ANTIFASCIST ARCHITECTURAL ANNOTATIONS ANDREW SANTA LUCIA

Why is it that the practice and teaching of architecture’s collective imagination, or more aptly put, canonical proselytization, is so comfortable covering projects not only of capital, but of plunder, settlement and mass murder?

I can see how if you’re reading this right now you may be thinking that I am being dramatic or inflammatory. I hope you take what I say at face value, not in the sense of the mask being the face but more in the sense of facing your fear. What is imperative in this worlding exercise is that you and I can collectively come to a conclusion, of course whilst I guide you towards some points of my lived experience being an architect and educator in this particular epoch of humankind.

To answer that first rhetorical question, it is because architecture has always been the second line of offense in the process of colonialism and imperialism—first comes murder and stealing of land, then comes buildings that further destroy the worlds that were there before. In many ways, architecture in its current state can be seen as anti-worlding because it contributes to carbon emissions eventually leading to mass extinction and the end of the world as we knew it. To build off the recent words of Douglas Spencer, the architectural imagination in the US seems more like a never-ending nightmare than a dream. Congruently, teaching architecture has always been about teaching the version of itself most valuable to the ruling class, which is to say that in our contemporary moment of an ebb-and-flow political & ethical awakening around the world; architects are reckoning with these realities and asking the question, can architecture be decoupled from capitalism (from anti-worlding)?

In short, there have been hundreds of thousands of examples of anticapitalist and, perhaps more importantly, antifascist architectures throughout the last 120 years. There is no shortage of buildings, networks and worlds conceived outside of the logic of capital, and extraction.

Why, at least in the United States, do we not focus on these projects as examples of alternatives to capitalist architectural endeavors?

This second question is much less difficult to answer because once you work through the plausible reasons, it becomes clear that it's because many bosses and educators do not want to. Why they don’t want to is maybe more difficult to surmise, mainly because there are lots of excuses out there: ‘I didn’t get taught these,’ or ‘there isn’t as much material on this, as I have on something Philip Johnson curated or MOMA funded,’ or even ‘that would be great but we need to teach a canon.’

Why are we more knowledgeable about the Jeffersonian grid replete with the chattel slavery needed to produce its proto manifest-destiny-colonialism than say Narkomfin, the Soviet era housing proposals which abolished the kitchen as a private and invisible space for a woman’s free labor, instead opting to make this labor visible, collective and accessible shifting society away from a misogynistic architectural enterprise? Again, it's simple. The Jeffersonian grid needs no justification—we hold these truths to be self-evident—while Narkomfin abolishes something and in doing so strips power away from a typology, a ruling class and a system (patriarchy). It’s a lose-lose for people in power.

However, even in that description I have missed the core of my own argument, on purpose. Stripping away the radical socialist origins of Narkomfin’s conceptualization allows for a depoliticized architectural narrative to emerge. Who wouldn’t be against giving more rights, visibility, and credit to people? But more importantly, removing socialism or anarchism from the equation of architecture allows for fascist architecture to be freely presented, enjoying the same depoliticization as radical social projects, but this time without the baggage of mass murdering and business first political enterprises.

There is no reason we need to be teaching with Terragni, Speer, Johnson and hell even Schumacher, outside of maybe what not to do. Many will critique this approach as problematic because we need to know history to not repeat it. My critique of this is, then why are you repeating this fascist history over and over again?

A Genealogy of Antifascist Architecture is necessary if we are to find ourselves within the liberatory projects of the last 120 years spanning Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Global South, and Asia. These projects such as: Centro Gabriela Mistral in Santiago and/or the Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in Angola and/or the Black Panther Party Free Breakfast program and/or Schools of Modern Dance & Plastic Arts in Havana and/ or Monument to Patrice Lumumba in Africa and/or Spomenik’s in Eastern Europe and/or the National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Birmingham, AL, all use a social, political & ethical foundation to the architectural forms presented. There is no way to decouple the victory of these projects from the systems that created them because to do so would perhaps even remove them from the discipline of architecture. That is to say, if we are to rescue architectural practice and discourse from the neoliberal capitalist extractive machine then the inclusion of these and the exclusion of fascist projects can and will augment architecture’s affective footprint in this world.

Finally, finding ourselves within antifascism is about killing any inkling of fascism within us and that includes the indoctrination we’ve had as architects towards certain projects and people. There is an almost flippant nature to architectural theories today dealing with issues of copying & influence, repetition & genealogy, specifically because of the depoliticization of precedent by historicist postmodernists. If everything is pop, then everything is commodifiable and follows the logic of capitalism. Capital wins, we lose. So, if we were to find ourselves within subcultures and communities actively pushing against the logic of capital (not just trying to reform it) then perhaps a new form and function for architecture outside of it is possible. In a simple sense, architects must be activists as citizens first before ever dreaming of knowing how to push against a disciplinary juggernaut with thousands of years of power manifestation at its core.

All projects images and text are included in Office Andorus’s ALANAR (An Altar to Antifascist Architecture) designed for the Bellevue Art Museum Biennial 2021, curated and researched by Daniel Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia. These images are found on prayer candles adorning the Altar. ‘ANTIFASCIST’ typeface designed by Briar Levit.