By Dennis Pohl

In this volume of Sternberg's Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl locates the origin of Europe's dependency on carbon and nuclear power in the postwar architectural designs and energy policies of the European Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial, regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in an effort to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs. This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of postwar Europe as a means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into tools of European governance. Pohl's work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the carbonisation of Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue, which challenges both architectural criticism and historiography in the era of the Anthropocene.