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ANTIFASCIST ARCHITECTURE - Empire Files LIVE at PSU
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Mike speaks with the authors and illustrator of t…
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- [00:04]
A
Just by a show of hands, who knows a thing or two about architecture. Cool. I don't other than getting an advanced copy of this book and being able to read this book and through being friends with Andrew. So for me you will be getting and for most of our listeners on this podcast, a stupid person's approach to architecture. But nonetheless, this book is really illuminating for me. And so if my question questions are academic y from an architecture student's point of view, that's why I don't know anything about this. But it was very exciting through our political lens that we've had for so many decades to look at this topic
- [00:43]
B
in a new way.
- [00:44]
A
And it was really exciting for me to go through it and excited to talk to you guys about it. So welcome to the Empire Files cup podcast. My name is Mike Kreizner. Architecture is usually sold to us as neutral steel, glass, geometry, aesthetics. What if architecture is closer to warfare? What if buildings aren't just shelter but ideology made concrete? Tonight we're talking about fascism, resistance, power, memory, prisons, utopia, and whether architecture is already taking sides. Whether we admit it or not, our guests today are the authors and illustrators of the new book Anti Fascist Architecture. I'd like to point out it has no subtitle, which I appreciate. Two words. That's your title. It's out now. This is the official book launch event with a live audience here on May Day at Portland State University with the School of Architecture. Andrew Santa Lucia is a Cuban American designer, educator and prison abolitionist based here in Portland. He's Associate professor of practice at Portland State University School of Architecture where he teaches design history and architectural theory. He is the founder of the design studio Office Endurance. His work has been exhibited internationally including at Art Basel and the Chicago Architecture Binenio and the Venice Architecture Biennale. What is that word?
- [02:06]
C
Biennale.
- [02:07]
A
Okay. Told you I warned you guys in the beginning. Tonight he joins us with co author Daniel he is the co author of Ein to Farce Architecture. Joining us is his co author. Daniel Jonas Roche is a New York based journalist, curator, architectural historian and educator whose work expl explores architecture, labor, political struggle and the built environment. He serves as news editor at the Architects newspaper, has taught architecture in New York and his writing and research focus on the intersections of socialism, urbanism and political history. He is the co author of Anti Fascist Architecture and Lane Rick, an architect and illustrator in New York City. Her Drawings in her drawings she uses detail, erasure and layering to explore moments of engagement between people and space. As co founder of Office of Things, a collaborative Architecture and design Studio Lane extends narrative thinking into spatial work with a focus on perception, material and movement. Welcome all of you to this event and to the show today. Okay, so as I said, I don't know a lot about architecture and of course the intersection of politics and architecture, but I think people who are politically minded or just live in the world we live in might be able to make some of those connections already. I think some architecture is recognized as political already. I think about anti homeless architecture, otherwise known as hostile architecture, bad designs for low income housing units. I feel it's political. Walking around the Lloyd Center, I feel like that's a political building and you can explore our system through the context of the architecture of that building and how it exists today. You know, on the flip side, there's work, you know, Andrew in the past has done these kind of portable mobile needle exchange units, which is political architecture from the opposite of the bad things that I mentioned. But the politics of those buildings feels kind of obvious. You know, it's just kind of like right in front of you. So I want you three to help me see this deeper. Like, how is architecture political beyond, you know, beyond that, you know, what exactly is a fascist architecture? And most importantly, wondering, can a building itself be fascist?
- [04:27]
B
Thank you, Mike. Hello everyone. So thank you so much for being here. It's. As a fellow journalist, it's, yeah, Mike's work, Abby's work is just incredible. It's great to be here with everybody. So right off the bat, Mike asked the question, can architecture be fascist? The answer is yes. As somebody who studied architecture that is now studying journalism, I think a lot of folks in this room that are also have taken an architectural history or theory course. You likely have been exposed to the works of Albert Speer, Giuseppe Tarani, many canonical fascist architects that practiced in the 1930s and the 1940s. So fascist architecture has been something widely accepted as part of the education of an architect for a very long time. And what is really important about this book is that this is the first attempt at trying to identify the opposite of an anti fascist architecture.
- [05:30]
C
And so, yeah, yeah, I, I think Dan, you know, kind of hits it on the head. I think from a historical perspective we, we obviously understand the relationship between, like, state power and building construction. But I think that the book gets at something a bit deeper, especially in part one, where it asks us to look deeply into the ways in which the default kind of disciplinary approaches in certain strands of architecture are already quite laden with fascist ideas or produced by folks that were outwardly fascists. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger. And then also the other end of that, which is this sort of suspension of belief that was asked in the 1970s, not just of architecture, but also of folks that were making films and making music. Right. To depoliticize the. The kind of fascist stuff for the sake of some sort of. In some cases, for some sort of understanding.
- [06:56]
D
Right.
- [06:57]
C
Like in Dalcon, Poland and Poland's sort of thinking, Tafuri as well, these essential kind of 1970, 1960s, 1970s, architectural theorists, historians. But we asked a simpler question, which is, what if we didn't look for an architecture of liberation in the opposite of fascism, but look at directly architectures of anti fascism? Buildings that are produced by socialist governments, anarchist projects that are produced for survival, immediate networks of care that are produced for survival. And what does that do to our understanding of architecture as a kind of practice or discipline?
- [07:50]
B
So, yeah, and I would just add to that as well. So the position that we take in regard to studying fascist architecture, I think is a really interesting one, and I think it's a new one. So the position that we take is essentially after the war, when massive. There's a massive consummation of Nazis into the American workforce. Operation Paperclip, all of these sorts of different things. At the same time, fascists are being subsumed into the American workforce. There is the rehabilitation and the reintegration of fascist artists and architects into popular culture, into the discourse. It's something that Susan Sontag critiques, Jonas Mikas critiques, but in architecture, that critique of the. The consumption of fascist art and architecture is a critique that was not had the same way it happened in film.
- [08:43]
A
Yeah. And Lane, I'm curious from you because, you know, as the illustrator which did the amazing. What, you know, really makes the book something different, takes it to a whole new level. It's really incredible for like a layperson, Right. If we're trying to understand fascist architecture, like, are there characteristics, like, if I'm looking at something, what are the fascist stylistic characteristics that I can determine by simply looking at it visually?
- [09:09]
D
So first off, thanks so much for having us at this locale today, but I think I would flip that question on its head. There are a lot of books about what makes fascist architecture look like fascist architecture. There's an entire. You could go to the library, you could go find them, go read them. There are all these qualities, a lot of them are very much aligned with modernism. And we see that all over the place. And that's an aesthetic look that has been associated. And then disassociated and is still fundamentally associated with fascism. What I actually really appreciate about Dan and Andrew's work is asking what architectures are associated with the people who are fighting against the fascists. And this is a question that has been utterly unexplored. And so who are the anti fascists? What kind of architectures do they make and what drives them? And then who are the people who visit them, who come see them later, not as the designers, but as the users of these buildings? And what do they see? And so one of the things that we talked a lot about in the making of this book was trying to make a book that people who are architects can appreciate, but that people who are just anti fascists can appreciate. A lot of that is about seeing things, observing things. A lot of the drawings are not architectural diagrams, but our perspectives are accessible to humans who are not used to dissecting multi folding hidden planes, exploded axonometric drawings.
- [10:51]
A
Right.
- [10:51]
D
And that was something that we, that was really important to us is that you don't have to be an expert in reading drawings in order to understand these projects, because they're basically fundamentally humanist projects. They're about people, they're by people, they're for people, they're built in alignment with governments that are and movements that are fighting for those people. And so trying to find those moments of alignment, whether they're imagined or whether they're realized or whether they're partially realized. A lot of this is very much about the long struggle uphill towards a utopia that we may or may not get to, but we can always get closer. And then trying to figure out how we can set those, how we can make visuals for those, how we can start to celebrate those moments. So that you all have them burned in your heads when you go to sleep.
- [11:45]
B
Yes.
- [11:47]
A
Great. And you know, you obviously wrote, started writing this book before Trump too came in. So there have been some, you know, some pretty dramatic developments in what you could consider fascist architecture just in the past year. You know, I'm thinking about data centers, cop cities, alligator, Alcatraz, like pretty on the nose, like blatant fascist structures. But let's shift to what you're talking about, which is the anti fascist architecture. Right. I mean, unfortunately, we are surrounded by fascist architecture. We'll talk about how we got there in a little bit. But turning to anti fascist architecture, this book opens up with the story of Alphonse Laurentik, Who was an architect and anti fascist militant in the Civil War. You describe his work as the only other time before this book that someone tried to articulate an anti fascist architecture. So this is the second attempt since that, you know, 50 years ago, you know, he designed. And the reason he brought him up is because he makes him pretty blatant anti fascist architecture. He basically designed prison cells for captured fascists in the civil war in Spain. And they were not ordinary cells, of course, they were psychological environments. They had tilted floors, disorienting color theory, geometric patterns, avant garde film loops. The illustration of this is, I think, my favorite in the book. It's just trippy and weird and really cool. And I'm sure you had a blast coming up with the concepts for that, which I'd like to hear about. He was captured and tortured and executed, like, specifically for doing this work. I think it makes an important point that architecture is not neutral. It's something that can be used to participate in a political struggle. But beyond this very literal example, like deprogramming fascists with architecture, pretty literal antifascist architecture. What to you is anti fascist architecture? And what kind of building is an anti fascist building?
- [13:54]
B
Yeah, so to that point, I'll just talk about some of the main figures that we highlight in the book. So the first person we talk about in part two, which is a survey, is a Cuban revolutionary architect named Pastorita Nunez Gonzalez. Pastorita grew up in destitute poverty on a farm. And very early on she joined the Cuban revolutionary cause. She went on to fight in the mountains alongside Fidel and Shea. Her code name was Augustina. So she was a commando in the Cuban rebel army. Not only a commando, but also raising taxes and money to support the revolution. And after the dictatorship is toppled, Paslorita is put in charge of a major banking institute in the country that's tasked with building things like social housing. So she ultimately builds thousands of units of social housing all throughout the country. So social housing is an anti fascist building type. The second, another person that we talk about is an Algerian Marxist revolutionary who fought alongside Fanon. His name was Abdurrahman Bushamma Busama. Again fought in the underground. He fought in the fln. And afterward he was tasked by Ahmed Benbella with decolonizing Algeria's architectural education system. Because prior to the revolution, Algerian architects were taught under the French Beaux Arts style. So Bushamma's amazing task was identifying what is an Algerian architectural approach to education. And so while he's doing that, he's building things like libraries, he's building schools. And then the last person, before I pass it on, I want to talk about somebody named Kyoshi Karamaya, who was based in Philadelphia, and Kiyoshi, in his life, never built a building in the sense that we would identify a building. But Kyoshi is an architect that we consider to be the architect of what we call shelter forms or immaterial architecture, which what Kyoshi built was mutual aid support networks for people living with HIV and aids. And he used his architectural training to build these incredible grassroots networks.
- [16:15]
C
I think one of the things that we tried to do in this book, too, is articulate some of the qualities and let's call these kind of like anticipations of things that maybe aren't possible today, but also things that have been being done in particular. And so I think we take that on seriously through looking at different sort of anarchist projects that they value, I think immediacy over, like state power, for example. Like the projects that we include in this book, they span a spectrum of the sort of political left, right? From the incredible state projects that Dan was speaking about down to the sort of squatting practices of the 70s and 80s in places like New York, for example, and ABC no Rio. I'm particularly interested in how those actions force the hand of the state, particularly that was the state, or, sorry, the city of New York. But I'm always interested in how it forces the hand of the state to do things better. We take seriously, for example, the work of the Black Panthers and their survival programs. And for all the architecture nerds in this room and also listening to this, when we say the word program are sort of bells and whistles, right? Like, we've heard that term a lot, right? Program as an idea, is an update to the way that we use the term function during modernism in particular. Program is this sort of supercharged function that has form also and perhaps typology built into it. And so when we think about the. The survival programs, for example, the Black Panther Party, you see the groundwork of what a society that takes care of the most vulnerable people looks like. You know, you see healthcare centers, you see places for free breakfast for children, right? These are not just random uses of space based on charity, right? If we learn anything from, like, the work of Dean Spade, it's about solidarity, not charity, right? And they actively have a spatial component. What's interesting about those projects is that you may just think about them as they're just using a church basement to feed people, but when enough church basements become used, you then get programs that emerge, like free breakfast programs at the state level. For many children in the United States, that was something that was sort of Actively used to, in a way take the power out of the Black Panther Party, which is, well, they're doing it better than us. We need to do it. I mean, and the idea that mutual aid is less of a kind of powerful tool for the use of spaces that exist versus, you know, building through state power, I think it kind of forgets the sort of forgets the possibility of human ingenuity in the moment. And so we know that there's a lot of disagreement about that expansion of architecture, the definition of architecture, but we're also not that worried about it.
