Biopolitical Architecture: Right-Wing Politics and the Design of Healthy Bodies in Romania, 1920-1944

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intertwined history of modern architecture, eugenics, and right-wing politics in Romania in the period 1920-1944. Combining methods drawn from architectural, social, and political history, this investigation charts the development of biopolitical architecture as the country turned increasingly right-wing amidst the international rise of fascism and impending total mobilization. To this end, the dissertation examines an array of building typologies designed to implement social- and racial-hygienic policies, ranging from apprentices’ boarding schools to rural puericulture dispensaries and forced labor camps. Although at first sight these building types appear dissimilar, they were all administered by a sole governmental body—the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Social Protection. This dissertation proposes three main arguments. In contrast to the mobility of transnational biopolitical discourse, this project foregrounds architecture as a historical source that anchors abstract concepts such as authoritarianism, racism, and eugenics in concrete government policies and lived experience. Second, by focusing on the materiality and place-specificity of the built environment, this approach moves away from totalizing explanations of top-down power and internalized discipline to an explanatory model that foregrounds public health as a political field in which privileges were contested among competing social and ethnic groups. Third, this project investigates both consensus-based and coercive building typologies, thus revealing the Janus-faced character of biopolitical architecture. It was profitable to the privileged majority and oppressive to marginalized groups. Embedded in its popular appeal was its destructiveness.