2/3/2024 0 Comments Jena08 rec tube![]() It has been argued that it laid the groundwork for numerous structural visions of European integration and intervention during the interwar and early postwar years-from the pan-European network plans developed by the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, and the European Atomic Energy Commission, to the Schuman-, Strasbourg-, and Marshall Plans. It provided both blueprint and technical apparatus-at its core a world power grid-for intervention, and loomed large in the imaginations of postwar planners. Sörgel’s proposal bears witness to this shift in all its media-technological modalities. ![]() This discourse is marked by a shift in colonial practice, distinguished, as Dirk van Laak has noted, by a common European ideology of interventionist development, of opening up and cultivating foreign territories as material and human resources through investments in infrastructure. ![]() The project illustrates an emerging discourse of ‘world building,’ framed by discussions of risk and remainderlessness (Restlosigkeit), that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century among architects and engineers who saw themselves as intervention-oriented planners. This paper will argue that Sörgel’s 20-year Atlantropa project exemplifies an under-explored genre of modern European architectural thought, shaped, epistemologically, by its techniques-both its geopolitical and material infrastructural technologies. Concrete dams, steel levers, glass towers, copper conductors, and rubber cables were the fabric-and instruments-of Atlantropa’s architecture. ‘Instead of diving walls: binding power lines!’ Sörgel proclaimed, ‘Only a common high voltage network achieves a European Union.’ Europe and Africa would form a double continent joined by the technological bonds of infrastructure. Once separated from the surging force of the Atlantic, Sörgel claimed, the water levels of the Mediterranean Sea would decrease, and immense new areas of arable land would appear along the changing coastal territories, reserved for European settlement. The circuit closed at Gibraltar, Atlantropa’s geographical origin point and the nucleus of its machinery. Sörgel proposed sealing the Straits of Gibraltar with an enormous dam, the center of a system of subsidiary dams and power plants that stretched from the Dardanelles east to the Ural Mountains, down the Arabian Peninsula and encircled the African continent. At the 1930 World Energy Conference in Berlin, the German architect Herman Sörgel unveiled his technological vision for Atlantropa-an infrastructural hydroelectric network that tethered strategic territories in Africa and the Middle East to the industrial centers of Central Europe.
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