How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era
and paved the way for today's dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear
power.
In this volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl
locates the origin of Europe's dependency on carbon and nuclear power in
the postwar architectural designs and energy policies of the European
Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial,
regional, and urban development plans that served the European political
project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in
an effort to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car
industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as
promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs.
This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of
postwar Europe as a means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into
tools of European governance. Architectural design enabled EU
institutions to support social policies and worker housing within the
coal and steel industry as well as to promote a new pan-European
lifestyle based on nuclear energy. In other words, architecture powered
Europe's larger infrastructural, economic, and cultural network. Pohl's
work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the
carbonization of Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue,
which challenges both architectural criticism and historiography in the
era of the Anthropocene.
Design by Zak Group
Featuring artwork by Armin Linke and Giulia Bruno
