Weltkonstruktion

In the twentieth century European architects studied everyday building practices and construction methods of domestic architecture around the world. Their pioneering work laid the foundations for a global history of architectural ethnography – a history of knowledge that remains highly relevant to constructive thinking in architecture today. Sascha Roesler offers the first such history. The empirical study of non-European house building by architects sharpened awareness of how narrowly modernism defined construction and made the epistemic margins of that definition visible. Reading the ethnographic discourses on non-European building, Roesler reconstructs frames of reference for construction that the discipline had neglected for reasons of period, theory and ideology. In place of modernism's focus on load-bearing structure, new conceptual fields appear, tangible in the idea of a thermodynamically or symbolically structured materiality.