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

This thesis will assess the extent to which the built environment of a German concentration camp is itself a historical source, whether the spatial experiences created were deliberate and how this affected victims and perpetrators. 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. The connection between the ideological drive towards architectural efficiency, the built environment of concentration camps and the effects of this on prisoners has yet to be evaluated.