Architectural modernism and the built environment it has left us with remains a fiercely contested question, making what might have been an obscure set of historical questions about its origins a century ago a live issue even today. The almost always progressive, and oftentimes radical, politics of its founders have for decades been dismissed as too utopian, too lofty and too pie in the sky. Modernism dreamed big and fell hard when reality could not be moulded along its utopian designs, the story often goes. For historians who spend some time in the archives, the limitations of this dismissal soon becomes evident. With a few notable exceptions, the inter-war modernists were intensely preoccupied with everyday life and the people and places their sketches hoped to remake.

Kenny Cupers is one of the foremost scholars of modernism of his generation. His latest book makes an interesting addition to the literature on the early twentieth-century architectural avant-garde of Germany by reversing the familiar critique. It is less the German modernists’ heads in clouds we should be suspicious of, but their hands dirty with a worldbuilding project they in large part inherited from European colonialism. Tracing the spatial politics and epistemologies that emerged as Germany tried to play catch-up on the colonial world stage, Cupers paints a vivid picture of the world that the people of New Frankfurt and at the Bauhaus grew up in and had to position their work within.

In The Earth that Modernism Built’s first analytical chapter, Cupers charts how a group of nineteenth-century German-speaking intellectuals began to theorize the relationship between ‘peoples’ and land, and how geopolitics and biopolitics were articulated in a particularly pernicious way that laid the groundwork for both colonial violence and its recoils in the metropole. The book shows how geographers and political theorists defined ominous terms such as ‘homeland’ and ‘living space’, and how this had stakes for architecture as turn of the century settlements came to be seen as spaces that could be designed to make claims on the land in Europe as well as in Africa. In the following chapter, Cupers turns to the way architectural historians of Germanic culture became crucial players in developing vernacular designs for settlements, signalling ethnic and racial possessions on Prussia’s precarious claims on Eastern Europe. In the third chapter, Cupers tracks how early biological discoveries connected human life with its place within the living landscape. Architecture brought ethnic notions of homeland to new sites within the nation through initiatives like a massive push for allotment gardens in urban regions. Just as Germany’s architectural modernists were stepping onto the stage, these biopolitical articulations of people and land were taking off in the public imaginary, and while the most obvious connection here led to the Nazi ideologues who would come to ban modernism as ‘degenerated’, Cupers unearth links to left-wing modernists like Ernst May in Frankfurt, Margerete Schütte-Lihotzky and Josef Frank in Vienna and even Bauhaus’ Hannes Meyer. In particular, Meyer’s pioneering attempt to develop ecological design practices at Bauhaus, Cupers argues, was profoundly shaped by a German notion of settlement of people on land through acts of cultivation that cannot be separated from its colonial context. Finally, the book closes with a chapter on the universal ambitions of design as a system that could encompass the globe, and also remake space at a scale beyond even regional planning.

That modernism is of a world that was deeply shaped by colonialism is a timely argument. Cupers shows that this is not only an apt approach for colonial urban outposts as spaces of experimentation, places which other historians for some time have held up as crucial for architectural and planning developments in Europe. Yet, there are also questions about the limits of how far we can stretch this argument when looking closer at the empirical material Cupers presents. That modernists had a keen interest in bringing green space and gardens to the urban masses cannot completely be detached from colonial notions of settlement, but can it fully be explained by this context? Is a Jewish socialist like Josef Frank whom Cupers mentions briefly in this context, and who was working in a profoundly conservative and antisemitic society like inter-war Austria, taking an interest in designing urban allotment gardens at the tail end of the wartime maritime blockade that caused mass starvation of workers repeating the colonial grammar of people’s settlement in their appropriate land? Perhaps it is, but there is here a risk of missing also what the repetition by new subjects and in new styles changes in that which is repeated – especially when so many of these architects were making a very conscious effort to break with their historical precedents.

Cupers’ critique is ultimately much more interesting than the tired dismissals of modernism as lofty utopianism doomed to fail, and his attention to how profoundly the epistemological influence of colonialism reverberated far beyond its most ardent adherents and their romantic aesthetics is valid. Yet, there remains much more work to be done to unravel the complexities of Europe’s inter-war avant-garde architecture. If Cupers, despite the book’s title, convincingly charts the colonial patterns of worlding in which modernism was made, The Earth that Modernism Built does not capture the full range of new meanings this colonial grammar took on in the politically fragmented and culturally dynamic inter-war period. What did, for instance, the loss of empire mean for the spatial imaginaries of architects in Vienna and Berlin? What was the influence from the first decade of the Soviets’ new forms of technical expertise and their particular form of universalist identity on the international stage and the architect’s political imagination? And how did thinkers beyond the European settlers’ metropoles refashion and contribute to the modernists’ architectural ambitions beyond being objects of orientalist fantasies? As historians continue to bring in the colonial politics of space into the origin story of modernism, we must not forget how contested architectural modernism was from its very beginning and that the colonial influence not only varied, but was reinterpreted in varied ways.