Architecture is Always Political:

A Communist History

Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History — November 2024

by Simon Elmer

Architecture is always Political: A Communist History is the first volume in a new series titled the ASH Papers, which will collect in book form the more important articles published on our website. The projected next two volumes will be titled, respectively, The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance and Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing.

Description

Written between 2016 and 2019, before the watershed of lockdown and the Great Reset of the West into stakeholder capitalism it initiated, the articles collected in this book were originally published on the website of Architects for Social Housing, the company and practice founded by the architect, Geraldine Dening, and Simon Elmer in 2015 and for which he is Head of Research. They were written, therefore, against the background of the crisis of housing affordability created by the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 and the collusion of the architectural profession in how the financial institutions responsible for it turned what should have been their accountability and regulation into a financial stepping stone to where we are now.

Many of these articles came out of the various practices of Architects for Social Housing in exposing and challenging this collusion, which gives this book a practical foundation in the relationship between finance capitalism, government policy and property development largely absent from academic studies based on other academic studies. So although its case studies look back, in one article, 900 years to the origins of current land ownership in Britain, and include some key moments and buildings in the history of architecture — including the Sacré Cœurin Paris, the Narkomfin building in Moscow, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, the Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, the Seagram building in New York, the reconstruction of post-war Dresden, modernist housing estates in the UK, the New London Vernacular and international corporate architecture — the focus of this book is how the practice of architecture can move beyond the impasse at which it finds itself today. This begins with identifying what has produced it.

This book is subtitled ‘a communist history’, and there are two reasons why. First, it offers a historical-materialist critique of the relation between architecture and power that comes out of social and political practice rather than academic theory. And second, the history of architecture is inseparable from the history of community — the struggle to create it and the struggle to contain its revolutionary threat. In the Twentieth Century, for better or worse, that struggle was engaged around the meaning of the word ‘communism’. This communist history of architecture focuses on moments in which the stakes in that struggle — which continues in the Twenty-first Century, though on more unequal terms than it has since the dawn of modernity — reached their greatest clarity in the theory, practice and use of architecture.

List of Contents

Preface | 1. The Way of the Dead: Land, Class and Architecture | 2. The Sacred Heart of Architecture: Lessons from the Paris Commune | 3. The Narkomfin Building: Regenerations, Appropriations, Denials | 4. Radiant City: The Marseilles Housing Unit | 5. Neo-Avant-Garde Architecture: The Seagram Building | 6. Memorials of Forgetting: Art and Architecture in Berlin | 7. That Obscure Object of Architecture: Politics, History and Capitalism | 8. The Space of Community: Post-war British Council Housing Estates | 9. The Smell of an Anarchist: The Aesthetics of Social Cleansing | 10. The Duties of an Architect: Gentrification in New Mildmay | 11. The Architecture of Death: Albert Embankment Plaza | 12. For a Socialist Architecture: The Facts in the Case of Patrik Schumacher.

About the Author

Simon Elmer was born in London and has been living in Hong Kong since 2024. In 2002 he received his PhD in the History and Theory of Art from University College London, and he has taught at the universities of London, Manchester, Reading and Michigan. In 2015 he co-founded Architects for Social Housing, for which he is Head of Research. His books include with Geraldine Dening, Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018); For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); and Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022).

Publication Details

Publisher: Architects for Social Housing (November 2024)
Distributed by Lulu Press, UK
Language: English
Hardback and paperback: 270 pages | 125 illustrations
ISBN 978-1-326-99699-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-326-99802-8 (paperback)
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 in | 14 x 21.6 cm

Endorsements

‘Very few architects have the courage to speak truth to the hoarders and abusers of wealth and power, and the modesty to listen to those who have been denied a voice but who most know what it is they desire and need.’

Ted Landrum, Architect and author,
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba

‘A powerful and valuable contribution to debates across the urban disciplines about the relationship between politics, ethics and the socio-materiality of cities.’

Dr. Juliet Davis, Reader in Architecture and Urbanism,
Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University

‘ASH’s most significant contribution is to understand, evidence and share the relationship between society and architecture.’

Sam Causer, Conservation Architect,
Director of Studio Sam Causer

‘ASH’s research continues to produce rigorous social, spatial and economic analyses of existing housing policy reports and designs, drawing out issues of social and environmental justice.’

Jane Rendell, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice,
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

‘ASH are at the forefront of exposing the sheer folly of housing estate demolition in London.’

Professor Murray Fraser, Professor of Architecture and Global Culture
and Vice-Dean of Research,
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL