Architecture in Global Socialism

Download Architecture in Global Socialism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691168709
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Architecture in Global Socialism by : Łukasz Stanek

Download or read book Architecture in Global Socialism written by Łukasz Stanek and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Introduction Worldmaking of Architecture -- Chapter 2 A Global Development Path Accra, 1957-66 -- Chapter 3 Worlding Eastern Europe Lagos, 1966-79 -- Chapter 4 The World Socialist System Baghdad, 1958-90 -- Chapter 5 Socialism within Globalization Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, 1979-90 -- Epilogue and Outlook -- A Note on Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Image Credits.

For a Socialist Architecture

Download For a Socialist Architecture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781008909540
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (95 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis For a Socialist Architecture by : Simon Elmer

Download or read book For a Socialist Architecture written by Simon Elmer and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the summer of 2019, as part of a research fellowship, the UK practice Architects for Social Housing (ASH) took up a month's residency in Vancouver. Drawing on the past five years of practice working with residents of housing estates threatened with demolition, ASH presented their thoughts about the necessity and possibility of a socialist architecture under capitalism. To do so, they looked at the social, environmental, economic and political spheres of architecture, and how they can be reclaimed from the hegemony of neoliberalism in legislation, policy and practice. In a series of four lectures, ASH mapped out the development process from 1) strategy, legislation and policy, to 2) urban design, master-planning and brief development, to 3) project design and the planning process, to 4) procurement and construction, to 5) management and maintenance, and identified the moments of political agency at which the agents for a socialist architecture can intervene in and disrupt the capitalist structure and functioning of this process. In addition, ASH also identified moments that are outside this development process proper, but which can be brought to bear upon it, including the tasks of education, dissemination and agitation for change. In doing so, they have developed a framework for both individual and collective agency that extends far beyond the skills of an architect, and is not limited to either industry professionals or the layman's protest. ASH contends that all of us are potential agents for a socialist architecture; but to be called 'socialist' that agency must go beyond voting and protest - both of which give legitimacy to the illusory 'freedom' of capitalist democracies - to oppositional political practice. For this printed edition of the lectures, ASH has included two additional texts: an introduction, which was originally published in January 2020, following the UK general election; and a postscript, which looks at the ruinous impact of lockdown restrictions on UK housing and how we can respond. In publishing the expanded forms of these lectures, ASH aims to make their contents available not only to people who are threatened by the crisis of housing affordability in the UK, but also to policy-writers looking for alternatives to the selling off of public land and housing to private investors, as well as to architects looking for an alternative to the orthodoxies of contemporary architectural practice.

Building Socialism

Download Building Socialism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012609
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Building Socialism by : Christina Schwenkel

Download or read book Building Socialism written by Christina Schwenkel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

Socialist Architecture

Download Socialist Architecture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9783941644922
Total Pages : 68 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (449 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Socialist Architecture by : Srdjan Jovanović Weiss

Download or read book Socialist Architecture written by Srdjan Jovanović Weiss and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Architecture ? The Reappearing Act' is a cooperation between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke. Since 2009, Jovanovic Weiss and Linke are documenting the current state of selected places of socialistic architecture in the former Yugoslavia. After the disappearing of Yugoslavia, the inherited architecture often remained empty, in a kind of limbo between reutilisation and modern archaeological ruin. This documentation considered this indecisiveness in the five emerging democracies and investigates the relative impact on the spatial perception and the fate of the former ideological architecture of Yugoslavia.

The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968

Download The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315460114
Total Pages : 343 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968 by : Ana Miljacki

Download or read book The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968 written by Ana Miljacki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities

Download From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317585887
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities by : Alexander C. Diener

Download or read book From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities written by Alexander C. Diener and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of post-socialist cities has become a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences and humanities. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This book explores this burgeoning field of research through detailed cases studies relating to the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity in the post-socialist cities of Eurasia. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.

Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity

Download Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 082297780X
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity by : Kimberly Elman Zarecor

Download or read book Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity written by Kimberly Elman Zarecor and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country’s transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

Identity in Post-Socialist Public Space

Download Identity in Post-Socialist Public Space PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 100048503X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Identity in Post-Socialist Public Space by : Bohdan Cherkes

Download or read book Identity in Post-Socialist Public Space written by Bohdan Cherkes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comparative analysis of the architecture of central public spaces of capital cities in Central and Eastern Europe during the period of their authoritarian and post-authoritarian development. It demonstrates that national identity transformations cause structural changes in urban public spaces, and theorises identity and national identity within urban planning in order to explain the influence of historical, cultural, mental, social as well as ideological and political conditions on the processes of shaping and perceiving the architecture of public space. The book addresses the process of shaping and restructuring historic centres of European capital cities of Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, and Warsaw, which developed under authoritarian regime conditions throughout the 20th century and were characterised by ideological determinism and the influence of state ideology and politics on the architecture of public spaces. The book will be useful for urban planners, architects, land management specialists, art historians, political scientists, and readers interested in the theory and history of cities, the fundamentals of urban planning and architecture, and the planning of cities and public spaces.

Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland

Download Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 9780367860738
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (67 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland by : Florian Urban

Download or read book Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland written by Florian Urban and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Garish churches, gabled slab blocks, neo-historical tenements - this book is about these and other architectural oddities that one would not expect under an authoritarian socialist regime. It is about the committed individuals that rendered them possible in spite of repressive politics and persistent shortage. It is about a very different background of postmodern architecture, far removed from the debates over Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson or Prince Charles-a context in which postmodernism stood not for world-weary irony, but for individualized resistance against a collectivist dictatorship, a yearning for truth and spiritual values, and a discourse on distinctiveness and national identity. Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland argues that this new architecture was more than just a symptom of the beginning political and economic transformation. Rather, it was itself an agent of change. The changing style and priorities in architecture, the most public and expensive of the visual arts, contributed to incremental change beneath what otherwise appeared to be a rigid authoritarian regime. The book analyses the dynamics of this change. It shows that to a large extent postmodern architecture was promoted by dedicated people who took advantage of cracks in the system. These included not only architects but also public servants and priests, acting courageously without explicit support by the rulers, despite tight economic circumstances. Their work did more than just tweak the appearance of the built environment, it changed society in late-socialist Poland and continues to do so today. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in architectural history, postmodernism, and socialist history"--

Second World Postmodernisms

Download Second World Postmodernisms PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350014427
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Second World Postmodernisms by : Vladimir Kulic

Download or read book Second World Postmodernisms written by Vladimir Kulic and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If postmodernism is indeed 'the cultural logic of late capitalism', why did typical postmodernist themes like ornament, colour, history and identity find their application in the architecture of the socialist Second World? How do we explain the retreat into paper architecture and theoretical discussion in societies still nominally devoted to socialist modernization? Exploring the intersection of two areas of growing scholarly interest - postmodernism and the architecture of the former socialist world - this edited collection stakes out new ground in charting architecture's various transformations in the 1970s and 80s. Fourteen essays together explore the question of whether or not architectural postmodernism had a specific Second World variant. The collection demonstrates both the unique nature of Second World architectural phenomena and also assesses connections with western postmodernism. The case studies cover the vast geographical scope from Eastern Europe to China and Cuba. They address a wealth of aesthetic, discursive and practical phenomena, interpreting them in the broader socio-political context of the last decades of the Cold War. The result provides a greatly expanded map of recent architectural history, which redefines postmodernist architecture in a more theoretically comprehensive and global way.

The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934

Download The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262024519
Total Pages : 554 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 by : Eve Blau

Download or read book The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 written by Eve Blau and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedic in its coverage, this seminal work focuses on the architecture of Prague from the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War: a rich matrix within which to place the figures who created the powerful, innovative spirits of modern Czech architecture. The book documents the architects, structures, and theoretical underpinnings that helped to shape Prague's cultural heritage and present-day artistic spirit.

Landscapes of Communism

Download Landscapes of Communism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New Press, The
ISBN 13 : 1620971895
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Landscapes of Communism by : Owen Hatherley

Download or read book Landscapes of Communism written by Owen Hatherley and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain, often populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism. Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces, and secret policemen’s castles; East Germany’s obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant-garde ever dared. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communism—what residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life?

