In the five largest cities along the west coast of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), bright white housing blocks rise from the rugged bedrock like rectangular, alien objects. The standardized concrete blocks stand as a material testimony to the Danish-controlled modernization of the country, which radically transformed all aspects of Greenlandic society from 1953 to 1979. This project investigates the colonial entanglements of the post-Second World War Danish welfare state and its architectural manifestations, as seen in its emergence across the North Atlantic and the Arctic, in the two former Danish colonies: Greenland and the Faroe Islands. New scholarship about the Danish welfare state tends to privilege the metropole, either disregarding Greenland and the Faroe Islands or treating them as anomalies in post-war high-modernist developments. I instead argue that the colonial history of the North-Atlantic was central to the construction of the Danish welfare state, its ideology, and the welfare subjectivity that crystallized through new norms, defined in opposition to an unmodern ‘other.’ Architecture at multiple scales, from cross-national urban planning to intimate domestic management, was a crucial component of this welfare ideology and the ensuing high-modernist transformation of the region.
Bio: Frederik Braüner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and an exchange scholar at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. His research focuses on the history and theory of welfare-state architecture, primarily in the Nordics and the Arctic. In his ongoing PhD research, he is investigating the Danish welfare state’s colonial presence in the Arctic, looking into the social, cultural, and economic factors that influenced the waves of post-war modernization that took place especially in Greenland and the Faroe Islands.Frederik holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Copenhagen and an M.A. in Architecture from the Royal Danish Academy.
