Architecture against Democracy

Histories of the Nationalist International

Reinhold Martin, Claire Zimmerman

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781452970844
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Examining architecture’s foundational role in the repression of democracy
 

Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman bring together essays from an array of scholars exploring the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics. Comprising detailed case studies throughout the world spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, Architecture against Democracy analyzes crucial occasions when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power.

 

Alongside chapters focusing on paradigmatic episodes from twentieth-century German and Italian fascism, the contributors examine historic and contemporary events and subjects that are organized thematically, including the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, Ellis Island infrastructure, the aftermath of the Paris Commune, Cold War West Germany and Iraq, Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic architecture, and Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Through the range and depth of these accounts, Architecture against Democracy presents a selective overview of antidemocratic processes as they unfold in the built environment throughout Western modernity, offering an architectural history of the recent “nationalist international.” 

 

As new forms of nationalism and authoritarian rule proliferate across the globe, this timely collection offers fresh understandings of the role of architecture in the opposition to democracy.

 

Contributors: Esra Akcan, Cornell U; Can Bilsel, U of San Diego; José H. Bortoluci, Getulio Vargas Foundation; Charles L. Davis II, U of Texas at Austin; Laura diZerega; Eve Duffy, Duke U; María González Pendás, Cornell U; Paul B. Jaskot, Duke U; Ana María León, Harvard U; Ruth W. Lo, Hamilton College; Peter Minosh, Northeastern U; Itohan Osayimwese, Brown U; Kishwar Rizvi, Yale U; Naomi Vaughan; Nader Vossoughian, New York Institute of Technology and Columbia U; Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia U.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction: Architecture and the Nationalist International
• Part I: Hegemony: Coercion with Consent
• Chapter 1: Hints on Whiteness and American Public Architecture
• Chapter 2: The Photographic Mythology and Memory of Hitler’s Destroyed New Reich Chancellery
• Chapter 3: DIY Fascism: Architecture and the Autarchic Exhibition of Italian Minerals
• Chapter 4: The Concrete Politics of Housing: Assembling Cecap Guarulhos in Authoritarian Brazil
• Chapter 5: Freehold/Freedom: Exurban Existence in the United Arab Emirates
• Part II: Technocracy: Ideologies of Expertise
• Chapter 6: Germanizing Krakow: The Political Complexity of Architecture under Nazi Occupation
• Chapter 7: Afro-Caribbean Migration and Detention at Ellis Island
• Chapter 8: Curtain Wall Inside-Out: Technocracy, Theocracy, and Technoaesthetic Formations of Cold War Fascism
• Chapter 9: Sert Goes South: Planning South America
• Chapter 10: Albert Speer, Ernst Neufert, and the Modularization of the World
• Part III: Democracy: Perennially Deferred?
• Chapter 11: “The Fairness of Our Demands”: Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bureaucracy, and Resistance in the Prussian Rhineland, 1815–1840
• Chapter 12: Metropolis against the State: Architectures of Violence after the Paris Commune
• Chapter 13: The Racial Allegories of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style
• Chapter 14: Democracy and War: The University of Baghdad between Collaboration and National Competition
• Chapter 15: The Aesthetics of Resistance: Istanbul’s Standing Man between the Body Politic and Bare Life
• Conclusion: Democracy Now?
• Contributors
• Index