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The Invention of Indigenous Architecture
Kenny Cupers
What is indigenous architecture? An example that might come to mind is the
traditional German farmstead, nestled in the agrarian landscape or perhaps part
of an old village, as is suggested in an early twentieth- century photograph of
Golenhofen (gure 10.1). e farmhouses of this picturesque village feature half-
timbered facades, clipped gable roofs, dormers, and a variety of pitched roof
shapes. Yet despite exhibiting such age- old German building styles, the entire
village was meticulously planned and built from scratch just a few years before it
was photographed for publication in the magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration
(German Art and Decoration) in 1906.1 e ensemble encompassed not only
farmsteads but also a church, a school, workers’ houses, an inn, a bakery, a poor-
house, and even a small public laundry and a re station, built with material and
technologies imported from Berlin. Golenhofen was located in Prussia’s eastern,
Polish- dominated province of Posen; the village is now in of Poland, and bears the
name Golęczewo. But at the close of the nineteenth century, this seemingly time-
less German hamlet was part of a rural modernization and territorial control
project.
Even though indigenous architecture— architecture of, for, and by people native
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to an area— conjures up a sense of timelessness, it is itself not a timeless concept.
It was invented in the nineteenth century, and would have important repercussions
in the one to follow. By the time Golenhofen was built, there was a well- established
discourse in Germany about what architecture was considered native. Even though
intellectual elites tended to reserve the term “native” for non- Europeans they con-
sidered inferior, they approached rural communities in European provinces with
similar assumptions about the innate connection between architecture, land, and
racialized notions of human dierence. While anthropologists looked for indige-
neity in the colonized other, folklorists, as they would come to call themselves,
tended to approach the material culture of rural Europe in a like- minded manner
in which anything from dress to building came to index ethnic identity. As the
notion of the nation gained increasing importance in the nineteenth century,
locating the indigenous within one’s own society was not only important in order
to dene that society as modern, but to be grounded and communal in that
modernity.
In the course of the nineteenth century, architecture became ever more intensely
charged with the task of representing human dierence in terms of race.
Architecture became part of a powerful set of “invented traditions” used by elites
to bolster national pride and the supremacy of whiteness.2 Imperial Germany is a
particularly instructive context to examine how these anxieties about race shaped
the discourse of indigenous architecture. Germany lagged behind in the formation
Fig. 10.1 The village of Golenhofen in the province of Posen, designed by Paul Fischer. Source: “Eine deutsche Dorf-Anlage
in den Ostmarken,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 18, April–September 1906, 536.
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The Invention of Indigenous Architecture
of a national consciousness when compared to England, France, or the United
States. e region’s multiethnic population and its extreme fragmentation in ter-
ritorial sovereignty challenged a sense of nationhood both before and after
German unication in 1871. Beyond these challenges in the construction of
nationhood, Germany also experienced rapid urbanization and mass migration in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which propelled desires for
belonging and rootedness. e concept of Heimat (homeland) and its architectural
productions such as at Golenhofen were crucial to German nation- building as
much as they were strategies to cope with modernization and globalization.3
Despite much scholarship that unpacks this cultural and political role of archi-
tecture, scholarship on the twentieth century has often continued to accept archi-
tecture’s claims to represent ethnic identity at face value. is tends to mask the
history of modernism as the self- evident spread of “international” architectural
principles, forms, and styles. Even the proposition of what has been termed “crit-
ical regionalism”— a combination of International Style aesthetics with “local” or
“regional” elements— rests on an assumed direct relationship between architecture,
ethnic identity, and geographic environment. is assumption becomes particu-
larly problematic for the history of architecture in formerly colonized parts of the
world. Up until today, indigenous claims remain central to anti- colonial struggle,
and architecture can play a signicant role in such struggles. e concept of indi-
geneity has indeed been mobilized by colonized peoples in the eort to attain
self- rule and continues to shape post- independence nationalism, particularly in
Africa. But history shows that the kind of work that the idea of indigenousness
performs when applied to architecture has not always been emancipatory.