- [20:11]
B
Right?
- [20:11]
A
Yeah, that's something that kind of changed my perspective on what architecture was reading this is that you define it as beyond buildings, but it's software, it's schools, it's organizing systems, it's mutual aid. So the use of existing space being something that falls into that category was really interesting for me. Before we move into the how, how did we get here and why is it anti fascist architecture is so sidelined and not understood? Explain this concept of. You talked about shelter forms which I wanted to ask about. If there's anything else you want to say about that, that would be cool. But also social expanders. Right. And so when we're thinking about like the possibilities. Right. You know, you touched on things we can look to in the past as being good examples, but looking towards the future. Like, explain this concept of social expanders and how it relates to social.
- [21:04]
C
I feel particularly lucky because Dan and Lane and my other very good comrade quinn reviewed my Arch 382 studio today, which is termed the social expander collective. And it's about this sort of concept. It's a slight update to an earlier like Russian constructivist, early 20th century after the Russian Revolution. It's an update to Moisey Ginsburg idea around the social condenser. We talk a lot about that kind of in the weeds of theory in the book, which we recommend diving into. But the simple way of understanding the social condenser is, you know, effectively like, what would it look like if all of your needs were met in a building? Kind of like the way in which your needs are met in a bigger city. The social condenser goes through a couple of iterations. Perhaps the most notable ones are the forms of social housing that particularly get built in the Soviet Union and in other parts of of Europe and Eastern Europe. Here in the States they're less condensers and a lot more kind of strict in terms of just as housing, which in many ways, you know, that's certainly one criticism you can have of. Of certain of the mid 20th century housing projects. Right. But the social condenser sort of loses its effective reach without the political infrastructure that it found itself in, which was effectively, we need an architecture that serves all of us and that serves a new core of workers building a society. We talk a lot about workforce housing, I think, in our contemporary discourses of architectural practice in the world. And many times those are on the other end of the spectrum, more of like the company town versus the social condenser. You're like one step away from them giving you company money and then you shopping at the company store, and you're just like a surf. Right. So the social, you know, the social condenser really was a kind of update to architecture's effective reach at that scale. An expander for us is a sort of challenge not to Ginsburg entirely, but to a challenge. To sort of challenge the concept that it's not about condensing the city.
- [23:42]
B
Right.
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C
It's about making sure that architecture can expand access to not just itself, but to, like, the world around it. Some of that has to do with anticipating the kind of spatial networks that could develop in a city, meaning adjacencies, the kind of districts of care that might be necessary. But it's not just about care. It's also suggesting, like, could these new buildings that have varied programs create new types of architecture?
- [24:13]
B
Right.
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C
And in our studio, for example, we asked that question by forcing the students to deal with a building that houses three pretty different programs. One is a space for triage.
- [24:25]
B
Right.
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C
The second is a space for a food bank. And the third is Movie Madness video rental store. And the adjacency is supposed to create something not perceivable right now in, like, the way we think of a strict separation between certain forms of function and program. Does that expand the way in which architecture can affect our lives? Right. By, for example, going in after, you know, a sort of bout of, you know, upset stomach and being like, oh, man, I would love to rent this movie that I heard about. And it's upstairs. I go up through this museum to get it, which is fantastic. And I haven't thought about food for a while, but this. This care that I got made me feel a little bit better. So I'm going to get a scone at the food bank on the way out. It seems simple, but only because our lives are so hard. And I think that that's very scary.
- [25:50]
A
Thanks. Yeah. And did you have, you know, so I do want to talk about the. Because it feels like that's the kind of things we should be focused on doing in our society. Right. It's using all the intellectual labor here to make life better for people in the world and in this country. But the reason he wrote this is because that's not exactly the case. Right. And so I want to talk about how we got here, how antifascist architecture and antifascist architecture is very sidelined, Right. What is dominant is what's dominant. I kind of was getting a feeling that some of you might be communists or anarchists or something extreme like that. But you and you probably, Andrew, I knew you have been for a while, and so I don't know if the same is true for the two of you, but you went through architecture undergrad graduates. Like, I want to hear, like, you know, I want to hear about how this book came to be from like the way back. Right. Like, what were some moments when you were going through your undergrad education in architecture and your graduate studies were. But being a political person, like having the political beliefs that you have now or the predecessors to those beliefs, like, were there particular experiences, like crimes, where you felt things were not clear? You started noticing the problems early on. Like, I'd like to hear from each of you how the genesis of this came through this your own studies.
- [27:15]
B
So just to get this out of the way, I'm a communist. This feels like the reverse of a HUAC meeting or something, no? So that's a great question, Mike. And it's deeply informed by personal experiences in a messed up system. So just who am I? A little bit about me. I'm Jewish, I have family that was killed in the Holocaust in Auschwitz. And when I started architecture school, I have this very distinct memory of being a second year architecture student. And I'm in the lecture hall and it's early in the semester, and there's this quirky modernist guy with long hair. And today's lecture is about how great a project named Casa del Fascio is in Como, Italy, which is this quintessential work of fascist architecture. And so I'm in my chair and I'm 19 and I'm like, you know, something's off here. Why isn't anybody saying anything? And why is this professor just so nonchalantly talking about how great of a work of architecture this is? And I just remember sitting in my seat and just seeing red. I was so angry and so upset with that experience that from at that stage in my development as a person, I knew that there was something very, very wrong with the way that architecture is taught in the US and it took a couple years to get the vocabulary and the sort of intellectual confidence to be able to confront that. Because something we always talk about is the imposter syndrome we have coming up against this. These decades of entrenched thinking by people that have written the syllabi, commanded the institutions. And so, yeah, personally speaking, where this book is coming from is just being a 19 year old kid really upset and not knowing what the hell was going on in the lecture hall.
- [29:18]
D
Yeah,
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A
similar experience.
- [29:22]
D
I would say that a lot of my studies in architecture and my work as an architect has been about appreciating the big architectural canons that were taught, but then realizing that there are all these other things that are underneath that and that that complexity makes our cities more interesting. And so what I try to do is I try to focus on what I try to do in my work, in my drawings and my architecture, is to try to focus on those things that are hidden or otherwise, like, unseen and that can arrive in any number of ways. Sometimes they're political, sometimes they're not political, sometimes they're accidental. Sometimes it's, you would like to have a better front port. And so you go put an umbrella on it. And this can start to be about how you shape your space. And so I would. A lot of what brought me around to this, like a lot of what I bring to this project is that, that appreciation for the fact that we just like to shape the spaces around us. And if we think about that thoughtfully, and if we look at it more thoughtfully, then we can learn from it. And I think that when I pair that with my preferences and values for the society we should live in, this book kind of emerges in the seams. Let's say,
- [30:59]
C
You know, growing up in Miami, Florida and being a child of a Cuban American immigrant, right. There is this rigid way of thinking about my culture that, you know, it's not that I never questioned it, but during architecture school there was something that I latched onto when reading and learning about the kind of histories and theories of architecture that were often the most social, in a kind of utilitarian, you know, sense and positive. I certainly had similar stories to Dan and Tulane with regards to some of the stuff that was being taught to me and maybe perhaps disagreeing with it. But I think the sort of awakening, the political awakening for me happens part and parcel with my, you know, falling in love with architecture. So it's weird, I'm sitting here now, you know, I started architecture school 23 years ago. And I don't feel old, but I know that I am. And those moments were so integral because at the same time that I was learning, you know, kind of incredible theories of architecture, I was also going to the Campus Action Summit or the Campus Action Network Summit, which is where I met you and all the other homies. And I remember that day was like my, my life was one way the day before that day, and then it was. That was it. And I really gravitated to the group that we were a part of. It was called the Bolivarian Youth that was really, you know, supportive of the sort of mass changes that were happening in Venezuela at the time. And we're really interested in, you know, educating ourselves politically in ways that we weren't being educated in our university and in our schools. And we did that together. And we like, fumbled through it together. Like there was no indoctrination, it was discourse, it was learning. And that kind of emergent sort of political identity was always about the next action, the next thing. And I think the place that it found its most, like, happy medium was when we were working closely with Umoja Village in Liberty City in Miami, which was, this was back in 2005, 2006. And it was a kind of a pop up shanty town made by houseless folks claiming land not too dissimilar from Hazelnut Grove. And the type of pod projects that the school of architecture here at Portland State, you know, has been, you know, kind of integral in theorizing the role of the architect in.
- [34:37]
B
Right.
- [34:38]
C
And the action led to us building a shanty at our university and like squatting in it for a couple of days. But this is the joke of it. The best part of it is we needed a roof. And so I went to the graduate studio and I took a site model that I thought they weren't using and I brought it and we put it on the roof. And the graduate students were like, why did you do that? And I was like, we needed a roof. And again, that simple thing, right? That simple thing I think really reminded me of, like, we could do this, you know, we, if we just looked at it a bit different. But I think that that's, that sets the foundation. There's a lot of stuff that happens after where it's back and forth and, you know, people saying, yeah, leave the kind of social stuff on the side. Architecture is about itself. Let's, let's figure out architecture out by itself first and then help the world. And then like, our argument is, well, you can't depoliticize architecture.
- [35:41]
A
So, yeah, and at the time, that was a really formative experience, organizing with the Umoja Village, which, you know, has some history to it. I mean, you can find a lot of work, academic work about it as well. It was an important project in Miami which demonstrated the real class dynamics too. Right. Because it's in the shadow of these luxury high rises. And then you have a town made out of milk crates, which I didn't understand at the time and didn't understand until I read this book that that was an architectural experience that I had pretty changed in the way I look at everything. You know, in this book, there's this guy I really don't like. His name is Heidegger. Talk about, for those who don't. Don't know anything. Heidecker, Tim Heidecker. Talk about. Who's this guy? Why is he so bad? And also, why does he have such a gravity in the field? Right. That is kind of. You're. You're pulling against.
- [36:37]
C
Okay, you know, the graduate students that have been through my architectural history class will probably. I mean, architectural theory and architecture history courses, you'll know a little bit about this because we've kind of dealt with it a little bit. But, you know, philosophy is, I think, one of my ways in. To the deeper understanding of life. And during that era that we were sort of become. I was becoming more politically awake, I also decided to study philosophy pretty deeply and get a minor concentration in undergrad. And. And it ended up becoming one of the main reasons in grad that I kind of moved towards criticism and writing and journalism, et cetera. But I think the experience of getting told, analyze this text because there's something really important for you as an architect in it, but don't ask more about who wrote it and where it sort of came from. I think that's really the reason why we wanted to deal with Heidegger in an architectural context since the late 80s and really since way before that. But in the late 80s, a philosopher by the name of Farias wrote a book called Heidegger Nazism, where he basically has this effectively like a giant breakup, Right. With Heidegger as this kind of foundation for phenomenology, a very important philosophy about the human body. And there are many versions of phenomenology that are incredible, and it's a big part of our school, too. But with Heidegger in particular, Farias asked a simple question. You know, if there's any bit of Nazism in your thinking, could it also be in your philosophy?
- [38:32]
B
Right.
- [38:33]
C
And so we take that extent, you know, question a little bit further and ask ourselves, you know, what are some of the defaults that we as architects
- [38:43]
B
have
- [38:46]
C
sort of accepted that have some touch of influence of Heidegger, right? And we do it through, like looking at three really like big essays of his. You know, one of them is Building, Dwelling Thinking, which is one that you may have read. You know, it's the one architects love. Because I'm not sure if you know this, but when someone out of architecture says something about architecture, we are really psyched about it, but we're also sometimes suspect of it. I wish we were a little bit more suspect of this one, right. There's so many pieces in that where the writing was on the wall. You know, the work that I think is the most detrimental is the sort of question concerning technology and the kind of re. Theorizing of the concept of tools. That's maybe not that important for us right now, just in a philosophical sense, but I think it's very important for us in terms of accepting the kind of default nature of certain tools and their kind of place in the world. That essay, for example, gets published much later, like in the 1950s. And when it gets published, they remove all the anti Semitism from it, but the original one is effectively blaming the, you know, all the world's problems on like basically Jewish technology. So that's again, an easy one to bring into this book to again ask a reader to find their foundations, right. That I would say line up with their hope and vision for the world and question, right? Like the defaults that are given to you.
- [40:48]
A
Right? And that's kind of just like a tip of the iceberg, right? Because you know, in your book you basically attack the academy as you talk about this fascist architecture industrial complex, right. And how that is dominant in education. And so that's a pretty straightforward attack on kind of the mainstream of what's taught. And so this figure that you use as an example is just one of kind of like a bigger problem. So, Dan, can you just talk to us about this fascist architecture industrial complex and the need for your book to kind of counter it?
- [41:18]
B
Definitely. So, yeah, in this book we introduce a couple new concepts that we're really proud of. One of them being what we call the anti fascist avant garde continuum, which is a way of kind of grouping this genealogy that we've identified. Another is the fascist architecture industrial complex, which, coming back to your question about Heidegger, it's this way of grouping together many, many, many years of intellectual thought into a single overarching problem. And what the fascist architecture industrial complex is, is essentially how the fetishization of fascist architecture over time snowballed and became a self repeating cycle. So to the extent that, you know, we crunched the numbers, there was something like five new books about Italian fascist architecture in the last two years. Like, why. Why are we still making these? I have absolutely no idea. We need new material. And so. And you know, it's. And people get. People get tenure this way. Like, people get tenure from like specializing in this sort of thing. And what is that? Ultimately it just reproduces the cycle over and over and over again. So by calling attention to this thing, the fascist architecture industrial complex, we want to throw a wrench in the machinery.
- [42:49]
D
I think there's also an intergenerational problem here. Right. If there were people in the 80s who were studying Heidegger in order to justify their architecture, then they hired all these architects who now call those architects their heroes. And so now you have people who now you have this multiplying problem of tiny fascist architects spreading around the world and telling you that Wexner center is amazing and perhaps we shouldn't be doing this.
- [43:25]
A
Great. And I want to get into some of the other people and concepts that we should be studying instead of the fascists coming out of the fascist architecture industrial complex. Speaking of intergenerational, though, you have a line in this book that 1970s discourse around Neo fascism opened the doors for fascism to transform into memes. Can you talk about memes and how that line plays into this?
- [43:52]
B
Yeah. Do you want to talk about Dawkins here or we can.
- [43:56]
C
I'm happy to do it.
- [43:57]
B
You can do it. Well, I want to. Let's definitely talk about memes. But another important. So after we launched this attack of Heidegger studies, we critiqued somebody that not a lot of people on the left critique, and that's Michel Foucault. And what we're critiquing is, is this Foucaultian concept that gets picked up by Delou and Guattari and a lot of other Western Marxists. It's this thing that Foucault coins called non fascism. And so the way that we introduce the fascist architecture industrial complex, you see the term non Nazi architecture getting used among.
- [44:39]
A
It's not anti fascist, non fascist.
- [44:42]
B
And just like, if that term sounds weird to you, it's because it is. Like, I remember telling my. I was talking to my aunt who's like in her 90s, and she's this like, badass. Socialist that was interviewed by HUAC and stuff. And I remember being like, aunt Tammy, have you ever like, what do you. What do you think about non Nazism? And she was like, what? And so anyways, non fascism is this intellectual movement that Foucault starts to proliferate when he's starting to take his turn to the right. He's abandoning anarchism, socialism, sort of accepting neoliberalism. And so what at the core of non fascism is actually a kind of something that makes sense. It's this idea that we are all capable of being fascists. And the way to fight fascism is an internal pursuit where you're constantly questioning and challenging the fascist voice. You know, it's that famous thing like kill the cop inside your head. So it's just that this idea of doing that ad nauseam and that's the way you fight fascism. The problem with that is that when this is getting picked up by the Deleuzes, the Guattaris, the academy, anti fascism becomes a dirty word and it gets associated. You know, The external collectivist struggle against fascism is abandoned. And then you suddenly start to see, you know, conferences happening at schools about non fascism and all that stuff.
- [46:16]
A
So, yeah, no, I really love how you went into that, the anti fascist versus non fascist. And you mentioned some of the ideological leaders of that non fascism trend. Right? People like Madeleine Albright, you know, not a good person, did a lot of bad things around you. And, you know, it makes sense when you look at kind of what was happening in the world. I mean, you have Post World War II, of course, the defeat of fascist Germany, fascist Italy, Japan. You know, anti fascism is like the thing, it's the winners of the war, the dominant thing. But then when you kind of get into the different era, like the Cold War era, anti fascism then becomes anti colonial also. But what are the big victors in World War II, the ones who defeated fascism, other than the Soviet Union? They come out of that war becoming like the new empire, the new imperialist power. And so they need ideologies in their own countries to kind of support that. And so there's kind of this pull like we can't be fascist because we just did a whole big war to defeat fascism. And no one in the world likes fascism, so we can't, you know, we gotta step away from that. But at the same time, we need to adapt to this new world order, this kind of unipolar. We are this big military empire and everyone's under our tutelage. And so how is, you know, obviously there's some play there, right? I mean, with the New World Order and the academies and the ideologies that come out of it.
- [47:40]
C
Yeah, there's so many, like, greater,
- [47:45]
A
you
- [47:46]
C
know, mentors of ours that, like people we really look to and care about that deal with this in particular. But I think the vehicle that you're speaking about, Mike, is this term that we use a lot called recuperation that is like an easy tool that generally, like you talk about New World Order, obviously the sort of like the new. No, no, no. I'm more of the NWO from WWF way. But that's the other end of the spectrum. The, the, the reality of recuperation for particularly like, you know, governments that don't want to abandon, for example, very like corporate. Corporate subsidy and support versus like, you know, social investment, et cetera, is that they'll use, you know, they'll use something like recuperation to take an idea that is very popular and then rebrand it.
- [48:55]
B
Right.
- [48:56]
C
You know, the, the Nazis did it. They called it National Socialism.
- [49:01]
B
Right.
- [49:01]
C
At its core, the concept of socialism, for example, necessitates a kind of internationalism, right? Something that doesn't have borders. Right. That is inherently not nationalistic. And so they put the adjective in front of it and bam, we have a new thing, you know, a subsidized existence for non Jewish Germans at the expense of an entire cadre of slave labor. Right. Of imprisoned Jewish people and communists and anarchists and gay folks, etc. So recuperation happens often. That's one example. The kind of non fascism is just one example of it. It's really something that happens a lot more than I think we're used to. And I think any of you know, any of the folks, particularly in the sort of theory courses that I've taught, have heard me speak about how concepts like affordable housing is a recuperated term versus concepts like housing for all or like, like, you know, like actual subsidized, you know, housing estates and, and housing projects. Right. We talk about that often. Right. Like affordable for who? And affordable how? Right. So, you know, it's. Sometimes the concepts are much bigger, but I think the worry is always within the ones that are more innocuous.
- [50:27]
A
Yeah. You know, and you have that quote in there from Mussolini about how fascism should really be called corporatism. And so, yeah, you have this system in America that it's not fascism, but it's close to that other word or use that other word to describe it. So, you know, how far off is it really? You know, You've done a really incredible job in this book. Not just attacking, you know, the fascist architecture industrial complex, but kind of attacking the canon of architecture, but creating your own anti fascist canon. Right. I mean, one of the best kind of areas of illustration is all that the figures that we should know about that aren't taught in the schools and many of the structures, cool buildings and things like that. I did want to, you know, you mentioned earlier, Kyoshi Kurumiya. That was my favorite figure that we talked about. I wanted to ask you, Wayne, like, someone drawing some of these things. And I was drawn to that one by. I went to the page first because.
- [51:24]
B
Because of the.
- [51:27]
A
Are the kids out of the room? The F word, the draft drawing from the newspaper. You know, that hit me because those of you who were assigned male at birth, between ages of 18 and 25, you're going to be automatically registered for the draft in December. If you didn't know that it's happening. It's supposed to be selective service. You're signing yourself, but you're going to be automatically registered. And so that draft graphic from the 70s, you know, was poignant in the sense that it's, you know, we're getting close to that. That again. But I like how that figure was, you know, used architecture in a variety of different important spaces, from the anti war movement to the LGBTQ movement, civil rights, you know, anti militarism. Anyways, and I'd like to hear more about kind of your favorite figures, like if there's one favorite figure you have from this part of the book. But I want to start with you. Some of the favorite illustrations from this part also. And I'm thinking about the newspaper, but I'm sure there's others.
- [52:27]
D
Okay. Because Andrew's on this page. There's these guys in 1980s in France, os congaceros who were. Who are not into the idea that architects design prisons, which I think is reasonable. We should all not be into the idea that architects design prisons. We should generally not be into them. And what they did was they sabotaged the construction sites of prisons that were under construction so they would go poor sugar into the curing concrete or pour acid into the concrete mix and start to sabotage the structural integrity of the foundations of these future buildings. They terrorized the architects who designed them. And it's like, it's both hilarious because it is completely outlandish. It's also definitely some highly illegal activity. It's not exactly architecture. They're not making buildings. If anything, they're sabotaging the effort to create buildings. But once you start to think about this as a act of architecture rather than an act of, let's say, political guerrilla warfare, then you start to think about the larger structures and systems that make this happen, that make this possible, that emerge because of it. So now you can. Once you start to think about the architecture which is anti prisons, then you can start to think about what you have instead. Do we have a society full of buildings that are slightly lower ratio of them are putting or locking people into small jails? Right. And so now we can have a better. Now we can imagine this better, more anti fascist world. I think there's something. I think there's something delightful about how not material that is. And I think it's important to remember that architecture is not always about pouring a foundation, putting in some rebar, making some walls, putting a lock on the door, making a nice window. And that these systems and these larger patterns and relationships can make change in the way that we perceive and move through our built environment as much as the buildings themselves.
- [55:19]
A
So when you are designing the, the fascist deprogramming prison cells of Alphonse Laurenczyk, you didn't come up with your own ideas for like the Pete Heimset cell or the,
- [55:33]
B
you know, Milei in Argentina just literally recited. He used the phrase satanic Marxism in a conference recently and boy, you know, it sounds a lot like what they were saying to Laurentic. Literally the same thing.
- [55:50]
D
Yeah.
- [55:52]
A
If there's any other figures you feel worth mentioning. And also some of the buildings, I mean, I wish we had it up on the screen, but my favorite was the Casa de Portoal. It was the, like the dock workers. It just looks like, you know, we'll get to this utopian word, but like it looks like some 70s utopian sci fi stuff. And I think one of the wild things about learning more about that is that it, like it was built and it is empty now and it's not used for the purpose that it was designed for. But were there like some favorites here that you feel are notable?
- [56:27]
C
Yeah, you should also bring up the Esquire thing.
- [56:30]
B
Definitely. Yeah. So Casa del Porto Ale. First of all, we're big Sopranos fans, so thereby we love Napoli, so we had to have Napoli in the book. So Casa del Portuale was a social condenser that was built for the Neapolitan proletariat, the dock workers. And it was this outlandish, incredible brutalist monument. It organized the social life of dock workers. It was a union hall. It's where you got your paycheck, all sorts of different things. And it was designed by Aldoloris Rossi, not to be confused with Aldor Rossi, but Elder Loris Rossi was this really interesting Neapolitan militant that also had his own TV show. So he was invited to have his own TV show and it was in Rome. And he just gave political commentary. So cool. And he designed it with Donatello Mazzolini. They met as students together in architecture school. Their thesis was a social condenser unbuilt. They went on to build social condensers. So it's so incredible. Another building that we care deeply about is the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, Centro Gam. And we talk about Karl Marxhoff. There's one more that I really want to call attention to. And we talk about a building that recently tragically met demise and we hope to see rebuilt. It's the Rashad Al Shawa Cultural center in Gaza City, Palestine. The building that, the way that we frame it is a love story written in concrete. It was by an architect and an artist that were married. They were in love. And the building, it was the first cultural center built in post1948 Palestine. It was met with stiff Israeli opposition to the project. It became a place where Nelson Mandela spoke, you know, serious political conferences. But also things like Clowns without Borders would go there. They screened the minions there. Things that brought Palestinian children joy. This is a deeply anti fascist work of architecture that we're honored to talk about in this book.
