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 1…