Indigenous architecture was promoted and produced by metropolitan elites before
it was mobilized by colonized peoples for their own purposes.4 At the time of
Golenhofen’s construction, Germany was, after all, both a nation- state under con-
struction, and an empire with colonial ambition both overseas and in Europe. Its
architecture was not only an invented tradition for domestic purposes; it was also
an instrument of colonial oppression.
Heimat and Lebensraum
In his bestselling Kulturarbeiten volumes, published between 1901 and 1917, archi-
tect Paul Schultze- Naumburg argued that to protect Germany from the unsettling
consequences of industrialization and urbanization, architecture needed to be
what was called bodenständig— literally rooted in the soil. Styles needed to be
native, just like plants, to their environment rather imported from abroad; he was
especially critical about the use of Italian renaissance and French styles in
Germany’s burgeoning industrial cities. “Rooted” architecture, by contrast, would
safeguard the Heimat— an idea that was central to the Heimatschutz movement,
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the environmental and architectural preservation movement that Schultze-
Naumburg helped found in 1904. Germans, like other Europeans, made categor-
ical distinctions between their own native populations and the natives elsewhere.
e term eingeboren (native) was used for Africans, while Heimat and
Bodenständigkeit as applied to people were reserved for those individuals indige-
nous to Germany. Architectural historians have tended to translate bodenständig
as contextual or regional, but “indigenous” is in fact a more illuminating translation
in this context, since its usage allows one to critically approach the imperial dis-
tinction between colonizer and colonized. Despite its romantic provenance and
anti- modern overtones, Bodenständigkeit— and the aesthetics associated with
it— were fundamental to the development of modern architecture.5
Schultze- Naumburg was not the rst and certainly not the only one at the time
to focus on architecture indigenous to Germany. In 1894, the Berlin Architects’
Association (Vereinigung Berliner Architekten) had already begun commission-
ing a systematic study of the German farmhouse, leading to the publication in
1906 of the encyclopedic book Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und in seinen
Grenzgebieten (gure 10.2).6 Such studies of German building traditions were part
and parcel of the rise of folklore studies, which developed rst in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Since its founding in 1863, the Österreichische Museum für
Kunst und Industrie had been exhibiting regional arts and crafts objects to repre-
sent the multinational identity of the empire, and during the 1870s, this focus was
expanded to include farm buildings.7 In contrast to the acknowledgment of its
multiethnic regional character in Austria- Hungary, however, folk art in Germany
was more often cast as naturally unied.8 Just as the notion of a local Heimat
contributed directly to German nationalism, as scholars like Celia Applegate have
demonstrated, so was local folk art— whether from the Schwarzwald or
uringia— understood as a direct expression of the German people, or Volk.9
Folklorists such as Robert Mielke, cofounder of the Heimatschutz movement,
and Oscar Schwindrazheim, who founded the association Volkskunst in Hamburg
in 1889, considered folklore to spring from the countryside and thus not from the
city. eir unspoken assumption was that rural buildings were more indigenous
than urban ones. is rural ideal relied on the romantic intellectual tradition of
Johann Gottfried Herder and the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, one of the
founders of German Volkskunde (ethnology). In his four- volume Die Naturgeschichte
des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social- Politik, written between 1851 and
1869— the most famous volume of which is entitled Land und Leute (Land and
People)— Riehl emphasized the essential German- ness of the landscape. e book
contrasted the agrarian landscapes of France with the forest landscapes of
Germany, and found in the latter the uniqueness of its national character. Riehl
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Fig. 10.2 Cover of Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und in seinen Grenzgebieten (Dresden: Verlag von
Gerhard Kühtmann, 1906).
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Kenny Cupers
understood German culture, more than any, as anchored in the land, and thus
organically grown through nature and history. His anti- urban and anti- modern
ideology had a long- lasting inuence on German intellectual culture in the second
half of the nineteenth century.10
By the turn of the twentieth century, through the work of Schultze- Naumburg,
Mielke, and others, these romantic ideas had developed into a more deterministic
mapping of German architecture onto the national territory. Architectural forms,
styles, and details were systematically projected onto territory in order to suggest
that racial identity was rooted in the land, and that local homelands could be
subsumed under the umbrella of the German “race.” At the same time, the folk-
loric celebration of Germany’s man- made landscapes, by Heimatschutz advocates
and reform movements such as the Wandervogel, was not foreign to imperialist
ambitions, and in many ways correlated with emerging geopolitical theories. e
concept of Lebensraum (literally, living space), developed by the geographer
Friedrich Ratzel, best encapsulates these imperialist ambitions. Lebensraum was
dened as “the geographical surface area required to support a living species at its
current population size and mode of existence.”11 As an evolutionary rationality of
environment, Lebensraum impacted older concepts such as Heimat, which were
based on more static connections between people and the land, as formulated by
Riehl earlier in the century. Ratzel’s concept thus signaled a revolution in how
space was understood: social and political space was no longer essentially xed but
could now be conceived of as a vital category.12
Lebensraum is one of the most well- known German political concepts of the
twentieth century. After the treaty of Versailles, radical conservatives harnessed it
to argue for the establishment of a new German empire, and the Nazis subse-
quently employed it to legitimize the invasion of Poland. But its political impact
was felt even before that; the concept was formulated in 1901 to legitimize German
settler colonialism. Ratzel’s concept was a way of extending biological principles
to geography, casting the Darwinian struggle for life as, essentially, a struggle for
space.13 By conceptualizing the state as an organism rooted in the soil, he suggested
that just like plants spreading their roots, a people needed to expand its territory
or die. is idea, of environment as a category of life itself, resonated with a range
of turn- of- the- century reformers, including Heimatschutz advocates. Opposed to
turning to the widespread urbanization, industrialization, and internationalization
of the time, and a corresponding instrumentalist view of nature and human society,
these advocates held up biology as the guiding principle for social and political
aairs. And it was this kind of naturalist nativism that undergirded the deploy-
ment of indigenous architecture in the German Empire— from the Prussian coun-
tryside to sub- Saharan Africa.
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The Invention of Indigenous Architecture
Systematic Settlement
Golenhofen was a rural modernization project of the Prussian Settlement
Commission. Between its establishment in 1886 and 1918, this state organization
settled close to 150,000 Germans in farming villages in Prussia’s eastern provinces
of Posen and West Prussia. Around the time of Polish independence in 1918, the
Settlement Commission proclaimed to have built 57 churches, 479 schools, and
more than 700 other public buildings, in addition to thousands of farmsteads.14
Central to such “internal colonization” eorts, as Germans called them, was the
aim of strengthening German national identity in the eastern provinces. Resettling
German farmers and workers was a way to oppress Polish people, and this goal
was explicitly formulated by the Settlement Commission at its outset.15 Polish
resistance only grew in the following decades, in part as a response to the work of
the Prussian Settlement Commission. Land prices skyrocketed because Polish
farmers were eager to buy back land from German settlers, which led to new
legislation in 1908 to allow the direct expropriation of Polish farmers.16 But the
oppression ultimately failed; it only further heightened Polish nationalism. In the
period 1896–1914, the Polish anti- colonial movement gained 181,437 hectares of
land.17
German ocials cast Polish farmers as backwards, their agricultural techniques
as inecient, and their architecture as primitive. Tropes of colonial ideology thus
seem readily applicable to the resettlement project. Yet despite some parallels with
overseas colonialism and the increasingly racialized understanding of German-
Polish dierences, the category of race worked quite dierently in Prussia than it
did, for instance, in the empire’s African colonies. Although Germans saw the
Poles as inferior, they were still incontestably European. Polish people had ocial
citizenship in the Prussian state and there were no interdictions on Polish- German
marriages or explicit segregation policies.18 In fact, the determination of German
and Polish nationality was often an ambiguous and contradictory exercise. Since
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Prussian statisticians had used linguistic
status as the determinant of nationality.19 Yet, in practice, categorical distinctions
between Germans and Poles were often extremely dicult to make— in some
regions language was to determine nationhood, while in others “behavior showing
adherence to the German state [Staatsgedanken]” was proposed as a supposed
determinant.20 e region’s Jews, living mostly in cities, were sadly caught in
between German nationalism and its Polish response.