- [58:55]
C
Trying to think of. There's a lot of greatest hits here. There's a lot of greatest hits here. Maybe one thing I'll say about this is we really care about the discipline of architectural history and we don't, we don't consider ourselves historians. Right. Like I, you know, I think of myself more as a genealogist. I think, Dan, you know, through the lens of like journalism and obviously Lane, through illustration, we try to depict these histories in ways that can matter to architects and others. Right. These small vignettes are for us, they're more than hunches. They used to be hunches. Right when the project first started. But what we hope sort of happens through this particular book is a. A kind of recentering of these types of projects for more intense, deep architectural history. Perhaps a whole new generation of PhDs that they can perhaps go a little bit deeper. But knowing how the system operates, I don't anticipate that I could be hopeful of it. Yeah, but I think, I think, yeah, I think you guys really? Yeah, just like anything, except one more Italian Fascist architecture in Morocco. Something, you know. Yeah. There's so many really fun stories. There's a lot of really sad stories. I think Margaret Schutt Lihotsky, I think is certainly one of my favorites because she's, I think, perhaps the most famous architect that we include in this list. And she's famous for designing a lot of things that she doesn't get credit for on a sort of popular scale. She gets a lot of credit for designing this new sort of format for the kitchen, which is amazing too. But that kitchen exists not as an isolated thing, but as part of a larger infrastructure of housing and sort of social engagement in a city. It's not the way in which, like we obsessed over the products of kitchens in Arts and Architecture magazine or the single family homes that those kitchens found themselves in.
- [61:26]
B
Right.
- [61:26]
C
Always disconnected from each other. She designed schools for children and she was a militant antifascist and spent time in prison for it. Maybe say the whole story.
- [61:44]
B
Yes.
- [61:44]
A
And you guys did a really great job kind of creating that blueprint, right, for kind of like a new curriculum, a curriculum for anti fascist architecture. The figures, the places, you know, Gaza to Cuba and Algeria, the structures, the things that can be studied and can create a new consciousness, we in the field. And so that's kind of what I want to end on. Right. It's like the looking forward part. You know, there's this idea that we can change the way these things are taught and the kind of base of knowledge, but even, you know, without that, what are we thinking about for the future? Right? And what I really love here is you. You bring back the idea of utopianism, right? Which is. Was a thing that existed more even in American culture. Utopianism had a much more. Had a bigger place in culture when there was kind of big socialist projects in the world that were providing a bright vision of the future. And so there was a need to kind of culturally, you know, embody that. We don't have the same kind of utopianism now in this country. For obvious reasons. Things look like they're going in a bad direction. But you even see that in pop culture, right? I mean, from film and television and, and literature, you know, there was a period where utopianism was kind of dominant. I mean, as like a sci fi fan, you know, it's definitely true there, you know, today in our culture and in pop culture there's these like severely apocalyptic and dystopian themes in like everything, which is a reflection of just where we're at and have been at for a couple decades. And so it's understandable. But I appreciate that you all are pushing people to, you know, we want to build like this liberatory future, but we have to imagine it first. And how can, through this lens of anti fascist architecture, not just review the past and what we shouldn't have studied, what we should have studied instead, but what we, what we can make and we can do. So
- [63:42]
C
I have to give so much credit to Juan Manuel Heredia, our director of the School of Architecture here, who if you did not suggest I check out Franz Hinkelimer, I know that I would not have brought that discourse into our group discussion. Have conversations with the people that matter to you in your lives and listen. That's all I can tell you on that end. Hinkelimert's work in the mid-1980s, it's a little bit different from the other liberation theorists and theologists of the time. Liberation Theology, for all you that don't
- [64:24]
A
know,
- [64:27]
C
is a really interesting species of philosophy that became really important to revolutionary movements in Latin America in the middle, latter half of the 20th century. And the reason that it became so, in a way, popular was because it made sure to include questions of liberation with ones about transcendence. And I think really meeting the kind of working class of those countries in Latin America where they were at and what it kind of turned into was effectively a kind of form of alchemy where it kind of turned, let's say, Christian doctrine into like, Marxism. And at its core, there was a lot of revolutionary Christian people in those countries that had a vested interest in, you know, kind of ending the hegemony of, like, US interests in their countries and whatnot. And, you know, violently, in some cases, violently, you know, murdered and killed. Perhaps the most important story here is the story of Oscar Romero, who was an archbishop and was a liberation theologist, and effectively the Catholic Church turned their back on him. And that's also a kind of predecessor to the era of, of the Catholic Church being kind of, you know, like incredibly like anti communist to the point of like, you know, suggesting doctrine against these kind of liberatory projects. And the idea is simple. If, you know, if the meek are supposed to inherit the earth, why are we not doing everything in our power to allow them to inherit it right now? And so that that sort of strand of philosophy is one, as someone from, you know, the sort of quote unquote capital of Latin America I was used to, we organized with a lot of folks that would refer to themselves as liberation theologists. But his book, this is a long way to get back to the book is this wonderful book from mid-1980s called the Critique of Utopian Reason. It's a really simple thesis. Every kind of dominant form of political ideology has a form of utopia, even the ones that are anti utopian. And I think what we're experiencing now is in a lot of, you know, the quote unquote western countries is a deeply anti utopian utopianism that works really, really well for corporate interests and not human beings. We ask a deeper question in there for architects, which is if we're not questioning what political system architecture finds itself in, we are doing a disservice to ourselves as, as practitioners of architecture. And if we want architecture to be more liberatory, if we want architecture to actually change the world around us, we might want to associate ourselves with utopian projects that line up with that vision. And so what are the kind of political ideologies that have those utopian projects? It's, it's kind of simple. It's projects of socialism and projects. Anarchism.
- [68:16]
A
Yes. And I want to, I want to go more into that because I. This book really got me thinking about how anti fascist architecture can save us in a variety of ways. I mean, it really can. I mean, just look at the climate crisis for one, right? It's bad. I don't know. If you look into it, it's pretty bad. And it's gonna get real bad when we're seeing sooner than you think. And there seems to be no collective project to address it in any meaningful way except for like some tax rebates for buying an electric car. Like things that actually do nothing at all. But thinking about how a field, different disciplines, like how could there be a massive project like pulling on the skills and the intellect and the intellectual labor of people in just this one field that could redesign our buildings and our landscapes and our neighborhoods in a way that could, could help mitigate the climate crisis. There would be pretty dramatic changes really quickly if that's something that was prioritized like just in that. But I think you can think of a variety of different problems that we face in this country. You know, lack of health care, poverty, food insecurity, like there's a racism. There's a lot of, of deeply bad things that are continually getting worse that I feel that there's. That this should be more of the conversation about how to address. And so we're thinking about this, of course, in two different worlds, right? There's the world we live in the system we live under now, where how can an anti fascist architecture intervene in our existing structure to make life better for people? But let's think utopian. Let's think about if there's decommodified. What if there's no profit motive at all in any of this and it really is considered like a collective effort of our society? Like what's possible then? Like, what are some pictures of what the future can look like if what you're recommending becomes the dominant ideology in the field?
