Office Work: Architecture and Extraction Between Atacama and Hamburg

Abstract: This paper argues that the memorialization of UNESCO World Heritage sites operates through processes that highlight certain aspects of buildings while obscuring others. In the case of the Chilehaus (1924), one of Germany's most iconic expressionist buildings, the UNESCO nomination makes only a passing reference to its namesake, Chile. This omission silences the historical and material synchronicities that connect—and separate—the rise of intellectual office work in Hamburg with the industrialization of mining in the Atacama Desert. Evidence of this asymmetrical modernity is still readable on the surface of the desert, which, due to its dryness and specific environmental conditions, is one of the most endurable storage devices on this planet. Analyzing the traces stored in the desert allows us to reconstruct a different understanding of the modernity of the Chilehaus; one that links the functional and aesthetic qualities of the building to networks of global extraction, histories of dispossession, and the planetary transformation precipitated by the rise of the fertilizer industry. The paper argues for a different politics of memorialization, one that questions the commemoration of isolated buildings and asks at what scale the history of industrial capitalism is registered.