Architecture as Geopolitical Strategy: The Nazi Cultural Landscape
David Haney, Virginia Tech
6:30p.m. ET | Thursday, February 6, 2024
Schermerhorn Hall, Room 934 | Refreshments Provided
In the Nazi era, Germany was run by extreme far-right Fascists who employed architects, landscape architects, and planners to help them construct their vision of the Nazi blood-and-soil-world. Monumental sites were exploited as actual landmarks that collectively established a new cultural landscape representing the Nazi Fatherland, for which masses of men would be inspired to fight to defend – and expand as an empire. At the level of architectural detail, monumental buildings were physically embedded in the sacred German ground as a literal manifestation of the blood and soil concept. While the Nazi-era is an historic episode, in this lecture we see how apparently normal themes such as love of country and the cultural landscape can be manipulated through the extreme far right to produce something radically racist and discriminatory, to the point of being evil. And, unsurprisingly, the design professions were critical participants in this geopolitical process.
David H. Haney is an architectural historian whose research focuses on the relationship between architecture, landscape, ecology, and geography. Haney’s most recent book, Architecture and The Nazi Cultural Landscape: Blood, Soil, Building, appeared in September 2022. His monograph on the German modernist landscape architect Leberecht Migge (1881-1935), When Modern was Green (Routledge, 2010), was the first study to reassert the critical role of ecological thinking in Weimar-era modern architecture. He received his PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, and his Master of Environmental Design from Yale in 1995. From 2005 to 2018 he taught in the architecture schools of the University of Kent and Newcastle University in England. He has lectured widely and has been the recipient of a number of awards including a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2015-2016), and the SAH Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award (2013). Haney currently teaches history/theory in the School of Architecture at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg.
