Office Work: Architecture and Extraction Between Atacama and Hamburg

UNESCO World Heritage Site designation often highlights certain aspects of buildings while obscuring others, as demonstrated by the Chilehaus in Hamburg. This study reveals that the memorialization process overlooks critical historical and material connections between the building's rise as a symbol of intellectual office work and the industrialization of mining in Chile's Atacama Desert. By analyzing traces stored in the desert—a durable storage device due to its environmental conditions—the research reconstructs an alternative understanding of modernity, linking the Chilehaus's functional and aesthetic qualities to global extraction networks, histories of dispossession, and the planetary transformation driven by the fertilizer industry. The paper advocates for a politics of memorialization that questions the commemoration of isolated buildings and considers the broader scale of industrial capitalism's history.

Thiermann, A., Correa, P., Neumaier, E., & Nueno, X. (2025). Office Work: Architecture and Extraction Between Atacama and Hamburg. Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism, 22(1), 54–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/fta.2025.a982229