e Prussian Settlement Commission was not solely motivated by an anti-
Polish agenda. It was in fact part of a larger set of programs focused on rural
modernization. In other parts of Germany, including those without a marked
non- German presence, a range of organizations pursued internal colonization as
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a way to rationalize rural land use and increase agricultural productivity.21 e
German countryside had been emptying throughout much of the nineteenth cen-
tury as peasants moved to cities or abroad. German governments responded by
launching programs that would repopulate the countryside and expand agricul-
tural productivity. Like other programs, the Prussian Settlement Commission
aimed to transform large land holdings into smaller farmsteads. Social as much as
it was economic in its aims, this measure would counter rural proletarianization
by strengthening the German rural middle class.
Architecture and planning played a key role in this project. Village layouts such
as Golenhofen’s aimed to create a community of German settlers while providing
each farmer with enough land for sustenance and independence. During the rst
years of the commission’s activities, settlers were responsible for building their own
farmsteads, using their own skills and building traditions. However, the commis-
sion soon took charge of the massive building operations, from the provision of
materials to design and construction. e project’s chief architect, Paul Fischer,
was responsible for the designs. Although he remains virtually unknown in archi-
tectural history today— he is not to be confused with the more well- known archi-
tect eodor Fischer— Fischer was well- versed in architectural debates of his time
and was particularly drawn to Heimatschutz ideas.22 In the rst half of the 1890s,
Fischer pursued an extensive survey of the farmsteads constructed by the rst
settlers to Prussia, who came from as far as Hungary and the Baltic. A decade into
the commission’s building experience, Fischer concluded that neither self- building
by the farmers nor custom design by his oce was ideal. e rst method was
economically inecient, and the second led to buildings that were often unsuited
to farmers’ needs. Consequently, Fischer implemented a new system of building
that was both centrally administered and adjustable to local needs and circum-
stances. e commission’s central administration would pay for wages and mate-
rials, so building production could be signicantly streamlined.23 At the same time,
designs were to be customized by individual estate managers.24 Such a system
required pre- approved, standardized designs, which Fischer compiled in a series
of catalogues (gure 10.3).25 e designs were inspired by his survey of the kinds
of structures settling farmers had built for themselves. Fischer understood his
work as a process of collecting of Germanic building traditions, inspired by the
self- building practices of migrating farmers from lower Saxony and Westfalen to
Hungary, mobilized for a rationalized design and construction system.
Reecting the contemporaneous debates within the Deutscher Werkbund, a
German association of architects, designers, industrialists, and artists, Fischer’s
work was shaped both by a romantic, anti- urban nationalism and the imperative
of standardization. In fact, despite the ethos of standardization that underlay the
commission’s building production, Fischer was adamant about stylistic diversity.
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Fig. 10.3 Farmstead design by Paul Fischer. Source: Paul Fischer, Ansiedlungsbauten in den Provinzen Posen
und Westpreußen (Halle a.S.: Ludwig Hofstetter, 1904), 3.
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None of the commission’s dozens of churches was the same. e goal of creating
a feeling of place by promoting architectural dierence reected the ambitions of
Heimatschutz designers. Architectural forms inspired by native traditions— even
if these regions were located a thousand kilometers away— would help settlers feel
at home. Whether the farmers trying to establish livelihoods in new surroundings
cared much for the intricate half- timbering is unclear. Many may in fact have
preferred more rudimentary, economical buildings. e ultimate goal of the
Prussian Resettlement Program, however, was not simply to build homes, but to
reinforce the homeland. is is what informed the creation of a rational system of
so- called indigenous architecture that was meant to make centuries of Polish
presence in eastern Prussia irrelevant.
