Antifascist Architecture by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche, with original drawings by Lane Rick. Parks Books, 256 pp., $40.
On a cool but springlike April morning a decade ago, I was taking a tram through the nineteenth district of Vienna when I saw the outline of a building I’d long wanted to visit, Karl-Marx-Hof. I’d first read about the place in a book about the Austrian artist Franz West, a lifelong art world enfant terrible whose provocative public sculptures, all twisted metal and abject forms, have always been to my taste. Born in 1947, West grew up in the (literally) shell-shocked Hof. The city beyond its coral pink archways and green courtyards was caught in a four-way dissection by occupying Allied forces. The Wests were lucky to have an apartment at all—about 20 percent of Vienna’s housing stock had been destroyed in the air raids—let alone one in a residence of such renown.
Karl-Marx-Hof is metonymic with Red Vienna. This was the interval of socialist rule that spanned the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the abolition of democracy by the Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934. Faced with a growing and insecure population, red administrators undertook a massive house-building project alongside labor reforms and new social security and health-care initiatives. For the Viennese working class, their faith in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was amply rewarded. Yet Vienna was not Austria in toto. The countryside remained a stronghold of the Christian Social Party, a nationalist right-wing organization with deep links to the Catholic Church, which returned chancellor after chancellor in national elections. (Its present-day unofficial successor is the Österreichische Volkspartei, or ÖVP.) Throughout the period, as in Germany, socialist paramilitaries clashed with reactionary paramilitaries, culminating in civil war. Armed leftist workers barricaded themselves within the Hof, but under intense shelling and machine-gun fire they capitulated.
Of the buildings recounted in Antifascist Architecture, very few can boast such explicitly antifascist credentials. Impressive as they are, buildings are, as a general rule, made to withstand all manner of upheaval. What, specifically, makes a work of architecture antifascist? It turns out not to be a question with a simple answer. Indeed, even the case of Karl-Marx-Hof, which was completed in 1930, is easily complicated. Its architect, Karl Ehn, went on to collaborate with Austrofascists and National Socialists alike. Austrian Jews who had counted among the Hof’s interwar residents were forced into exile or the camps; at the war’s end, their apartments were taken up by nominally reformed Nazis, West later recalled. He said of the grim scene: “Here we were in this housing project with snickering old Nazi women.”
Karl-Marx-Hof. Lauren Martin
Antifascism is a coalitional politics, uniting forces from conservatism to anarcho-communism in contingent and often uneasy alliance rather than around a positive program. Rarely in Antifascist Architecture do authors Daniel Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia linger on the contradictions that are routinely at play therein. They are let down by a convoluted schematic of parts, three in all, beginning with an encomium for an architecture they seem wary of defining. In the second, and strongest, section, they provide brief but compelling accounts of architects who might be considered antifascist, or antifascists who might be considered architects, or less convincingly, various things—edifices, artworks—that might be branded as such. Finally, they attempt to outline a continuum of practices, ideas, and policies with which to express a present and future antifascist architecture. If persuasion is the goal, then accretion is the ungainly means.
Ideological differences—between, say, socialism, anarchism, and communism—matter on a material and social level, especially in countries where those movements have long histories as organized political actors, often in conflict with each other.
The architects and architectures that Roche and Santa Lucia elevate are united by leftist affinities that tend toward state socialism. Pastorita Núñez fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Movimiento 26 de Julio before becoming a senior administrator at the Instituto Nacional de Ahorro y Viviendas, where she spearheaded the improvement and development of housing in postrevolutionary Cuba. The planning of the Ciudad Camilo Cienfuegos (1961) in the eastern suburbs of Havana applied the ideas of Anatole Kopp, a French architect and historian who was friendly with the Algerian Abderrahmane Bouchama, who in turn worked to synthesize pan-Arab nationalism with a precolonial style that harked back to the Islamic golden age. (The potted biographies are scattered with references to colorful knowledge brokers and overlooked go-betweens.) In contrast to Bouchama’s autochthonous approach, Friedrich Silaban, a favored designer of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, agitated for a unifying international modernist style. Notably, Silaban renovated the site of the Bandung Conference, an important 1955 convention of postcolonial African and Asian states that prefigured the Non-Aligned Movement, and in 1961 he conceived the National Monument in Jakarta, before being sidelined after Sukarno’s fall from power later in the decade. The harnessing of architecture to civic identity was ingeniously pursued by the Montenegrin Svetlana Kana Radević through works such as the Hotel Podgorica (1967) and the Memorial to the Fallen of the Lješanska Nahija Region (1980) in Barutana. The monument—one of hundreds in the former Yugoslavia that commemorate wartime casualties, especially the partisans killed in the struggle against fascism in World War II—flaunts an abstraction free from explicit political symbology.
We can see some common trends in Roche and Santa Lucia’s exposition here: the adoption of a modernist architectural vocabulary as a way to spurn the ways of the past or leapfrog to a sunnier future; a focus on socialist, pan-Arab, and so-called Third World solidarity movements; and a flattening impulse that treats workers’ housing, madrassas, and tourist hotels as more or less equivalent. All of this is fascinating and often admirable, a callback to a time when the economic and political order of the superpowers was being contested more convincingly than today. But Roche and Santa Lucia’s decision to bring the products of autogestion (in the Yugoslav case) or Nasserism under the rubric of antifascism is puzzling, unless one regards Stalinism and Western capitalism as mere synonyms for fascism. I don’t, and neither should you.
The case studies that tack most closely with Roche and Santa Lucia’s program, such as a squatted cultural center in Manhattan, a Black Panthers’ school in Oakland, or a street attack by French anarchists on a prison architect, are those whose designation as “architecture” are the weakest.
