Sean Keller reviews Architecture against Democracy

Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International. Ed. Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 408 pp.

Review by Sean Keller

6 February 2025

A century ago, Le Corbusier—already well on his way to shaping modern architecture—concluded his book Urbansime (1924) with an “homage to a great urbanist”: a seventeenth-century image of Louis XIV ordering the construction of the Hôtel des Invalides.[1] The Sun King points imperiously (how else?) at a plan of the proposed hospital as a trumpet-bearing angel heralds his divine will. For Le Corbusier this was the way in which world-changing architecture and urbanism came to be: a powerful figure enacting his despotic will through design—though perhaps in the paternalistic care of others. For those of us who would rather not be rulers or ruled, the question is whether this must be true. Must architecture—or at least public architecture—always be aligned with authoritarian, nondemocratic power?

The recent volume of collected essays Architecture Against Democracy essentially answers “yes.” Edited by Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman, who also provide compelling framing sections, the book includes fifteen historical case studies of varying impact. Perhaps not surprisingly, the collection’s center of gravity is mid-twentieth-century Europe, but it reaches out geographically to include the Americas and Middle East and extends temporally from the nineteenth century to the present. One conclusion of the editors is that we should recognize “that buildings operate hegemonically; they demand that we consent to and comply with decisions generally made by others” (p. 350).

As many of the examples explored here demonstrate, the material demands of buildings are easily exploited by repressive political regimes to buttress their domination of social space. Over and over we find technique providing an excuse for repressive social constructions. The most valuable of the contributions here explore just how, in specific times and places, this general tendency of architecture was deployed by antidemocratic interests, whether fascist or neoliberal. In this regard the book is both an important reminder of architecture’s all-too-easy complicity with regressive politics and a valuable catalog of the means by which this has been accomplished in the past.

However, this framing and the cases examined within it also raise a set of methodological risks and questions that call for further exploration. First, if buildings are taken as inherently hegemonic, architecture would seem to be doomed from the start. While the editors hope that the contributions nonetheless show “how building and spaces might nonetheless operate democratically,” the volume strongly suggests that autocratic architecture is just an intensified instance of building practices generally (p. 350). This framing and the historical breadth of the cases chosen also imply a theoretical equivalence between historically distinct contexts, so that nineteenth-century slavery in the United States, mid-twentieth-century fascism in Europe and South America, and twenty-first-century statism in the United Arab Emirates come to seem equally antidemocratic. The result is an Adorno-like image of autocratic power extending itself always and everywhere through architecture and other forms of culture (the editors and some contributors note that this tone is a reaction to the recent rise of antidemocratic forces across the globe).

But surely, outside the gates of utopia, what matters is the degree to which specific buildings, architects, representations, and design processes amplify centralized power (of whatever sort) or find means to challenge that power to “represent the interests of the demos” (as the editors have it) (p. 350). While material and social conditions may always be pushing architecture toward hegemony, there have been, and can be still, buildings and urban spaces that embody and encourage democratic practices. Indeed, today, the potential of architecture to control space over time might be a much-needed form of resistance to contemporary forms of authoritarianism that thrive in groundless chaos. In this vein, the most compelling essays here are those that explore the ambiguities of architecture as a representation of power, rather than assuming an isomorphic relationship between the two.

Other methodological issues also arise here. Nearly all of the essays represent a general turn to the archive that has remade architectural scholarship in the last two decades. This shift has involved the expansion of our understanding of architecture to include the administrative, political, economic, and technical fields within which buildings operate. It has been coincident with the extension of research beyond Western Europe and North America and has been part of the wider shift in the humanities away from the privileging of heroic (nearly always) white (nearly always) men and their works as the objects of research. Ideally, intensive archival research and detailed social contextualization become the tools for constructing expanded, more complex understanding of our built environments and their actors. However, the risk—evident in several of these essays and in many more recent dissertations—is that the specific expertise of architectural history is neglected and that buildings, cities, and landscapes become little more than entry points to other types of historical work (important as those may be). Surely the difficult goal should be to convincingly interweave the political and the architectural—not to simply use the former to displace the latter. Here, it might be important to recall that the strongest historians of the previous generation—Kenneth Frampton, Alan Colquoun, or Manfredo Tafuri—always understood the forms and materials of building as political.

The over-prioritization of context also robs architectural history and criticism of intellectual vigor, as the context becomes wholly determinative and building itself contributes little or nothing of interest. Addressing authoritarian architecture, this book faces the strongest version of that risk: In the context of US slavery, or the Holocaust, or the massive deployment of noncitizen labor in Dubai, concern for architectural language, for issues of form and style and technique, could be seen as deluded at best and immoral at worst. Yet, for those of us who have not given up on buildings and cities, the argument—significantly advanced by the best portions of this book—has to be that architecture makes its own decisive, specific contributions to the larger historical struggle between democracy and the forces that oppose it.

[1] Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris, 1924), p. 285.