(Zionist) Coloniality under (British) Colonialism
The Architectural and Warfare Modernism of Yohanan (Eugene) Ratner in Mandatory Palestine

#3 of the Organizing Architectures Lecture Series on “Coloniality”

4.2.2026, 19 Uhr – 20:30 Uhr
DAM Auditorium
The lecture will be held in English.
Free admission, no advance registration required.

A Lecture by Prof. Dr. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Haifa)

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—an 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’s architectural school, while volunteering to organize and spatialize the military resistance of the Jewish population.

I will argue that Ratner’s 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 “capital A” 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 “forms of dominance” that Ratner envisioned nurtured a coloniality of power that predated rather than (or prior to) outlasting the formal end of European colonialism.

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 “Seizing Jerusalem: The Architectures of Unilateral Unification” was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2017. She is currently completing an edited volume, “Erich Mendelsohn: Architecture of Dialogue” and writes the Israel volume of the “Modern Architectures in History” series by Reaktion Books.

This event is part of this year’s lecture series of the DFG Research Training Group “Organizing Architectures”. https://organizingarchitectures.org/

Members of the Architektenkammer Hessen (AKH) can earn 2 credits points for participating.