cecilia Resende Santos is a Ph.D. student in modern architecture and planning at Columbia University, with an interest in the history of modernity and development in the Americas. Most recently, she has researched agricultural modernization in Brazil and the United States, and her Chicago BA thesis, winner of the Feitler Prize, examined the private-public relationships that shaped the postindustrial South Loop.
Related Titles
An intellectual history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and environmental crisis.
The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny...