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Antifascist architecture, as presented in Daniel Jonas Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia’s book, is not a single style. It is a proposed political category that can include social housing, collective buildings, cultural reuse, protest, sabotage, demolition and even a deliberate absence where a prison or other oppressive project was prevented. Stephan Trüby’s review in Architectural Record (published September 15, 2026) describes the book as an ambitious counter-canon—but argues that it never fully explains why these very different things belong together.
That tension is the useful way into Antifascist Architecture: A Genealogy of Antifascist Architects, Buildings, History, and Theory. The book asks architecture readers to look beyond familiar authors and monuments toward political movements, communities and direct action. Trüby’s criticism asks the harder follow-up: what, exactly, makes a building antifascist, and how can political orientation be read in built form?
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What does the book mean by “antifascist architecture”?
Roche and Santa Lucia describe their aim, as quoted by Trüby, as “to build an antifascist discipline for architecture and to survey antifascist buildings—socialist, communist, anarchist, Indigenous, nomadic, militant, and other world-building systems outside capitalism.” That sentence makes the scope unusually broad. The proposed field is not limited to buildings designed by people who used the word antifascist for themselves. It reaches across political traditions and includes systems of collective life that the authors position outside capitalist practice.
Trüby characterizes the result as an antifascist architectural counter-canon. A conventional canon tends to organize architectural history around recognized designers, influential styles and celebrated objects. This book, by contrast, puts architects alongside housing programs, political communities, reuse projects and acts intended to stop construction. In the review’s account, “antifascist” operates as an umbrella for a militant Left that includes socialism, anarchism, communism, trade-unionism and anarcho-syndicalism.
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The authors also reject the idea that architecture must always be a completed object. Their formulations, reproduced in the review, make that explicit: “Sometimes antifascist architecture looks like a school for working-class Algerian children, a social housing complex for Cuban revolutionaries, a manifesto, or a monument to the defeat of colonialism.” In another passage they write, “Other times, a work of antifascist architecture is a sabotaged prison project or the act of making a prison simply not exist.” They add that antifascist architecture “doesn’t just connote buildings. It can also be a demolition or a void—an absence in space.”
That definition changes the reader’s first question. Instead of asking whether a façade looks politically radical, the reader must ask what a project does, who controls it, whom it serves and what forms of power it resists.
The three different things the category combines
The examples discussed by Trüby fall into at least three distinct categories. Keeping them separate helps explain both the book’s ambition and the review’s reservation.
| Category | What is being classified | Examples discussed in the review |
|---|---|---|
| Built form | A building or housing complex whose organization, symbolism or collective use is presented as politically emancipatory. | Karl-Marx-Hof; Casa del Portuale; housing associated with Pastorita Núñez González. |
| Political use and memory | An existing structure whose occupants, institutional role or later reuse changes its political meaning. | The UNCTAD III complex, later reopened as the Gabriela Mistral Metropolitan Cultural Centre (Centro GAM). |
| Refusal or direct action | An intervention that prevents, damages, removes or withholds architecture rather than producing a conventional building. | Os Cangaceiros’ prison-construction sabotage; a demolition or spatial void. |
These are not interchangeable claims. A housing complex can be evaluated through plans, construction and everyday use. A reuse project requires attention to memory, institutions and public ritual. Sabotage raises questions about ethics, legality and whether an unbuilt project should be called architecture at all. Trüby’s central complaint is that the book gathers all three under one label without establishing a sufficiently clear rule for inclusion.
People and housing in the proposed counter-canon
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky appears in the review as an established figure in the counter-canon: an Austrian architect and communist resistance figure. Her inclusion demonstrates that the book is interested in political biography as well as formal design. Trüby’s objection is not that her political commitments are irrelevant. It is that the book discusses the buildings associated with her indirectly through biography rather than showing, in architectural terms, how a particular plan, construction method or spatial arrangement embodies antifascist politics.
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Pastorita Núñez González and the “Repartos Pastorita”
Trüby describes Pastorita Núñez González as a Cuban Revolution guerrilla fighter who later headed the National Savings and Housing Institute (INAV). The review reports that she oversaw 8,533 homes in 27 months, from 1959 to 1962; the homes are colloquially called “Repartos Pastorita.” That figure is a report from Trüby’s 2026 review, not an independently verified statistic here.
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Núñez González’s presence shows how the book expands architectural authorship. The person associated with a housing program may be a political organizer or administrator rather than the architect whose name appears on drawings. Yet the same example exposes the criterion problem. Are the homes antifascist because of their social purpose, because of the revolutionary institution that delivered them, because of their physical design, or because of the political biography of the person who led the program? Trüby says the book does not answer that question by analyzing the housing directly.
Buildings that stand for collective power
Karl-Marx-Hof and Red Vienna
The review identifies Karl-Marx-Hof as a flagship project of Red Vienna. In the counter-canon, it functions as more than a large residential complex: it represents a municipal and working-class program in which housing is treated as collective infrastructure. Its significance, on the account presented by Trüby, lies in the relationship between a building, a political movement and the social provision the project was intended to embody.
That relationship still needs to be specified. A political label attached to a housing program does not automatically explain how courtyards, circulation, services or thresholds produce a different social order. A rigorous architectural reading would connect the political claim to observable spatial decisions rather than leaving the building as an emblem.
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Trüby gives the construction span for Casa del Portuale (Dockworker’s House) in Naples as 1968–1980. He describes its aesthetic as a mixture of baroque, surrealist and brutalist elements. The review quotes Roche and Santa Lucia calling it a “massive space where the unruly Neapolitan proletariat could congregate.”
This example makes the counter-canon’s formal range clear. Antifascist architecture is not presented as a clean, uniform style. A building can combine historical references, theatrical effects and heavy concrete while being interpreted through the collective life it supports. The unresolved issue is whether those visual qualities matter politically in themselves, or whether the political argument rests mainly on who was meant to gather there.
When a building’s later life becomes part of its politics
UNCTAD III and Centro GAM
The review traces a dramatic sequence for Santiago’s UNCTAD III complex, now known as the Gabriela Mistral Metropolitan Cultural Centre (Centro GAM). Trüby says the complex was completed in 1972 under Salvador Allende for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, he says, it became a seat of power for the dictatorship.
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According to the review, a fire in 2006 preceded the site’s reopening in 2010 as a cultural center. Roche and Santa Lucia interpret the years of public rituals surrounding that transformation as an “antifascist architectural exorcism.” The phrase shifts attention from original design to contested memory. The building’s political meaning is produced through occupation, state power, fire, reconstruction and public acts of reclaiming.
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This case is different from a purpose-built socialist housing project. The same physical complex passes through opposed regimes and uses. If it qualifies as antifascist, the relevant evidence may be the later collective work of reinterpretation rather than a permanent political message encoded in its first plan. Trüby presents that interpretation as the authors’ argument and does not independently verify the historical sequence in his review.
Can stopping a prison project count as architecture?
Os Cangaceiros
Trüby says Os Cangaceiros formed in Nice, France, in 1968 and remained active until 1990. He recounts the group’s sabotage of future prison construction by pouring sugar into wet concrete. That is the review’s account; the article does not add claims about the extent of damage or the project’s final outcome.
The episode tests the boundary of the category more sharply than any completed building. If architecture includes the design and construction of a prison, can preventing that construction be an architectural act? Roche and Santa Lucia answer expansively. Their quoted formulation says a work may be “the act of making a prison simply not exist,” and even “direct action taken against architects themselves for committing crimes against humanity in the form of prisons, concentration camps etc.”
For readers, three distinctions are essential:
- Design: the production of plans, structures and spaces.
- Occupation or use: the social and political practices that occur in an existing building.
- Intervention: an action that alters, removes or prevents a project.
Calling all three architecture may be intellectually productive, but it also changes the discipline’s object. A reader should not assume that a sabotage campaign can be assessed with the same tools as a housing plan.
