Paul Kurek

Inspired by his work with artists, architects, urban planners, and humanists, Paul’s first book Heavy Load-Bearing Modernity: A Cultural Geology of Albert Speer’s Berlin/Germania embeds a charged piece of material into intellectual history: the heavy load-bearing cylinder, a highly innovative but largely unnoticed geotechnical laboratory constructed under the fascist regime in 1941. By simulating an unprecedented amount of weight, it prepared Berlin’s soil for the construction of history’s largest monuments. Interweaving questions of space, time, and identity, Paul explores what we can learn about fascism and humanity by looking at this megalomaniac object as a product of the Anthropocene. This journey navigates the reader through the entangled histories of architecture, geotechnology, and the holocaust, among other layers of history.