Structural Racialism in modern architectural theory

Abstract

Revisionist in the best possible way, this essay uncovers the racialist genealogies of modern architecture. Re-reading architectural history classics – including Quatremère de Quincy, Owen Jones, Viollet-le-Duc, Charles Garnier, Adolf Loos, or Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson – the author unravels a history of modern architecture intimately tied to the belief in the superiority of the Aryan or Germanic race. In their efforts to find a modern architecture – and in close contact with the rise of racial sciences of the nineteenth century – these authors laid the foundations of modernism on changing racial ideals, from the natural to the historical racialism and, ultimately, to its whitewashing through universalism.