- [70:17]
C
Yeah.
- [70:18]
B
Just to that question, I want to say that a huge part of this book is building an anti fascist Popular Front. We want to connect the struggles in architecture and outside of architecture. But I'll talk about in architecture right now first. Right now, the sort of left wing of architecture discourse has to do with unpacking architecture's colonial footprint and also the labor movement within architecture right now. So there's. That breaks down into a few other conversations. But we're trying to build an anti fascist Popular front of everybody that fits within that category, which is a lot of people, hopefully, you know, the environmentalists that are maybe in the center and aren't as radical, come join us. That's essential. So the idea is that, you know, this anti fascist Popular Front conjoins the anti colonial struggle, conjoins the fight against ecological devastation, conjoins the. The fight for democratizing your workplace. We're trying to build this front. And so, you know what happens when you. So today's Mayday. When I was walking here from where I'm staying, I walked by all of these amazing different tents on the green. And I'm seeing, you know, psl, dsa, jvp, no kings, all of these different people. And yeah, I think like, what if we just dusted off good old anti fascism and made a huge tent? What would happen then? It's that easy, right?
- [71:54]
C
It's that easy. Another thing too, the sort of last chapter, which is called Utopia's Refuge. I think about it as a primer more than anything. It is a continuum, the project. So there's no conclusion. The conclusion is to continue. Right. But the, the primer tries to make sense of the qualities of that future that you're asking about, Mike. And I really appreciate Lane's illustrations on that end because they're, they're kind of instructive, but also they're meant to, they're also meant to, to make you imagine. Right. So the first thing is in some ways marrying, like Dan said, the sort of movements around de growth, which is Effectively this kind of anti capitalist, anti growth approach to ecological issues with larger kind of political projects. And over the last few years, we've seen wonderful works emerge around concepts like eco socialism, degrowth communism, salvage communism that are not emerging from the world of architecture, but I think really have resonance in a lot of the ecological projects of architecture. In particular, our really good comrade out in France, Charlie Montair Barths and her work A Moratorium on Building Construction. The idea of we do not need to build anything else. Now, if we don't build anything else, what happens to the imagination of the architect that is almost always being asked to imagine something that wasn't there? What if we only thought through problems of reuse, problems of the existing architectures that our world has? And we believe that that's not just a niche in our profession. We think that it could have massive ontological and epistemic reverberations for how we consider architecture. When you start with a building and have to make architecture through it, that is a very different thing than saying, here is your picturesque plot of land and now let an architecture emerge from it. So on the one end, we think maintenance is going to be a really big key quality of this future where how we reuse these buildings are going to be more important to us as architects, even though now we specialize in other aspects. So imagine a world where architecture is really obsessed with post occupancy and how the aging process goes. There are architectures that do that. There's historic processes that question those things. But one that's not niche, I think, is the goal. Another idea that we have here is fighting against kind of scarcity and austerity narratives to think about architecture and instead recapture concepts like maximalism, which are often thought of through kind of a pejorative lens of like, oh, is this superfluous? Right. But there are very cheap ways to be maximalist. I know a lot of you guys have super interesting and messy living rooms with a lot of detritus and stuff. It didn't cost you a lot. Right? So maximalism is that, but it's also, it's also about conceiving of something much more than just this austere minimal life. Right. Even in the middle. I'm sorry. In the early 20th century, when the Congress International Modern Architecture started to take on the problem of housing seriously. For, as a, as a project for modern architecture, what was the name of their conference that turned into the kind of program the Minimum Dwelling. Right. What is the Maximum dwelling? Right, That's a little bit of that Chapter and then, you know, finally, you know, fighting against austerity and using, let's say, like the vehicle of coloration.
- [76:46]
B
Right.
- [76:48]
C
As, you know, in some ways a little self serving, like saying, maybe we do need to consider the communicative possibilities of architecture as an object in the world, in the ways that it's colored, but also in the kind of sense of starting with that pre renaissance place of architecture and art being much closer together.
- [77:17]
B
Right.
- [77:19]
C
Really, I would say flattening the hierarchies imposed on us by like the Bauhaus and other educational models of the 20th century. So, you know, those are a little, I would say a little bit more nerdy, a little bit more like pedagogy focused and a little bit practical focused. But there are a lot of conditions I think that we can anticipate.
- [77:44]
A
Yeah. And Lane, you know, being a visual person, you know, just trying to. Architecture students in here, I assume they're here because they want to make stuff, make something. Right. Like, how can we think about the things we make if anti fascist architecture was in charge and the new cities and towns, things we were building, what do you imagine things could look like? What is the untapped potential of this discipline or this, I guess, new tradition within the discipline of architecture that can change the way we look at things like cities and neighborhoods from a visual perspective?
- [78:19]
D
I think we're used to talking about architecture through the lens of style. And so the first thing is to stop doing that and to start thinking about it through the lens of the way that it's used, the way that it comes together, the way that is expressed on it. There are styles that may emerge. Right. But that's not. I think that as a guiding structure is constraining. Thinking about seeing your students work today, Andrew, seeing all of the students trying to engage with existing structures, trying to engage with program, trying to look at how different people might come through the building and use it in different ways is a really good place to start. And then we can talk about whether the way that the object has come together meets those needs. But that's largely what drove a lot of the way that the illustrations came together. These projects that Andrew and Dan write about are so different in when they were built, how they were built, what they look like. Their stylistic character spans the spectrum. But there is something that unifies all of them. And that's the thing that we want to try to focus on. And the more we can do that, I think the closer we will be. It's kind of like asking, I always ask students to try to make projects that live outside of capitalism, but no one can imagine the world outside of it. So it's very hard to do. I think it's the same thing. It's like, how do you imagine the foundation is something that doesn't have this super pervasive quality? And so you have to find a way to figure out how to start thinking outside of it. And part of that is just reading case studies, reading history, reading philosophy, understanding how other people have tried to get around this, and then trying to find your own way around it, trying to actually tackle that.
- [80:43]
A
Yes, Well, I know now any problem we want to fix in our society, we can't do without the antifascist architects. It goes down the list. Every single one of them is way more important than I thought. Antifascist architecture out now. Get the book. Round of applause for our authority.