Two years ago, while traveling through northern Italy, I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the Fascist architecture that pervades Milan and Trieste. Much of the country’s public infrastructure had been built under Fascist rule, including many of its train stations, power plants and post offices. Positioned at the heart of several Italian cities, still-standing buildings possess a peculiar authority that I found difficult to resist. What struck me most, however, was not simply the survival of these structures in pristine condition. In Germany too, ministries and public institutions continue to occupy buildings inherited from the Nazi era; the difference was in how they were integrated into the present. In Berlin, such architecture often (though not always, one thinks of Tempelhofer Feld) feels densely tainted by history, over- shadowed by an enduring sense of rupture, catastrophe, and guilt. In Italy, where Fascism lasted longer, wartime destruction was less severe, and the postwar narrative differed in its details from Germany’s, Fascist architectural legacy appears strangely continuous with every- day life. It is less questioned, less quarantined by historical explanation, and more thoroughly absorbed into the civic landscape.

Eventually, somewhat embarrassed by my fascination, I confessed what I took as a personal weakness to an Italian communist academic. She laughed immediately. “That,” she told me, “is every leftist’s guilty pleasure”. Her light-hearted response made me feel less uniquely compromised; not so much as though I had stumbled into a private political lapse as into a familiar, if rarely discussed, state of intellectual confusion: the unsettling experience of responding aesthetically to a built environment born out of destruction. One encounters a similar ambivalence in responses to colonial architecture, including the enduring fascination with Italian colonial modernism in Eritrea or German colonial romanticism in Qingdao, China.

The appeal is not difficult to identify. Totalitarian and colonial buildings often confront the viewer with overwhelming scale: vast plazas, towering facades, cavernous interiors clad in stone and marble. Their clean geometries, rigid symmetry, and monumental proportions project an intoxicating sense of order, permanence, and control. Fascist architecture, within which Italian colonial architecture must also be counted, was designed precisely to collapse the distinction between admiration and submission. It sought to make power appear natural, historical, and preordained. Standing beneath those immense colonnades and exaggerated volumes in northern Italy, I understood the sensation immediately.

Against Rehabilitation

My reaction was hardly unique. Architectural discourse has long sustained a similar ambivalence, one marked by a willingness to isolate aesthetic achievement from the conditions of its production and to admire the elegance, rigor, and discipline of these buildings, even while acknowledging the brutality of the regimes that conceived them. The attraction I felt was therefore not entirely personal, but cultivated and inherited, part of a broader fascination with authoritarian power translated into stone, reinforced concrete, and plaster. It is this cultural inheritance, and its slow seeping into the everyday language of urban appreciation, that explains the peculiar normalisation of totalitarian aesthetics within architectural education and popular culture alike: their gradual rehabilitation, not only as formal exercises in proportion, material, and scale, but as objects of detached visual attraction that train the eye to unsee what they were built to enforce. This is where Antifascist Architecture by Daniel Jonas Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia enters the picture.

The book begins with a question at once simple and destabilising: why has fascist architecture been so meticulously documented, theorised, published and enshrined into the canon, while its antifascist counterparts remain scattered, half-visible, resistant to classification? The asymmetry is astounding. Alongside illustrations by Lane Rick, the authors, one an architect and professor, the other a journalist, locate the origins of this imbalance in the remarkable speed with which Italian Fascist and German Nazi architects such as Giuseppe Terragni andAlbert Speer were rehabilitated within postwar European cultural discourse. Their work was gradually reintroduced into a supposedly de-fascisised and de-nazified public forum as though it could be approached primarily through aesthetics and taste, while the political worlds that had sustained it were handily eclipsed. And even when these conditions were acknowledged, they were often carefully cordoned off from judgment.

It was as though Fascists and Nazis themselves could be retrospectively and conveniently divorced from the ideologies that had produced and legitimised them, once the corresponding regimes had receded into the background. In tracing this logic beyond architecture, the authors place both architects alongside Leni Riefenstahl and Martin Heidegger, whose post- war reputations were similarly preserved through the claim that artistic or philosophical accomp- lishment could remain untouched by politics. Form and content, in this account, are treated as though they can be untethered from the worlds they helped to stage, reinforce, or conceal.