Building a New Homeland
Compared with other major European powers, Germany came late not only to
the business of nation- building, but also to the colonial project. Only with the
Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 did Germany become an imperial power and
begin to ocially acquire colonial possessions in Africa (now Namibia, Tanzania,
Cameroon, and Togo), the Pacic (New Guinea and Samoa), and China (port
concessions). In these overseas colonies, architecture was similarly used to con-
struct a homeland, and building was accompanied by violent practices of dispos-
session and annihilation. is was particularly true in Namibia. Soon after its
formal colonization in 1884, armchair colonists began to portray German
Southwest Africa as an ideal territory on which to expand German Lebensraum.
While the region’s existing polities had participated in capitalist exchange for
centuries, and local societies had been reshaped by long- distance trade and migra-
tion from the Cape Colony, the relatively short period of German colonization
(until 1915) constituted a radical moment of rupture— not so much for bringing
the region into the dynamics of global capitalism than for ruthless annihilation
and the systematic dispossession of African land and wealth.26 After the genocidal
war with Namibia from 1904 to 1908, the German colonial state aimed to trans-
form those who had survived into a landless proletariat, to destroy their culture
and political organization, and to force them into serving as a disciplined labor
force for white employers.
While white settlement remained nevertheless sparse, and fewer than 15,000
Germans moved to Namibia during the German colonial period (compare this
with the 150,000 settlements in eastern Prussia alone), settler colonialism in
Namibia constituted a radical restructuring in the ownership, use, meaning, and
construction of the landscape. As they moved to this region’s dry highlands and
deserts, German settlers relied not only on African forced and wage labor, but at
least initially, on local building techniques. e architecture of the region’s existing
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The Invention of Indigenous Architecture
peoples included domed huts, rst represented in early nineteenth- century draw-
ings. Germans called these pontoks, to mean any dwelling type built by and for
natives. In addition, the settlers adopted the Afrikaans word hartbeeshuis to typify
the dwellings built by groups of mixed African and European descent. Just like
their builders, German colonists understood such dwellings as a hybrid type, built
using “native” techniques but essentially “European” in form.27 By reducing archi-
tectural form to racial type, colonists denied both the variety and historical change
of dwelling cultures in precolonial Namibia.
In a pamphlet distributed to the rst settlers, the German Colonial Society
explained how to use such native building techniques. For the roofs, the pamphlet
suggested weaving together small trunks and twigs, rather than using corrugated
metal.28 Not only was corrugated metal expensive to import from Europe, it also
collected the intensive desert heat. Over the following decades, however, corru-
gated metal— together with all sorts of building elements such as windows and
doors— was increasingly imported for roof construction and became the colony’s
standard roof material. Similarly, for masonry walls, builders gradually replaced
local stone with factory- produced cement blocks as they became locally available.
Despite the growing inuence of such modern building materials, or perhaps
because of it, Germans increasingly insisted on the Bodenständigkeit of their new
architecture.
