Struggles in the Concrete: Architecture and the Marxist Tradition by Mark Crinson and Luisa Lorenza Corna (eds.). Birkhaüser, 240 pp., $40.
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 Cri…