“The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.“1
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
In the nineteenth century, the politics of imperialism brought the geography of the entire planet into focus. In 1881, in Hopes and Fears for Art: The Prospects for Architecture in Civilization, British writer William Morris abstracted that architecture had to find a new role in the face of the challenges of modernity. “A great subject truly, for it embraces the consideration of the whole external surroundings of the life of man; we cannot escape from it if we would so long as we are part of civilization, for it means the molding and altering to human needs of the very face of the earth itself, except in the outermost desert.”2 At stake was nothing more than the complete restructuring and reshaping of the entire surface of the earth: “peopling the desert; for breaking down the walls between nation and nation; and the earth we tread on.”3
At the beginning of the twentieth century the world was confronted with the realities of World War I. Inspired by artists and writers like Max Ernst, Paul Scheerbart, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Oswald Spengler, architects like Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hermann Sörgel saw a new role for the narrowly defined agency of architecture in what they referred to as “Weltbauen.”4 Translated from the German as world-building or world-making, Weltbauen envisioned architecture as a larger totality away from designing every frame separately. Partly engineering and partly utopian in meaning, Weltbauen recovered a geographically aligned aesthetic from the long intellectual and political history of modernity and illuminated conflicts in the relationship between the metropolis and the hinterland, and nature and technology. In fact, Weltbauen referred to more than William Morris’ concept of the totality of planning across the entire planet. The First World War united architects inIts protagonists wanted to disengage architecture from history and move it beyond own constraints into a new dialogue with nature and technology. Within these frameworks, architects saw a possibility to extend architecture through geographically articulated designs that envisioned new territories and advocated new world orders built upon the rewriting of the surface of the earth.
Alpine Architecture
The Russian revolution of 1918, the defeat of Germany in World War I, and worsening inflation left many architects in a state of despair in the early twentieth century. With no commissions most architects found themselves dismissed from the service of the bourgeoisie, commerce, and industry; many architects turned to imaginary projects and proposed to engage with the world through a new lens. A global war; traumatized cities and landscapes; overpopulation and unemployment; architects saw an opportunity to address larger systemic problems by beginning to develop frameworks which distinguished between tools and systems, architectures and territories recognizing the interdependence between agents, objects, and the world. Unprecedented in their scale, these mainly utopian projects, driven by postwar ideologies, techno-environmental visions or geopolitics, articulated the world at a planetary scale after the war. Ranging in scale from remodeling Pacific island groups, mountain ranges in the Alps, and the entire Mediterranean region, architecture after the war found its role within assumed value systems in its engagement with history and the environment, willing to challenge and restructure the entire planet. In Alpine Architecture, a book in which Bruno Taut published his utopian fantasies, he argued that radical visions were necessary to make “earth a good dwelling.”5
The rise of the Weimar Republic in 1918 gave reason to believe that the government might undertake social reforms. In fact, Bruno Taut asked the new government to support programs to provide employment and gain new trust in technology, which he wanted to see diffused from its associations with the machinations of the war. In his theories, he previously had been misused for the efficient destruction of society and nature. In Alpine Architecture, he imagined silent architecture in an idealized territory in which humankind could live with each other without the constraints of (national) boundaries. His visions saw the war machines dismantled in a world in which all humans could live united under the task to peacefully carve elegant crystalline structures beautifying the earth’s mountain ranges. The crystalline metaphors synthesized society with territory by means of architecture and knowledge transmitted through the autonomy of architecture.