The Chekas example and the problem of limits
Trüby says the book opens with Spanish Civil War torture cells built by Alphonse Laurencic, often referred to as Chekas. He treats this as a contentious example and criticizes the book’s handling of it. Because the review presents the case as part of its critique, it should not be read as a defense or justification of torture. Its significance here is methodological: an antifascist history that includes spaces of coercion must explain whether it is studying the perpetrators’ architecture, the victims’ experience, the political circumstances of the cells or the later memory of those spaces.
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The Chekas discussion exposes the danger of an unbounded counter-canon. If a book includes every building connected to antifascist struggle, it needs to say whether inclusion means admiration, analysis, condemnation or historical relevance. Without that distinction, a reader can mistake the presence of an example for approval of it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Trüby’s main criticism: the selection rule remains unclear
Trüby’s concise verdict is: “All in all, the connection between architecture and antifascism—between built fabric and political orientation—remains a mystery.” His criticism has several parts.
Who gets included?
The book presents figures and projects from different countries, ideologies and scales, but Trüby says it does not explain why these people enter the canon while others do not. A counter-canon still needs a method of selection. Otherwise, replacing an established canon with a politically preferred list changes the names without solving the canon’s underlying problem.
What makes a work antifascist?
Trüby asks whether the decisive factor is authorship, intention, form, social use, institutional ownership or political effect. Those tests can produce different results. A building designed by a committed communist might not serve collective purposes in operation. A neutral-looking structure might become a site of democratic organizing. A prison can be architecturally sophisticated and politically repressive at the same time.
Where is the analysis of built form?
In the cases of Schütte-Lihotzky and Núñez González, Trüby says the book leans on biography and political association rather than analyzing the buildings themselves. That leaves the relationship between political orientation and spatial organization unproven. A convincing argument would show how layouts, construction systems, access, visibility, shared facilities or control of land carry political consequences.
How precisely are fascism and antifascism defined?
Trüby criticizes what he sees as broad treatment of capitalism and neoliberalism as “late fascism,” along with insufficiently precise definitions of fascism and antifascism. He also objects to sweeping style judgments and to the authors’ dismissal of engagement with fascist architecture. These are Trüby’s evaluations, not a settled consensus. The practical implication is that readers should distinguish historical fascist regimes, authoritarian state architecture, capitalist exploitation and contemporary right-wing politics rather than treating them as synonyms.
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How to test an antifascist architecture claim
The review does not supply a formal checklist, but its criticism suggests a useful way to read the book’s examples. For any project or action, ask:
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstall- What is the political category? Identify the specific movement, institution or ideology involved instead of relying on “Left” or “antifascist” as a catch-all.
- What is being classified? Decide whether the claim concerns physical form, authorship, intended use, actual use, public memory or an action against construction.
- What is the evidence in the space? Look for concrete relationships between politics and architecture: who can enter, who controls resources, how collective life is organized and what forms of surveillance or exclusion are built in.
- What is the political effect? Separate stated intention from outcomes. A project’s symbolism, administration and everyday consequences may point in different directions.
- Does absence count, and why? If demolition, refusal or sabotage is included, explain what architectural knowledge is gained by treating nonconstruction as part of the field.
These questions prevent two opposite errors: reducing antifascist architecture to a visual style, or expanding it so widely that every oppositional act becomes architecture by definition.
What readers should expect from the book
Antifascist Architecture: A Genealogy of Antifascist Architects, Buildings, History, and Theory is listed by the review as a 240-page Park Books volume with a publication-time price of $40. That price is the listing reported in Trüby’s review, not a current retail guarantee.
The book will be most useful to readers who want architectural history to include political organizing, working-class housing, anti-colonial memory and resistance to carceral construction. It offers a vocabulary for discussing projects that conventional design histories often separate: a municipal housing block, a revolutionary administrator, a repurposed state building and a campaign that prevents a prison from being built.
Readers looking for a settled definition should approach it differently. Trüby’s review indicates that the book’s energy comes from its expansive examples, while its weakness is the lack of a consistently stated test connecting those examples. The most productive reading is therefore comparative: examine what each project builds, enables, remembers or prevents, and do not treat the shared label as proof that the political and architectural relationships have already been demonstrated.
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