Roche and Santa Lucia rail against the “fetish” among academics for historical fascist architecture, which, it is alleged, has done irreparable harm to design culture at large. In some ways the authors’ efforts represent a simple negation, as when they write that “freedom necessitates antifascism, namely socialism and/or anarchism.” But while socialists and anarchists have historically practiced, and continue to practice, antifascist politics, their ideological and material understanding of what freedom looks like, and how to build for it, has been wildly divergent. Time and again, Antifascist Architecture struggles to articulate a clear understanding of what makes architecture either fascist or antifascist. In the place of any coherent argument is a pick-and-mix of political ideologies, ostensibly those offering something different to the current USian political culture, lumped together under the banner of antifascism. There is a willful naivete at work here that not even a pair of dense essays excoriating Heidegger and Foucault can hope to mitigate. Ideological differences—between, say, socialism, anarchism, and communism—matter on a material and social level, especially in countries where those movements have long histories as organized political actors, often in conflict with each other. Karl-Marx-Hof itself, crammed full of half-repentant Nazis in the 1950s and today run by an ÖVP-controlled council, is evidence that contravenes the claim that “antifascist architecture always extends socially and in liberating ways, regardless of whether these are formal or systematic.”
“Finally an architecture magazine that doesn’t just interview celebrities or cost ninety dollars.”
In Antifascist Architecture, the casual compression of socialist and anarchist politics, traditional bulwarks of the antifascist cause, veers into incoherence. When delivered in its breathless, slightly hectoring, and militant tone, the book’s attempt at a totalizing revolutionary synthesis comes across as underdeveloped, even sophomoric. If encountered in person, lines like “We hope that, one day, the material conditions that create fascism will be abolished, along with the petit bourgeois, snobbish, arrogant culture that preposterously sees beauty in a fascist building” would leave all but the most earnest comrades wondering if the practical part of the meeting was over and whether we should wind it up and head to the pub. Indeed, there is an overambition in the book’s thematic, inextricable from the renewed currency of the term antifascist. Like much Trump-era “resistance” discourse, it forces everything opposed to a deplorable status quo into an uneasy coalition. Maybe, for a time, that coalition can hold together in some form of negative solidarity, but ultimately it lacks the political and ideological coherence necessary to ever produce a positive program.
Roche and Santa Lucia rail against the “fetish” among academics for historical fascist architecture, which, it is alleged, has done irreparable harm to design culture at large.
Roche and Santa Lucia’s own perspective might be best described as anarcho-syndicalist, and as a former dues-paying member of the Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores, I sympathize with their cause. But the regimes they celebrate—mostly postcolonial nations marshaling the resources of a centralized state to realize architectural projects with unprecedented scope and speed—frequently crushed the forces of leftist dissent within their own borders. Núñez, whom the authors rightly laud for erecting workers’ housing, answered to a paranoid executive who after taking power wasted no time purging anarcho-syndicalists from the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, despite their participation in the guerrilla struggle that brought the revolution to victory. The case studies that tack most closely with Roche and Santa Lucia’s program, such as a squatted cultural center in Manhattan, a Black Panthers’ school in Oakland, or a street attack by French anarchists on a prison architect, are those whose designation as “architecture” are the weakest. Too often in Antifascist Architecture, the architecture isn’t antifascist and the antifascism isn’t architecture.
As if to preempt this criticism, Roche and Santa Lucia hedge that antifascist architecture, while inclusive of buildings, “can also be a demolition or a void—an absence in space.” This is hardly clarifying. In the end, the desire to produce a specifically antifascist tendency from cherry-picked examples obfuscates the more interesting connections between them. This overweening desire lands heavily from the first page, inducting the reader by way of a hagiography of Alphonse Laurencic. The French architect, depicted wearing half-moon glasses and a dapper mustache, traveled to Spain after civil war broke out. He lent support to the struggle by designing cells in the checas, semi-independent republican prisons, before eventually being captured by Francoist forces and murdered. Laurencic’s contribution was a significant omen of the forthcoming century: Using surrealist and modernist influences, his cells blended sensorial, psychological, and physical techniques to become, according to the authors, “transformative antifascist incubators of human souls.” Less euphemistically, they were torture chambers, precursors (of a kind) of those found in Gestapo basements or Guantanamo Bay.
The regimes they celebrate—mostly postcolonial nations marshaling the resources of a centralized state to realize architectural projects with unprecedented scope and speed—frequently crushed the forces of leftist dissent within their own borders.
“Could architecture purge fascists of their fascism?” Roche and Santa Lucia ask. The fact of Laurencic’s one-time membership in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union, seems enough to make this a “noble end,” but such editorializing papers over a much more complex history. Laurencic didn’t build his torture chambers for the anarchists but for the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the secret service of the Second Spanish Republic. And it wasn’t just fascists these dungeons held; as the republic descended into internal conflict between the state and Stalinist and anarchist militias, they soon filled up with Laurencic’s erstwhile comrades. Few who entered the checas, be they fascists or “fifth columnist” revolutionaries, emerged transformed, because few emerged at all: Thousands were executed, including socialists like Andreu Nin, the leader of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), who was possibly flayed alive. I have visited the sites of these prisons in Barcelona, in the cellars of convents and old schools. In the spirit of a vulgar dialectic invoked throughout Antifascist Architecture, the authors appeal to readers to “answer this existential question for yourself: Which side would you have chosen? Alphonse’s? Or his executioners’?” Perhaps we can beg leave to embrace the complexities that are so easily forgotten in a paroxysm of revolutionary fervor, yet are so often more interesting than the agitprop, and answer: “Neither, thank you.”