Question Marx

The number of architects—including some famous ones—who have been members of Marxist organizations of one sort or another is extensive. Lina Bo Bardi, Ernő Goldfinger, André Lurçat, Hannes Meyer, Oscar Niemeyer, Mart Stam, to invoke a few Great Men and Great Women, were all very public Communists. A handful took this as far as clandestine or armed struggle, like Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, detained in a concentration camp for her work in the anti-Nazi resistance, or Huỳnh Tấn Phát, a guerrilla who led the Vietnamese National Liberation Front into Saigon in 1975 and was also the architect of streamlined villas before the war and of Brutalist theaters after it. For some, their architecture was incidental to their socialism; for others, it was intrinsic.

You will find none of these people, bar a dismissive swipe at Niemeyer and an equally brief but complimentary name-check of Schütte-Lihotzky, in Mark Crinson and Luisa Lorenza Corna’s edited collection Struggles in the Concrete: Architecture and the Marxist Tradition (2025). Marxism here is not necessarily a revolutionary political project, in much the same way as architecture is not necessarily buildings. Instead, it is a multifaceted academic discipline: a philosophical system and an interpretative method, a political economy and a social ecology. That is, it is “Western Marxism,” the Marxism of theory-eaters like the Historical Materialism conference and journal franchise, the Marxism that is the bugbear of young neo-Stalinists for whom critical theory was an invention of the CIA. Like any avidly online Lavrentiy Beria enthusiast, the book’s editors aver that theirs is the correct Marxism and others, particularly those more concerned with the quotidian political concrete, are deficient in the true understanding of Marxian thought. Yet once you accept this unstated and highly questionable premise—more on that later—there is much of interest in this collection of essays.

In their introduction, Crinson and Corna lament the relative absence of Marxist architectural historians on the model of the many Marxist art historians of the middle of the past century and settle on the one figure who does appear to fit the bill—Manfredo Tafuri, a ruthless critic of the social architecture of welfarist and state socialist regimes, particularly of the notion that capitalism could be built out of existence through the construction of progressive enclaves (for the center-left) or working class fortresses (for the far left). For Tafuri, a Marxist architecture was categorically impossible—there was no such thing as a “class architecture,” only a “class critique” of architecture. Tafuri’s prominence in architectural history on the left has defined, sometimes too restrictively, what little tradition of Marxist architectural criticism there is; as Corna notes in her essay on the architect and teacher Marta Lonzi and the art critic Carla Lonzi, her sister, Tafuri always maintained a Great Man theory of architectural history, even as his work was devoted to lambasting said men. Tafuri’s Adornian role as a lone voice of absolute pessimism whose damning of social reform essentially led to the advocacy of an autonomous, apolitical aesthetics is criticized but not entirely escaped.

Struggles in the Concrete is organized into sections on labor, infrastructure, theory, and imperialism—a slightly eccentric division—and leaps around interestingly from place to place, thinker to thinker. (The allergy to Great Men and Women of architecture does not extend to Great Men and Women of theory.) Subjects and protagonists include Detroit factories, Yugoslav self-management, Stuart Hall, Siegfried Kracauer, the Brazilian revolutionary and architectural historian Sérgio Ferro, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the only contemporary of Marx and Engels to be discussed at length. The only practicing architects to be given their own chapter and an extended analysis of a building are Alison and Peter Smithson, surely at least in part because their own propensity for verbosity and jargon rivaled that of any Marxist theorist. None of the essays are bad as such—and some are very good; rather, it is the arid, sectarian framing, which the authors present as the only correct approach to combining architecture, historical materialism, and socialist struggle, that rankles. What makes this posturing particularly frustrating is that hardline statement of theoretical intent is followed by highly eclectic, even woolly practice. First, almost nobody is a true Marxist; then, almost everyone is.

