Mrs Jessica Cretney

Jessica is an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Midlands4Cities funded doctoral researcher at De Montfort University. Her research interests include Nazi concentration camps and the history of the Holocaust and genocide, in particular social and spatial ordering and historical understandings of eugenics and “race”. Her doctoral project examines connections between the built environment of camps, Nazism’s exclusionary and genocidal goals and contemporary architectural thinking on societal “improvement”.

MA Contemporary History and Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
BA(Hons) History, De Montfort University

New Directions in Holocaust Studies Workshop, Senate House, London,     
organised by the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of 
London, 4th November 2021

Paper: Building and Historical Artefact: The Holocaust, Architecture and Affect

GHIL (German Historical Institute London) Postgraduate Research Students
Conference, 7th-8th January 2021

Paper: The Concentration Camp, Spatial Experience and Architectural
Modernism

War, Crisis and Confinement: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, online public
lecture and panel discussion organised by De Montfort University, 11th
November 2020

Paper: Confinement by Design: Space and Nazi Concentration Camps

Title

The Concentration Camp, Spatial Experience and Architectural Modernism, 1933-1945

PhD project abstract

This project will examine the built environment of Nazi concentration camps as deliberately created spatial experiences, linked with the ideological drive for architectural efficiency and modernist aims of functionality and standardisation.
The link between the built environment and user experience is well-established in architectural theory, but historical study has yet to fully investigate these relationships to better understand the past. Historians frequently cite the closure of the influential Bauhaus school and emigration of the likes of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as evidence of the Nazi regime’s rejection of modernist design. Less well understood, however, is the influence of former Bauhaus members who chose to remain. Ernst Neufert (author of the internationally-renowned Architects’ Data, 1936) employed modernist aims of functionality and standardisation to design a new “Octametric” building method specifically for forced labourers.
Modernist architectural theory in the 1920s and 30s venerated the “machine metaphor”, in which built spaces should be rationalised and efficient as a means of achieving “social Utopianism” (Jencks, 1985). Cohen (2011) has argued that in Nazi Germany, this functional approach was increasingly applied to the “extreme compression of human bodies” within places of detention. Existing research on Ernst Neufert is scant, but it has recently been demonstrated that he worked for Albert Speer in the GBI (Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt) and explicitly acknowledged and designed for “untrained labour power” (Vossoughian, 2017). The project aims to investigate connections between concentration camps as physical manifestations of Nazi ideology and highly influential modernist architectural theories of standardisation and efficiency.

Professor Panikos Panayi (De Montfort University), Dr. Paul Moore (University of Leicester) and Dr. Didem Ekici (University of Nottingham)