Martin Reinhold Bücher

This collection of essays examines the foundational role of architecture in the repression of democracy, highlighting its troubled relationship with antidemocratic politics. Scholars present detailed case studies from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century to the present, analyzing instances where the built environment has been used as a tool of authoritarian power. The contributors explore significant historical and contemporary events thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany, Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright's domestic architecture, and Istanbul's Taksim Square. Through these diverse accounts, the work provides a selective overview of antidemocratic processes in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent "nationalist international." As new forms of nationalism and authoritarianism emerge globally, this timely collection deepens our understanding of architecture's role in opposing democracy. Contributors include scholars from various prestigious institutions, enriching the discourse on architecture's impact on political landscapes.

Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions.