4.2.2026, 19 Uhr \u2013 20:30 Uhr A Lecture by Prof. Dr. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan (Technion \u2013 Israel Institute of Technology Haifa)<\/p>\n The proposition to study coloniality as a modernist mode of organizing the ties between the terrain and its inhabitants allows us to set apart the act of settlement from the power of colonial rule. It thus provides a powerful theoretical tool to question the knowledge and expertise Zionists drew on to disperse civic and military settlement as a means of resisting and often undermining the colonial authority of the British Mandate (1922-1948). I address this tension by probing the architectural agency of Yohanan (Eugene) Ratner\u2014an immensely influential and largely forgotten figure, whose expertise and teaching simultaneously modernized the architecture and warfare of the Jewish population in Mandate Palestine. Trained as an architect in Germany and as a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army during W.W.I., in Palestine Ratner accepted a paid job as a formative Dean of the Technion\u2019s architectural school, while volunteering to organize and spatialize the military resistance of the Jewish population.<\/p>\n I will argue that Ratner\u2019s capacity to reciprocate between architecture and warfare is indebted to the foundation of both in the epistemology of German and Russian modernities. In architecture Ratner is credited with the transition from historicism to modernism in institutional building of \u201ccapital A\u201d Architecture. But perhaps his greater influence is in the utilitarian architecture, territorial strategies, and organizational infrastructure that he devised through his non-paid job and have turned into a Zionist modus operandi. This rather invisible architectural-military oeuvre demonstrates how the nascent \u201cforms of dominance\u201d that Ratner envisioned nurtured a coloniality of power that predated rather than (or prior to) outlasting the formal end of European colonialism.<\/p>\n Alona Nitzan-Shiftan is Professor of Architecture, History and Theory, currently a visiting professor at the GTA in ETH Zurich. She is a full professor at the Technion, where she holds the Churchill Academic Chair and heads the Arenson Built Heritage Research Center. Her work on the politics of architecture and heritage, inter and postwar architectural modernism, and critical historiography has been sponsored by CASVA, Getty\/UCLA, U of Michigan and U of Chicago. She served as the president of the European Architectural History Network, and advanced design research as the first Chair of Architecture at the Technion. Her awards-winning book \u201cSeizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification\u201d was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2017. She is currently completing an edited volume, \u201cErich Mendelsohn: Architecture of Dialogue\u201d and writes the Israel volume of the \u201cModern Architectures in History\u201d series by Reaktion Books.<\/p>\n This event is part of this year\u2019s lecture series of the DFG Research Training Group \u201cOrganizing Architectures\u201d. https:\/\/organizingarchitectures.org\/<\/p>\n Members of the Architektenkammer Hessen (AKH) can earn 2 credits points for participating.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The proposition to study coloniality as a modernist mode of organizing the ties between the terrain and its inhabitants allows us to set apart the act of settlement from the power of colonial rule. It thus provides a powerful theoretical tool to question the knowledge and expertise Zionists drew on to disperse civic and military settlement as a means of resisting and often undermining the colonial authority of the British Mandate (1922-1948).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":62599,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[233],"veranstaltungs_formate":[136,128,129],"tribe_events_cat":[406,253,255],"class_list":["post-62946","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-mega-menu-en","veranstaltungs_formate-fortbildung","veranstaltungs_formate-vortrag","veranstaltungs_formate-vortragsreihe","veranstaltungs_bedingungen-freier-eintritt","veranstaltungs_bedingungen-fuer-erwachsene","veranstaltungs_bedingungen-im-haus","veranstaltungs_bedingungen-sozial","tribe_events_cat-erwachsene-en","tribe_events_cat-veranstaltung-en","tribe_events_cat-vermittlung-en","cat_erwachsene-en","cat_veranstaltung-en","cat_vermittlung-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/62946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/62946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62946"},{"taxonomy":"veranstaltungs_formate","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltungs_formate?post=62946"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dam-online.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=62946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>DAM Auditorium
\n<\/strong>The lecture will be held in English.
\n<\/strong>Free admission, no advance registration required.<\/strong><\/p>\n