Contenu du sommaire : Transactional Spaces

In 1862 the Standard Bank of British South Africa was formed in London. A so-called imperial bank, its growth became synonymous with that of South Africa itself. It achieved a dominant position during the Transvaal gold boom of the 1880s, where its presence on the Rand saw it go from a mere canvas tent in 1886 to a hulking, six-storey neo-Baroque “palace” of stone in 1908, setting new standards in banking architecture. Huge profits were to be had in Johannesburg for those institutions that could position themselves as indispensable to the goldmining economy. There were heavy risks involved, but by the mid-1890s the Standard's Transvaal operation was contributing 40 percent of the bank's overall profits. Its Johannesburg branch not only boasted the biggest banking hall in the world, but was at the forefront of financial instrument technology, including an in-house assay and smelting operation and facilities for the safe storage of bullion. Yet, the bank was an enabler of workplace exploitation of white, black, and imported Chinese coolie labour, encouraging social tensions through the exacerbation of capitalist competition. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, and Patrick Joyce's ideas concerning institutional structuring and “performance,” this article considers the socio-economic dimensions of the Standard's operation in relation to its architectural formation.

This essay explores the financial structures of global cotton production and trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s by focusing on the German capitalist incursion into the Ottoman countryside. It chronicles one German company's attempt at financializing Anatolian cotton for the benefit of the German Empire and critically engages Rosa Luxemburg's concept of “capitalist imperialism,” which she developed in 1913 based on this very context. Acting in non-colonized Ottoman territory, German capitalists proved to be highly dependent on local capitalist agents, such as merchants, landholders, and bankers, particularly in the provinces. Financial transactions required physical translation and transformation. As a result, the dominance of the German firm was undermined, even though it was a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, then the world's largest private bank. The essay thus shifts our gaze away from metropolitan bank architectures to the “hinterland,” establishing factories, agricultural fields, and provincial mansions as spaces of financial transaction and contestation. It further identifies land ownership as a major impediment for the Germans. Studying the German government and company archives through an architectural lens foregrounds the material reality of the seemingly immaterial system of finance, revealing the frictions it creates, and thereby elucidates how power is produced and subverted across imperial borders.

It could simply be that guilt, rather than philanthropy, was the reason that Anna Grob-Zundel, widow of the tobacco planter Karl Fürchtegott Grob, donated their luxurious family home Villa Patumbah to a charity organization in 1910. When asked why she had made this gift to Diakoniewerk Neumünster, she said that she could not live in a place built with the blood of enslaved hands. This paper considers the Zurich mansion, completed in 1885 to plans by the Swiss architects Chiodera and Tschudy, alongside the plantation in Sumatra on whose profits it was constructed. Rather than working backwards from villa to plantation, I shall consider the villa itself as a plantation by thinking through it alongside the planter economy that funded it. Here I take up Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi's points, that the plantation is both “alien, strange, and unpredictable,” and yet it takes life under control, “space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people.” Western Europe's colonial “reckoning” of recent years has provided new methodological opportunities for historians of built and destroyed environments, and in turn new forms of criticality for understanding sites in erstwhile metropoles and distant colonies. This paper reads material from the architectural archive: photographs from tobacco plantations in Sumatra alongside plans and drawings of the Villa Patumbah. Chiodera and Tschudy's stylistic excesses ingratiated the Swiss public for the better part of a century, but material and metaphorical licentiousness also provides a lens for understanding the plantation in its European metamorphosis. In Switzerland, conditions of tropical violence were required for visitors to comprehend a tropics of material indulgence. Towards the end of this paper, a cryptic letter is translated. It is a clue: the villa is a site of colonial encounter without having to house the violence of the colonial act itself. Like the swirl of exhaled tobacco smoke, the plantation transmutes, absorbs, engulfs.

This article examines the planning of the Paramount Hotel in Sierra Leone, completed to the designs of James Cubitt & Partners in 1961, during Sierra Leone's transition from colonial rule to independence. This paper demonstrates that the hotel was conceived of as a neocolonial instrument planned and funded by the British government's Colonial Development Corporation to support the continued operation of British capital in a post-imperial world. At the same time, tourist-based development was a central component of economic planning in the immediate post-independence years for Sierra Leone's political class. This paper therefore reveals that the luxury hotel played a central, if unstable, role in planning for economic futures during the ends of empire in Sierra Leone.

In 1969, the Aga Khan IV, the forty-ninth hereditary Imam (spiritual and temporal leader) of the global Shiʻi Ismaili Muslim community, selected a “suitable team” to design and construct the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. The buildings began going up in 1971, and the complex was completed in 1985. This article situates the design and planning of the University Hospital in the context of 20th-century hospital architecture to explore how it was designed and planned differently from Western models of the period. It shows that the University Hospital was designed to embody the Aga Khan IV's theological quest for harmony between dīn (faith) and dunyā (world). Understanding and appreciating this theological quest helps going beyond merely adding the University Hospital to the historiography of hospital architecture in the 20th century to discern how it diversifies this historiography. Since the quest for harmony between dīn and dunyā raises the question of whether the Aga Khan IV supported ambitions for Pakistan as an Islamic state, the article also reflects, although briefly, on the place of the University Hospital in ambitions for Pakistan.