Socialist Architecture

Download Socialist Architecture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Jrp Ringier Kunstverlag Ag
ISBN 13 : 9783037642450
Total Pages : 131 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (424 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Socialist Architecture by : Armin Linke

Download or read book Socialist Architecture written by Armin Linke and published by Jrp Ringier Kunstverlag Ag. This book was released on 2012 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act is a collaborative project between photographer Armin Linke and architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss.Linke and Weiss have worked together since 2009 to visit and document selected examples of ex-Yugoslav Socialist architecture in order to document the state that they are in today. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia vanished during the early 1990s and the former Socialist states were 'Balkanized' into a number of emerging democracies.Each of these new states inherited monuments, buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure, which were constructed specifically for the former Socialist context and needs. After Yugoslavia vanished, most of the inherited architecture was left vacant and in a state of limbo between being repurposed and reused for new content, or simply being declared 'Socialist archeology', and continuing its life as ruins.By creating documentation, this project captures the indecision of five particular emerging democracies today: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia, and the distinct effects their irresolution creates spatially and visually on former Yugoslav architecture.Published with Codax Publishers, Zurich.English and German text.

Ideological Equals

Download Ideological Equals PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317119029
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ideological Equals by : Mary Pepchinski

Download or read book Ideological Equals written by Mary Pepchinski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945-1989 presents an alternative narrative of women in architecture. A topic often considered from the perspective of difference, this edited collection conversely focuses on the woman architect in a position of equality with their male counterparts. The book looks at nations in Eastern Europe under Socialism where, between 1945 and 1989, a contrasting vision of gender relations was propagated in response to the need for engineers and architects. It includes contributions from established and emerging academics in the fields of 20th century history, art history, and architectural history in Central and Eastern Europe exploring the political, economic and social mechanisms which either encouraged or limited the rise of the woman architect. Investigating the inherent contradictions of Socialist gender ideology and practice, this illustrated volume examines the individuals in different contexts; the building types the women produced; the books and theory they were able to write; their contacts to international organizations; and their representation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Spatial Revolution

Download Spatial Revolution PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501759213
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Spatial Revolution by : Christina E. Crawford

Download or read book Spatial Revolution written by Christina E. Crawford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Building Socialism

Download Building Socialism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501328123
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Building Socialism by : Curtis Swope

Download or read book Building Socialism written by Curtis Swope and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building Socialism reveals how East German writers' engagement with the rapidly changing built environment from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s constitutes an untold story about the emergence of literary experimentation in the post-War period. It breaks new ground by exploring the centrality of architecture to a mid-century modernist literature in dialogue with multiple literary and left-wing theoretical traditions and in tune with international assessments of modernist architecture and urban planning. Design and construction were a central part of politics and everyday life in East Germany during this time as buildings old and new were asked to bear heavy ideological and social burdens. In their novels, stories, and plays, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Günter Kunert, Volker Braun, Günter de Bruyn, and Brigitte Reimann responded to enormous new factory complexes, experimental new towns, the demolition of Berlin's tenements, and the propagation of a pared-down modernist aesthetic in interior design. Writers' representation of the design, construction, and use of architecture formed part of a turn to modernist literary devices, including montage, metaphor, and shifting narrative perspectives. East Germany's literary architecture also represents a sophisticated theoretical reflection on the intractable problems of East Germany's socialist modernity, including the alliance between state socialism and technological modernization, competing commitments to working-class self-organization and the power of specialist planners and designers, and the attempt to create an alternative to fascism.

Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe

Download Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317796438
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (177 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe by : Virag Molnar

Download or read book Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe written by Virag Molnar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The built environment of former socialist countries is often deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. Building the State peeks behind the grey façade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent. Examining how social change is closely intertwined with transformations of the built environment, this volume focuses on the relationship between architecture and state politics in postwar Central Europe using examples from Hungary and Germany. Built around four case studies, the book traces how architecture was politically mobilized in the service of social change, first in socialist modernization programs and then in the postsocialist transition. Building the State does not only offer a comprehensive survey of the diverse political uses of architecture in postwar Central Europe but is the first book to explore how transformations of the built environment can offer a lens into broader processes of state formation and social change.