In the colonial imagination, farmsteads were often thought of as naturally
rooted in their new homeland— just as they would have been in Germany. is
idea of natural rooting was suggested in drawings and paintings, such as those by
Erich Mayer.29 But it was more than just imagined or represented. Architecture
eectively served to transform the colony into a new, German homeland. Half-
timbering and clipped gable roofs constituted often self- conscious strategies to
emphasize German- ness in a geographical and climatic environment that contin-
ued to estrange and threaten colonial settlers. Industrial corrugated metal roong
was made to emulate complicated roof forms and details, including turrets, clipped
gables, and dormers. Despite the fact that these could be historically found across
much of northern and central Europe, and had more to do with the European
popularity of the neo- Tudor style than with historical German farmhouses, colo-
nists understood these elements to be essentially German. Moreover, these ele-
ments were often given a new function. Dormers rarely functioned as dormers, for
example; they were instead used to allow natural roof ventilation and to mitigate
the considerable heat built up under the metal roofs. e veranda became a dom-
inant feature of rural architecture, and could be seen in rudimentary farm buildings
as well as in more extravagant, architect- designed farmsteads.30 Built across colo-
nial Africa and South Asia, the veranda was inserted in a growing stylistic vocab-
ulary of German Southwest African architecture. Despite its quasi- global spread,
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the veranda came to be portrayed as a new element of specically German archi-
tecture for the new Heimat.31
Of course, the creation of a new homeland was hardly a matter of architectural
form or style alone. It required systematic eorts to physically dispossess Africans
and segregate their bodies in time and space. Control of the colonized population
entailed creating enclaves, building fences, and enforcing curfews.32 e building
of white settlements such as Windhoek also entailed the creation of native settle-
ments, locations, or werften— a form of segregation that was later formalized in
the South African apartheid system.33 In this process, the pontok was no longer
understood as indigenous architecture, but rather came to shelter a landless class
of refugees in marginalized enclaves or, during the Namibian war, in concentration
camps.34
Since the beginning of German colonial rule, African resistance had prompted
intensive militarization, which continued to shape the production and meaning of
the Namibian built landscape at large. German colonization had left a sprawl of
military infrastructure, in particular forts, across the country, especially along the
line that would become to delineate the “Police Zone,” as the Germans called it,
demarcating the southern two- thirds of the country where colonial control could
be maintained.35 But militarization shaped civilian architecture as well. is was
perhaps most striking in the crenellations that appeared on many private residen-
tial buildings. Housing projects for ocers adopted the layouts and sometimes
even the massing of forts.36 Even though such military architectural elements
might just as well be found in the residential architecture of Berlin’s leafy suburbs
at this time, they attained a meaning particular to the colonial context of German
Southwest Africa.
e prison of the coastal town of Swakopmund, designed by Otto Ertl and
nished in 1909, suggests how militarization and Bodenständigkeit collided in this
context.37 Like other prisons, the building was organized by strict segregation, with
separate entries and cells for white and nonwhite prisoners. With a mastery
unusual for the colonial builders in the empire’s overseas colonies, this building
displayed many of the stylistic tropes of the Heimatschutz movement, replete with
medieval- looking cornerstones, half- timbering, turrets, and protruding gables (g-
ure 10.4). e architect’s idea for the prison was that all its building materials
should be “appropriate to the local climatic conditions,” and therefore he chose
ashlar stone masonry.38 is aim seemed to be lifted from Schultze- Naumburg’s
ideas about Bodenständigkeit as outlined in the Kulturarbeiten volumes. Yet in a
colonial context where architectural design served to legitimize the dispossession
of exactly those who had indigenous rights to the soil, the cruel irony of these
ambitions seems to have gone entirely unnoticed.
e modern invention of indigenous architecture, foundational to the
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The Invention of Indigenous Architecture
Heimatschutz movement, was not only an instrument of cultural reform or envi-
ronmental preservation in historically German cities and countrysides, but also an
instrument of the European colonial project. From Namibia to eastern Prussia,
architecture was mobilized to colonize land and to reinforce German imperial
reign. Paradoxically, the accompanying architectural styles used the idea of indig-
enousness against those who had indigenous rights to the land. In the German
empire, indigenous architecture was not something that was simply found, or even
discovered; it was something that needed to be built and imposed. Indigenous
architecture was not just about employing the local to build the nation, but about
reshaping the local in order to expand empire. As it required a new, unprecedented
harnessing of people and materials, empire building entailed an architectural proj-
ect of indigenizing— of assigning people to specic places, making those people
belong to that place, and dispossessing others. For cultural reformers in Germany,
architectural indigeneity served as the medium for a new way of life, in touch with
nature and tradition. For ocials of the Settlement Commission and colonial
governments, it allowed for the implantation of a rational system of settlement.
For German settlers, it oered the opportunity to feel at home while they were far
away. And for Polish landholders and African pastoralists, it was a weapon that
enforced their dispossession.
Fig. 10.4 Prison of Swakopmund, designed by Otto Ertl, 1909. Source: Cupers, 2014.
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