Lager als Architektur. Kriegsflüchtlingslager der Habsburgermonarchie und Architektur der Moderne
Antje Senarclens de Grancy
Basel: Birkhäuser, 2024
German, 416 pages
ISBN: 978-3-03562-735-0 
EUR 88,00
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Disciplining and parcellation of living space, prefabrication and accelerated construction, functional segregation and hygiene in an urban context, housing colonies and small residential units—all of these topics were investigated by the planners of military, refugee, and detention camps in the early twentieth century. However, in their role as temporary collective accomodations, camps were long overlooked or only marginally discussed in the architectural historiography of modernism. In her book, Antje Senarclens de Grancy now for the first time examines the camps of the First World War in the context of modern architecture and urban planning. The focus here is placed on refugee camps as state-initiated instant cities planned by architects—designed for acute emergencies, but also for the internment and control of citizens of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The author develops perspectives on these camp formations based on newly accessed sources, demonstrating concrete and empirical connections to urban and residential construction. She shows how architectural developments in camps are, like under a magnifiying glass, densified, accelerated, and radicalized.