title: Staging Facts on the Ground: On the Historical Role of Built Objects as Markers of Imperial-Colonial Expansion
Creators: name: Pauer, Lukas
Publisher: name: The Open University
Year: 2025

description: This research critically examines built objects as evidence for the projection of power, authority, and influence. Specifically, my doctoral dissertation critically studies how imperial-colonial expansion has been performed architecturally throughout history.

There is a lack of general understanding of imperial-colonial violence as a pervasive and ongoing reality around the world. To not recognize the workings of this violence around us is a risk. In response, I seek to establish a working language by offering an account of architecture as a world-making device for the production of political imaginaries that legitimize claims to sovereignty. I argue that throughout the history of imperial-colonial expansion, sovereignty acquisition has depended on its practical realization on the ground. Structuring my dissertation, I inventory and categorize built objects that have been key to the acquisition of authority and influence over people and land. The first chapter looks at ancient Hellenic scene buildings, sacred barriers, and Roman military standards. These built objects used scenographic techniques along ancient procession paths to lay claim to governance. Giving a description of extraterritorial techniques along medieval trade routes, the second chapter analyzes how Eastern traveler inns, nation houses, and Western trade factories legitimized power in medieval times. The third chapter examines modern French semaphore towers, timeball towers, and British telegraph poles. In order to lay claim to authority, these built objects employed geodetic techniques along modern signal lines. Offering an account of filtrational techniques along recent transit corridors, the fourth chapter analyzes how US American quarantine facilities, detention facilities, and prescreening facilities legitimized influence in recent times. Thus, the narrative of this dissertation follows along with the Euro-and Western hegemonic lineage of techniques it sets out to expose and deconstruct. It covers the historical role of built objects in the intrahegemonic spread of Euro-Western imaginaries of imperial-colonial expansionism, tracing a genealogy of visual, material, and spatial practices taken up and aspirationally emulated by various hegemonic powers expanding into different parts of the world, carrying with them Euro-Western imaginaries from one hegemonic context to another.

The prevalent misconception that sovereignty is not without jurists and that the representation of sovereignty is not without cartographers persists. However, in practice, architects have played a key role in linking sovereignty to the ground via markers throughout history. My object-centered and non-written practice-based rather than written law-based approach highlights and problematizes how built objects embodying European and Western imaginaries of sovereignty have been instrumentalized for claims to the rest of the world on Euro-Western terms. Applying analytical and representational techniques, my dissertation traces a shift from a symbolic approach to occupation, based on aspects of the form and topographic context of built objects instrumentalized for sovereignty claims, to an effective one, based more on aspects of the function and topological context of the instrumentalized objects. I conclude that the political and theoretical concept of sovereignty is not to be separated from its built and practical markers on the ground; sovereignty is not without its markers.