In this lecture Professor Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s to the 1930s, showing how colonialism facilitated a new openness to experimentation fueled by the practice of exhibiting and archiving non-Western objects. By conceptualizing these archives as sites that collected, organized, and policed knowledge, yet, by their very nature, remain open to historiographical reconstitution, Professor Osayimwese articulates a new, more global history that centers colonialism’s contribution to German modernism.