Within this there are insights, twinkling stars, perhaps, in a Benjaminian constellation, illuminating a particularly bleak era for both architects and architecture. In an excellent essay on Kracauer’s early career as a mediocre and conservative architect in western Germany, Tom Wilkinson argues that the frustrations of architectural labor were a radicalizing experience, leading him to his second, more enduring act as a quasi-Marxist theorist and journalist; most importantly, Wilkinson notes, Kracauer’s alienated but educated desk job informed one of his best and least-read books, translated into English as The Salaried Masses (1930), focused on the Weimar Republic’s white collar workers. Wilkinson contends, rightly, in my view, that most architects remain “salaried masses”—Angestellen, in Kracauer’s German—rather than straightforwardly bourgeois or proletarian, with campaigns to radicalize and unionize the profession being as abortive as those aimed at white-collar workers in 1920s Germany. Elsewhere, Silke Kapp and Katie Lloyd Thomas write well on Ferro, a minor Paulista modernist who was imprisoned by the US-backed miliary dictatorship before choosing exile to France. Their essay suggests that Ferro’s insistence on the importance of (frequently unmechanized) labor as a factor in architectural change and capitalist development remains a more productive socialist approach to architecture than, say, Tafuri’s preference for bashing municipal housing estates like those of interwar Red Vienna for not being experimental enough. Nonetheless, reading the exegeses of Ferro’s ideas here—such as on the difference between Michelangelo-as-sculptor, insistent on the visible imprint of his own hands, and Michelangelo-as-architect, insistent that an alienated worker reproduce his drawings exactly—one wonders whether you really need Marx in order to reinvent the Ruskin of The Stones of Venice.

Claire Zimmerman’s essay on Fordism and the Midwestern “daylight factory” impressively outlines how the American factory typology, the totemic inspiration for Continental modern architects, was gradually suburbanized and gated to the point of being almost strike proof. It’s a welcome corrective to aesthetes’ histories of industrial architecture and an important reminder that these were usually horrible places in which to work, though not necessarily more so than the factories and workshops that preceded them. A similarly corrective tone can be found in Rujana Rebernjak’s critical account of environmental planning and cybernetics under “self-management socialism” in Yugoslavia. This is, among other things, a portrait of the sort of Marxism the editors of Struggles in the Concrete abhor—positivistic, technocratic, authoritarian, and involved in state-building rather than state-critiquing. Yugoslav bureaucratic cybernetics is a very Tafurian target, which is not to say the essay is unconvincing. In fact, it reads as an intriguing riposte to the currently pervasive Yugonostalgia on the left, although more as ultracompressed notes for a book I would like to read than as a self-contained work. Ideas are also highly squeezed in Nick Beech’s contribution on Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies’ famous analysis of moral panics around “mugging,” Policing the Crisis (1978). Beech gives a good précis of what that essay is and why it is (enduringly) important, but he stops short of investigating how it relates to architecture and space. Crinson has recently criticized Britain’s venerable New Left Review for publishing only a tiny handful of essays on architecture in its more than sixty years of existence, but if the net is cast wide enough to include essays like Beech’s, then there have surely been scores more.

The book’s eclecticism is both its biggest frustration and its greatest strength: The essays refrain from the deferential citation of Marxism-Leninism’s great classics, mostly to their benefit. The best of them, at least in terms of the sheer pleasure of the writing—something that many of the authors, like most academics, neglect, though Marx and Engels seldom did—is by the British filmmaker Onyeka Igwe. It is an account of two archives, one of a former colonial film unit in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other the remnants of a closed museum celebrating the British Empire, whose artifacts are now kept in a former tobacco warehouse in Bristol. Joined, these are a microcosm of imperial links across the seas, a diagram of plunder explained through fragments of poetry, theatrical script, and a dryly funny first-person narrative. It is the least obviously “Marxist” text here, especially according to the terms around philosophy and political economy laid out at the start of the book, and at the same time it is perhaps the most suggestive one in showing the analytical possibilities of a socialist and anti-imperialist urbanism.

The core of Struggles in the Concrete is an interview between Crinson and Nicholas Thorburn on the subject of Brutalism as Found (2022), Thoburn’s study of the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens (1972), a much-discussed and recently demolished public housing project in the East End of London. Thorburn argues that the Smithsons, rather despite Tafuri and rather despite themselves, managed to produce a “class architecture.” The architects in question would seem to be odd creators of such a thing, as they moved from a romantic Labor-left Bevanism into, by the 1970s, a neoliberal fixation on vandalism and privacy and a hostility to planning, but Thorburn’s account is still convincing. That’s due in large part to his attention to how the estate became, through racist local authority housing allocation policies, a thriving Bangladeshi community that embraced the “streets in the sky” as a form of outdoor urban life, much like home, and experienced the building’s enclosed, rather paranoid planning as a refuge from a surrounding environment that was often violently bigoted. This insight was based on extensive interviews with residents, who were largely not consulted by either Robin Hood Gardens’ defenders or its attackers while the debate raged over the project’s proposed demolition in the early 2010s. Thorburn explains how he also came to this position through understanding the complex’s “thresholds,” its series of intimate private spaces in a wider, monolithic whole—small touches within a totality that are nonetheless crucial. Many of these points could be applied to many an estate by less quotable architects, but it is a striking and rather optimistic account of a sort of socialism in one building, through real attention to its concrete details. Tafuri would have been appalled.