Taut’s personal sense of mission also matched his conception of the agency of the architect: “Building, when all is said and done, is the recognition of matter and the abolition of all contradiction between it and mind. The architect becomes demiurge, the demiurge architect.”6 In his theatrical performance Der Weltbaumeister, Taut drafted a scenario in which he sought to represent the creative principles of the world at work. Despite the fact that in his mainly hand-drawn schemes the existence of the human body was excluded from the grounds of the aesthetically disruptive individuality, he rendered the body as object indirectly present in his continually self-renewing natural and artistic realms. His proposal for global reconstruction performed a double function: “first, the process of construction itself could be seen as a pacifist statement, and, second, the completed reconstructions would be silent memorials proclaiming an end to the folly of war-time destruction.”7
A sense of urgency in the “reterritorialization”, or as a matter of fact “deterritorialization”8 of the planet after the war also motivated another fellow Weltbaumeister. Hermann Sörgel, the mastermind behind Atlantropa proposed the complete restructuring of the culturally and politically complex Mediterranean region. In his geographically inspired vision, Sörgel, contrary to Taut, saw in technology an ally. In his mind, he could not imagine that human beings alone could be capable of accomplishing macro-transformations of the Earth’s surface. In fact, he argued for technology and engineering to achieve unprecedented accomplishments. In his eyes technology no longer misused by war and profit could not only give positive impulses in transforming the globe but also help Atlantropa become a reality. Erich Mendelsohn, another self-proclaimed Weltbaumeister, had confidence in Sörgel’s vision and underlined, “only the systematic engagement of the forces of nature into the service of humankind creates … the foundation for politics and economy. Once these conditions are met, people would no longer be the automated appendage of the machine, but their inventor. “9
Many writers, artists, and philosophers who heavily influenced the architecture of the time also addressed the divergent relationship between Mensch und Maschine [humankind and machine] in relation to complex territorial transformations. In his painting Europe after the Rain I, Max Ernst processed the tragedy of the war by depicting an imaginary relief map of a completely “reterritorialized” Europe. 10 Europe after the Rain I illuminates an emotional desolation, physical exhaustion, and fears of the destructive power of combined warfare— the rain of fire, the biblical deluge, and the reign of terror. Ernst’s painting reveals amorphously altered territories that utilized the disengagement from history and place to negotiate new environments somewhere between centrality, peripherality, social and cultural identity.
But it was writer and theorist Paul Scheerbart, as well as, Friedrich Nietzsche that inspired Taut in his pursuit of new architectural narratives. It was about demanding a rethinking of architecture as a force to resist its complete technologization and the transformation of nature into a resource. In his science fiction novel, Rakkóx der Billionär, Scheerbart envisioned spaces and architectures on a scale unknown to the world at the time; he proposed the transformation of an entire mountain range into .
Scheerbart’s Weltanschauung resonated in Taut’s ideas and helped him develop his concepts and further focus on the separation of man and machine, and the encroaching technologization of humanity. In his world entire landscapes were filled with spiritual architecture that transcended people and even the cosmos with the desire to unite “normal everyday people (Volk) with an infinite, mystical, transcendental reality connected by the way of the spirit (Geist).”11
Not only Scheerbart’s fantastical writings determined a foundation for Taut’s Alpine Architecture, but also Friedrich Nietzsche’s “perspectivism”12 resonated with his ideas. In his writings Nietzsche rejected history, the bourgeois world and established authorities. His theories and metaphors set the foundation for Taut’s understanding of Weltbauen. With his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche told the story of Zarathustra who lived in a perilous solitude of the mountains. It was the purity of the icy heights of the peaks that stood in stark contrast to the conditions in the metropolis––an indication for Nietzsche’s anticipation of the hostility to all things urban that characterized the period. However, Nietzsche’s understanding of society, culture and politics was not calling for an external relationship of architecture, as Taut envisioned, it was his sense for beauty that determined Taut’s Weltdenken [world-thinking] that externalized architecture from the environment, and enabled it to disengage from history. That made the scenery of the Alps the ideal geography to accomplish these rather ambitious trajectories. Rugged angles and polished surfaces characterized his new forms of and aesthetics. Nietzsche’s influence on Taut was so big that he even annotated his sketches with quotes from his work: “The time may come when man has the power … to play with mountains as a child plays with sand. To create works of art as high as the Himalaya, formed from his imagination as the jeweler forms a casket for his jewels, perforated like lace, with stone used like metal, forest and field like jewels, glaciers like pearls, and water like crystal.”13
According to Taut, the crystalline aesthetic recovered the critical relationship between ethical geographies and the role of humankind. In a typical expressionist manner, Taut conceptualized the role of the body as object and how the aesthetic of his work may inflect, define or resist the territorial scale; typically the artist assigns everything to its place and light casts its radiance overall: “The earth itself sparkles with the new; as the impossible becomes possible, “hard” reality yields up miracles.”14 However, the timelessness and the absence of history and the human object in his drawings was by no means meant as an antihumanist gesture. On the contrary, the territories he transformed addressed the very changes of society external to nature. His fusion of territory and architecture represented the change of nature and society in harmony autonomously from each other: “That is, this man-made nature does more than just signify a new political man. The change itself, the public’s engagement in this reconstruction, is the means to a new peaceful condition.”15
Taut’s utopian and ethic “perspectivism” largely remained on paper. However, his architectural visions aligned, if not redefined agencies of architecture while responding to a totality that symbolically determined a new architectural autonomy within the territory. Hermann Sörgel, on the other hand, respectful of Taut’s ideas and his pacifistic core believed in the possibility and the successful realization of this project. With engineering at its core, Sörgel’s project was a result of his interest in geopolitics, new world orders, and believe that technological solutions could address the challenges of the future.