Reading this discussion, I was reminded of a longstanding unease of my own with the literature on totalitarianism. Italian Fascism is frequently treated as a transferable model, a political and aesthetic grammar that can be abstracted from its historical context and applied elsewhere. German Nazism, meanwhile, is usually approached as a historically singular phenomenon. The asymmetry is difficult to justify. Either both formations demand historical particularisation, or both can be elevated into broader analytical categories. Too often, however, theory and language proceed by universalising one while exceptionalising the other. For this reason, and unlike the authors, I reserve Fascism for the Italian context and Nazism for the German one, while treating totalitarianism as the broader category to which both belong. Such distinctions may appear pedantic, but they help preserve the specificity of the political formations under discussion without abandoning the possibility of comparison. Whichever terminology one adopts, however, the phenomenon identified by Santa Lucia and Roche remains striking: the apparent ease with which architects embedded within totalitarian regimes were rehabilitated and absorbed into the postwar architectural canon.

Building a Non-Fascist Canon

What troubles Santa Lucia and Roche is not simply that these rehabilitations occurred, but how quickly they hardened into disciplinary common sense. Within architectural culture, in particular, a vocabulary of admiration emerged that could celebrate formal rigor, technical brilliance, or spatial intelligence while bracketing the political frameworks that made those categories legible in the first place. The legacy of that separation continues to shape the discipline’s habits of attention, what it chooses to see, what it permits itself to admire, and what it leaves conspicuously unremarked.

Against this imbalance, Roche and Santa Lucia propose another lineage of architecture— less concerned with spectacle than with obligation, less invested in permanence than in collective life. Opposing Foucault’s notion of a “non-fascist life,” they argue instead that a non-fascist architecture cannot be reduced to questions of style or form. Buildings organise bodies, distribute care, enforce hierarchies, and encode political desires. Every plan contains an ethic, whether acknowledged or not. One explanation for the relative absence of anti- fascist architecture from the canon, the authors suggest, lies precisely in its refusal of formal coherence. Antifascist architecture resists consolidation into a recognisable style. It is dispersed across communist, anarchist, socialist, and social-democratic projects, held together less by shared aesthetics than by shared refusal. In this sense, the book responds to a broader absence of documentation, contextualisation, and sustained comparison. It seeks to bring these scattered practices into relation, not in order to smooth them into a single narrative, but to make visible the political and spatial ideas that recur within them, even as they take divergent and often incompatible forms.

From this premise emerges a striking constellation of architects, organisers, militants, and dissident practitioners whose work unfolded across different geographies and political conditions: Alphonse Laurencic in Republican Spain, Pastorita Núñez González in post- revolutionary Cuba, Abderrahmane Bouchama in newly liberated Algeria, the French anarchist collective Os Cangaceiros in the 1970s and 80s, Svetlana Kana Radević in socialist Yugoslavia, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, detained in Japanese internment camps in the so-called United States up until the second AIDS crisis, Georgette Cottin-Euziol in Nazi-occupied France and Russian-occupied Chechnya, Friedrich Silaban in independent Indonesia, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in antifascist resistance networks in Austria and across Europe, and Lin Huiyin in Republican China. What binds these figures together is not a coherent aesthetic programme but a shared conviction that architecture can function as a mode of political practice inseparable from collective struggle, mutual aid, and social transformation.

Yet even this attempt at assembling a coherent counter-genealogy exposes the instability of its own categories. The difficulty of defining what counts as “antifascist architecture” becomes especially apparent in the case of Friedrich Silaban, a close associate of Indonesian President Sukarno and a key figure in the architectural articulation of the country’s post- independence identity. His work is placed within narratives of anticolonial and “postcolonial” world-making: the redesign of the Bandung Conference site, associated with the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Istiqlal Mosque, and the Independence Monument in Jakarta, each of which has come to symbolise the architectural language of sovereignty after more than two centuries of Dutch colonial rule. At the same time, the authors also cite his “Monument of West Irian” within this broader continuum, a project distinctly tied to Indonesia’s neocolonial assertion of sovereignty over West Papua. This violent annexation remains con- tested and bound up with ongoing Indigenous struggles for West Papuan self-determination and independence.

This example, in which European colonisers are displaced by non-European colonisers, suggests that the language of emancipation in architecture is never fully separable from the political structures it later helps to stabilise. The attempt to assemble an antifascist architectural genealogy is thus necessarily confronted with practices that defy clear political categorisation. What emerges is not a fixed taxonomy, but rather a discursive field in which architecture is continuously reshaped by competing histories of emancipation, statehood, and power.

Collective Life, Not Masterpieces

Aside from its focus on individual architects, Antifascist Architecture also discusses a series of projects that resist isolation as architectural “masterpieces” and can be read as condensed histories of collective struggle. It cites the Gaza Cultural Centre, one of the few surviving fragments of the 1975–1981 Gaza Master Plan, an ambitious urban modernisation scheme initiated by Gaza’s then-mayor. Up until its destruction by Israel in 2023, the Gaza Cultural Centre stood as a material trace of a future once imagined for the city. In this framing, even the incomplete and interrupted status of the historical project becomes part of its architectural meaning, bound to the longer temporal arc between planning and realisation— interrupted by violence. Likewise, housing complexes such as Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, community institutions like the Oakland (California) Community School established by the Black Panther Party, cultural centres including the Gabriela Mistral Metropolitan Cultural Centre (GAM) in the Mapocho Basin, and autonomous spaces in Manahatta such as ABC No Rio appear here not as discrete achievements in form, but as material inscriptions of solidarity, self-organisation, and survival.

Several of these sites bear the traces of political reversal and appropriation. The GAM, constructed under Salvador Allende as a democratic cultural centre, was transformed after the 1973 coup into a site of detention, torture, and state violence under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet before eventually being rehabilitated decades later. Even Karl-Marx- Hof, long associated with Red Vienna and socialist municipal housing, became entangled in the authoritarian ruptures that followed its suppression. These buildings, then, should not be taken as static symbols of liberation, but instead as contested structures whose meanings shift alongside the political orders that inhabit them. What links them is a shared refusal of the commodification of architecture as a prestige object—and a shared condition of being targeted and contested by hegemonic power. These buildings deliver the everyday infrastructures that sustain forms of care and survival and make collective life possible, or simply bearable.

What emerges, then, is a counter-history populated not by solitary master builders but by architects who understood their work as inseparable from the means of production, the collective labour required for its realisation, the value and meaning of the materials applied and the political struggles within which the above was embedded. The architects named in the book organised tenants’ unions and mutual-aid networks, joined protests and revolutionary movements, designed social infrastructures such as nurseries, schools, parks and social housing, and in some cases resisted construction altogether, recognising that refusal could itself become an architectural act. For them, the labor of architecture exceeded the production of buildings; it was a practice of solidarity, a mode of collective responsibility, and a way of imagining how society might be arranged otherwise.

A Handbook for the Now

Antifascist Architecture does not confine itself to the “past”; so too does it attend to the forms antifascist architectural practice might assume under and against capitalism today. Its later sections turn toward methods of shared knowledge and speculative designs, less blue-prints for fixed utopias than provisional exercises in collectively imagining and realising other ways of inhabiting the world. Offering succinct reflections on trade unionism, syndicalism, expropriation, design, drawing, reorganisation, harm reduction, and building, the book presents itself not only as a historical overview but also as a manual for practice, and a direct call to action. This forward-looking impulse is mirrored in the book’s own formal structure. Carefully designed, it draws on and reworks the visual language of Fascist modernism; its fonts, its chromatic austerity, and its geometric sharpness subvert its authority from within. Reading the book in public in Berlin (as a melanin- rich person) led to a few irritated looks from people passing by. It caught the same uneasy fascination that often surrounds Fascist and Nazi design itself, which draws readers in for the wrong reasons—only to present them with a counter-use of those very aesthetics.

In this sense, the book becomes not only a critique of that aesthetic economy but also an act that operates within it. Its rhetorical register follows a similar logic: unpretentious, direct, playful, and self-aware. It refuses the fiction of neutrality, dispensing with the descriptive distance that often masquerades as objectivity, and instead situates itself and its readership within the political practices it discusses. The authors seek to move readers from the passive position of observers toward that of participants, to urge them not merely to understand the world, but to decide what to do within it.

Reading Antifascist Architecture, I was reminded of Eelam Tamil visual artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ show Another World at KW Berlin and ICA London in the winter of 2023. An imagined anarchist architect, Anṇaṅnkuperuntinaivarkal Inkaaleneraam of the Eelam Tamil resistance, constructs an alternative reality shaped by the struggle for independence, founded upon a communist architectural education received in Soviet Moscow. Where Thomas works through speculation and fiction, Santa Lucia and Roche locate imagination and alteration in a timeless present, assembling real-world examples of practices that were never merely utopian but already materialised in form (and now, sometimes in ruins), waiting to be recognised and canonised as such. In that sense, Antifascist Architecture is a necessary intervention: not a manifesto for a new analytic so much as an invitation to name and recognize one that has long existed in plain sight.