Architecture and Socialism

Historically, socialism has been—and remains—an international project. In architecture, this project has most commonly been studied through the building programs and urbanism of the Soviet bloc and more recently, through Soviet-led development programs. Widening the frame globally, the seminar will study the architecture of a loosely defined, heterogeneous, and often contradictory “socialist international” throughout the twentieth century, in cases ranging from national economic planning to postcolonial development to municipal housing. To do so, we will introduce examples from around the world—Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America—in which state policies, building types, construction methods, design practices, political ideologies, and architectural theories have offered systemic alternatives to capitalist hegemony. Such work has been variously associated with communist, socialist, and social democratic regimes or ideologies, some of which have been revolutionary and others reformist in character. Taking each on its own terms and critically in context, and emphasizing links between them, we will ask in each case how architecture meets political economy, guided by the socialist project.

We will begin with background on the concept, political project, and history of socialism, and of the various forms it has taken around the world from the late nineteenth century to today. We will frame this history within a debate—reform or revolution?—that took place in Europe around 1900 and has been repeated in different forms worldwide through today, with a notable implications for architecture. We will then proceed, week by week, through a series of architectural examples from around the world. We will assess each in relation to the form taken by the socialist project in that context, and its relation to anything like global or international socialism. We will also consider the contradictions made evident by or addressed in each case, and the contrary interests and counter-forces that have often prevailed. In this way, we will historicize, critically interpret, and compare significantly different works of architecture from many different contexts around the world; in turn, we will consider the degree to which those many contexts might also be understood as one—a world history of the socialist project, through architecture.

To do so, the syllabus is organized into three parts: three introductory weeks, eight weeks of case studies, and two final sessions for student presentations. For convenience, the case studies are organized roughly by region: a convention that, as we shall see, will likely prove inadequate to our object, and will also be subject to critique along the way. Rather than follow a strict chronology, we will therefore move back and forth across the twentieth century, evaluating each case against the historical background with which we began.