Atlantropa
What started, as an exhibition in the early 1930s in Germany and Switzerland became one of the boldest architectural visions ever seen. The architect-engineer Hermann Sörgel presented a scheme on such a grand scale that it even outshined the fantasies of a novelist like Jules Verne. Atlantropa, which was first known as “Panropa,” was a proposition that restructured the entire Mediterranean region, from the Western Mediterranean and the Straits of Gibraltar to Israel in the East, and from Northern Italy to the Sahara desert in Africa. A 35-kilometer-long dam in the Straits of Gibraltar was the critical element of his design and disconnected the water supply from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. As a result, Atlantropa was born and created a new super-geography of what was once known as the Mediterranean.
His idea of a gigantic dam set the foundation for a project that gradually dried up the Mediterranean Sea and reduced the water level by over 200 meters. The territory affected by this shrinkage was the most significant geographical transformation ever imagined. Sörgel’s vision created up to 600,000 square kilometers of new arable land where the sea had been. At the core of his designs were several trans-Mediterranean arteries that supported the flow of people, cars, trains, and natural resources between Europe, the Eurasian peninsula west of the Ural Mountains and Persia, including the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa.
He proposed infrastructural systems on never before seen dimensions; he essentially completely restructured and envisioned the entire Mediterranean geography, by actually eliminating it. Nothing that characterized the region remained the same; his project effaced the region’s complex systems and disengaged from its history to enter a new dialogue that was determined by technotopia. It seems as if by eliminating a complex cultural ecosystem and replacing it with new infrastructures, environmental systems, and distributions of capacities and power. 16 Within his framework, Sörgel wasn’t primarily interested in who would be the people populating these new territories, but the fact that Atlantropa’s would become a new geopolitically and resource-driven supercontinent.
With the Great Depression, World War I, and a looming World War II, Europe was in desperate need of a vision for the future. Sörgel’s angle on the problem transform the African continent. European racist ideologies of that time saw Africa as an empty continent devoid of history and culture. For him, it was always integrated into his geopolitical considerations and part of his belief in technology’s political power. His vision was an alternative to anything ever imagined, and with the larger geopolitical goal of venturing deep into the Congo Basin to secure the vast natural resources of Africa with European engineering, he turned Africa into a “territory useful to Europe.”17
At a time in which apocalyptic visions determined the Zeitgeist and the politics of imperialism were dominant, Sörgel placed his project within larger geopolitical orders. Part of his ideological foundation followed a Social Darwinist and colonialist school of thought, declaring, “the fight for survival is a fight for territory.”18 His plans for Atlantropa aimed to revolutionize the north-south connection between Europe and Africa, and convert the global west-east imbalance into a “harmonious coexistence” of the three A’s: America, Asia, and Atlantropa, which he considered Kontinentale Grossräume (continental mega spaces) that would coexist in a new world order of supercontinents. As a result, Atlantropa not only completely obliterated the Mediterranean, but it completely sacrificed its cultural complexity for the promise of continental European economic security and energy independence.
In its early stages, Atlantropa was created in the political context of the Pan-European Union, founded in 1923. The assembly brought together by the Austrian (geo)-politician Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi sought political unification of the European continent after the devastating First World War. When in 1929, Sörgel’s vision took on the name Panropa, he wanted to emphasize its close connection to the Pan-European Union. However, in 1932 Sörgel replaced Panropa with the official project name, Atlantropa, to avoid confusion with the Pan-European Union. He changed the name primarily because he did not believe in the Union’s ideological principles, and disagreed with Coudenhove-Kalergi politically and morally. Sörgel thought that only an economic union could bring Europe together, and advertised the guaranteed profit of Atlantropaambitions went far beyond Coudenhove-Kalergi’s organization. Atlantropa, the term invented by Sörgel, meant new territory at the Atlantic Ocean [Festland am Atlantik], and stood for the idea of politically and geographically uniting Europe with Africa into a supercontinent of tomorrow.
It was his interest in geography that shaped his Weltanschauung. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel and the philosopher Oswald Spengler were elemental to Sörgel’s self-assessment as Weltbauer. Both shaped this understanding in very different ways. Ratzel was fundamental to Sörgel’s concept of an architect as possessing a chiliastic spirit that liberated him to aim for cosmic depth and a pacifist spirit that aspired to create new borders. Ratzel’s theory was that of der Staat als Organismus [the state as organism], in which he equated dams, autobahns, railways, and bridges to the digestive and circulatory systems in natural organisms. Ratzel argued that the more extensively and qualitatively these systems were built, the more the organism, the Lebensraum [living environment] of a nation-state, would thrive.
Spengler, on the other hand, had a much deeper and more personal influence on Sörgel. Both were friends from the time they lived in Schwabing, Germany. In 1918, Spengler published his book, Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West], whose pessimistic prophecies about the extinction of western culture through “civilization” and “overpopulation” captured Sörgel’s attention.19 Sörgel, however, had a more positive outlook and believed in the technical advancements of modern societies. He shared Spengler’s critique of the nineteenth century and that uncontrollably growing urban environments were a sign of weakness of western civilizations. While Spengler looked at technology as a demonic force that destroyed culture, Sörgel believed in technical and artistic urban planning solutions for the future. In one of his countless publications, and movies, Atlantropa: Der Neue Erdteil, Das Land der Zukunft [Atlantropa: The New Continent, Land of the Future], Sörgel responded to the Spenglerian despair of civilization with his engineering megalomania and the desire to solve all major problems of the European continent.
Forged between Europe and Africa, his supercontinent in the Mediterranean did not only challenge anything ever imagined technologically, but it also was massive public works project in which he promised it would relieve the unemployment crisis on the entire continent after the war. Through the lowering of the sea level, the acquisition of new land would ease the pressure of overpopulation, which Sörgel thought were the fundamental causes of political unrest in Europe. New tracts of territory would be generated for new urban settlements and agriculture, including the Sahara desert, which was to be irrigated with the help of three sea-sized, man-made lakes located throughout Africa. Sörgel not only aimed to address the challenges of energy production, but he understood that “energy is space,” and it “exploits space as a resource, an environment for consumption, and a place for capital accumulation.”20 Sörgel looked at planning as a totality that extended to every corner of the planet. He was convinced that to remain globally competitive with the technologically and economically advanced United States, and an mounts of electric power.
Conclusions
The critical evaluation of Taut and Sörgel’s approach to Weltbauen gives perspective to our ability to recognize, deconstruct, or counteract more recent incarnations of environmental transformations in theory and practice. The way Weltbauen redefined aesthetics and narratives, both, as an investigation and geographically infused practice, I argue that Taut and Sörgel used Weltbauen as a position against the isolationism between the metropolis and the hinterland. Weltbauen functioned as a framework to give perspective and unearthed systems, materialistic and territorial characteristics that addressed the political significance of the space between the hinterland, nature and the metropolis.
— Antonio Petrov
Endnotes
1 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and R. J. Hollingdale. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1969.
2 Morris, William. Hopes and Fears for Art. Connoisseurship, Criticism, and Art History in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Garland Pub., 1979.
3 Ibid.
4 Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007, p. 29.
5 Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007, p. 29.
6 Friedrich Neumann, Der Deutsche Stil, Hellerau, n.d. (1912), p. 13- Peter Jessen, ‘Der Werkbund und die Grossmaechte der Deutschen Arbeit’, in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 1912, Jena, 1912, pp. 2ff.- Hermann Muthesius, Die Zukunft der Deutschen Form, Stuttgart, 1915 (Der Deutsche Krieg. Politische Flugschriften, L, p.36
7 Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007.
8 Reterritorialization is the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialization. Deterritorialization, characterized as the design of a new power, is a term created by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press, 1988.
9 Translated from the German: “Erst die Planvolle Einstellung der Naturkraefte in den Dienst des Menschen schaft … das Fundament fuer Politik und Wirtschaft.” Sobalt diese bedingungen erfuellt sind, waere der Mensch nicht “das automatisierte anhaengsel der maschine, sondern ihr erfinder.” Source: Russia-Europe-America, Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007.
10 Ironically completed in the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany.
11 Salter, Chris. Entangled : Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, p. 27.
12 Hales, Steven D., and Rex Welshon. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism. International Nietzsche Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
13 Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “Global Earthworks.” Art Journal 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 222-25. P. 83.
14 Ibid P. 55.
15 Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “The Interpretation of the Glass Dream- Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor.” The Journal of the Society of Architecture Historians 40, no. 1 (1981): 20-43.
16 Ranciáere, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. English ed. Cambridge ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009.
17 Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007. P. 29.
18 Ibid.
19 Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang Des Abendlandes : Umrisse Einer Morphologie Der Weltgeschichte. Ungekèurzte Sonderausgabe in einem Band. ed. Mèunchen: C.H. Beck, 1980.
20 Ghosn, Rania. “Landscapes of Energy.” New Geographies 2 (2009). P. 7.
21 Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature : How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press, 2004.
22 Gissen, David, ed. Ad Architectural Design. Vol. 3/2010, Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment: Wiley, 2010. p.14.
Weltbauen: Territory and the Architectural Imaginary
