The current cultural moment has instigated many questions about whether we are witnessing a perverse global renaissance in a fascist political economy, as well as dissections of how we instantiate fascist precepts into daily life without even realizing it (nationalisms and ethnic exceptionalism, market primacy, veneration of billionaire elites, dehumanization of opponents, techno-determinism). Theorists vary on what stage of a new fascist order has been reached: in Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023), Alberto Toscano argued that fascism has naturalized its hold to the point where we are in crisis; in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (2024), Richard Seymour asserts that the Trump/Modi/Netanyahu/Putin political era is insidiously pre-fascist but darker days lie ahead.
Whatever point of this dialectic may appeal to a reader, what is clear is that the world needs an active discourse around fascism and an active and malleable political economy: one whose powers may lie in states, but whose cultural imagination propagates through popular and high arts, literature, journalism, religion, and architecture.
While most contemporary literature on fascism remains inordinately preoccupied with the affairs of nation-states and right-wing political movements, there have been a few examinations of the micropolitical conditioning within fields of cultural production. None may be as cogent, brilliant, confrontational, or as emphatically playful as the new volume Antifascist Architecture, written by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche and illustrated by Lane Rick.
Any reader who expects either an insider presentation of architecture in which canonical figures are mentioned without explanation or a dour, leftist polemic deploying Marxist doctrine to make predictable bromides against capitalism will be relieved. Antifascist Architecture opens with a raucous, engaging voice that seems unusual for a collaboratively written text. The atmospheric drawings by Lane Rick provide a third point in the voice, as the visuals are integrated not just into content but into tone and emphasis. The book embodies the sort of cultural production its creators envision as the antidote to fascism— a playful, anarchic communism, bound not to overdetermined doctrines but to a joyful praxis of education.
Our authors are resolved that “fascism” denotes the political economy of a total capitalist (not necessarily, perhaps rarely “free market”) state that is ultranationalist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian. They venerate a wide spectrum of positions opposing the “fascist architecture industrial complex,” and openly embrace a definition of antifascism that is “both simple and slippery” (p. 21). Our authors invite a wide spectrum into their project within the confines of a militant left: socialists, anarchists, communists, trade unionists, anarcho-syndicalists, and eventually (hopefully) every architect who reads the book.
In an era in which oppositional politics can denigrate into sectarianism— the corporate Democrat disavowal of the “DSA” left, the DSA left’s own disavowal of more radical movements, communist and anarchist movements who disavow all but a small vanguard— Antifascist Architecture refreshingly understands what is really at stake. If we are confronting actual fascism, we must create a broad and popular rejection to truly prevail.
Santa Lucia and Roche present model antifascist designers and projects that may seem to be coming from a broad mix of political tendencies. But that blend embodies their optimistic sense of political possibility: they believe that divergent left tendencies can be united to realize a liberation of architecture from fascism. That conviction carries their book over the litany of qualifications and fears that doom a lot of radical writing these days.
Sectarianism is not on the agenda for Santa Lucia and Roche. As the world— and much of the left— stands numb in the face of normalized genocide, disappearance, reverse wealth transfer, and ideological purging, Antifascist Architecture remains an inspiration in its energetic call to defeat the oppressors and build a new world.
Of course, Antifascist Architecture first and foremost aims to reach readers within the field of architecture. That field consists of professional practice, academia, the architectural press, and a network of nonprofit funders and organizations — all of which remain largely avoidant of taking the sort of action Santa Lucia and Roche have in mind. Architecture firms’ exploitation of labor internally is well known, as is the predilection of firms to take work in authoritarian states where construction labor is sometimes conscripted and— in the case of Saudi Arabia’s scuttled project “The Line”— even fatal. In 2016, the American Institute of Architects infamously issued a both-sides equivocation on serving Donald Trump’s administration, before hastily retracting it in favor of an even more servile outright political silence.
In 2024, architecture school faculties were silent as their students (and a few professors) were arrested, suspended, or terminated for standing against their institutions’ culpability in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Since Trump’s return to office, architecture schools have not formally protested his assault on free speech in higher education, deportation and visa revocations (a Columbia University urban planning graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, self-deported after the government revoked her visa in March 2025), funding cuts, and hegemonic pressures to expel faculty members. The Journal of Architectural Education, the peer-reviewed journal published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, suppressed the publication of a nearly complete issue on architecture and Palestine due to the lobbying of a well-connected, pro-Israel, anti-free-speech activist. In that case, the editors of the issue and most of the journal’s editorial board resigned in protest.
How can you reach a field in which deafening silence is a more common political strategy than outright endorsement of fascism and much more common than open affinity with antifascist left-wing movements? Santa Lucia and Roche turn the structure of Antifascist Architecture into a veritable syllabus that meets architecture school graduates on familiar terrain.
Santa Lucia is an architecture professor at Portland State University, and Roche is an editor at The Architect’s Newspaper. Together they build a wide view of architecture—as a professional practice, a cultural discourse and an academic field. Antifascist Architecture is divided into three parts that could make for a semester-long history/theory seminar: a short but heavy introduction laying out precepts and goals; a longer but visually delightful and celebratory second section presenting case studies; and a concluding section suggesting how readers can apply the book’s concepts to current-day spatial problems.
If the book were a seminar, the opening lecture would wake up the sleepiest student. The “Prelude” offers its first case study with the career of French-born Slovenian designer Alphonse Laurencic, who left Paris to join the antifascist Popular Front in Spain in 1935. Laurencic served the revolutionary cause well, but his masterpiece of design came in the form of the “Chekas,” or prison cells that he designed and built to house Francoist prisoners. The Chekas were surrealist spaces of conflicting geometric patterns and textures, changing lights, bold polychromatic colors, and a bed set at a 45-degree angle to prevent comfortable slumbers. Laurencic did not intend for these spaces to be used for brutal, long-term punishment. Rather, he thought of them as sensory conditioners that might reform the spirit of captured fascists and send them out as decent human beings.
Laurencic was captured by the Francoists after their victory and executed at the age of 37 in 1939. His Chekas were visited by Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, who declared them to be degenerate Bolshevik art. Santa Lucia and Roche use the story of Laurencic to establish a dialectic form of presentation: the reader meets the brave and visionary Laurencic and the archetypal fascists Franco and Himmler. The authors then turn to the reader and openly ask which side they would have been on. The question gains power by being rendered into a materialist one through the physical immediacy of the cells, the war, and the murders instead of lecturing about typical architectural theory.
Architectural theory presents itself in the first four chapters, which contain the book’s most pungent rebuke of the culture of the contemporary architectural field. The authors manage to sustain the narrative voice of the “Prelude” and dip into the normalization of fascism within contemporary architecture by offering searing examples of how architects, architectural historians, and theorists have worked to venerate outright fascist architects like Albert Speer, the leader designer of Hitler’s Germany, and Giuseppe Terragni, a firm supporter and beneficiary of Mussolini’s Italy.
The disavowal of responsibility for the politics of individual architects allows the field of architecture to acquit even a defendant in Nuremberg trials. The book excels at demonstrating how reducing the appraisal of architects’ work to formal questions of beauty and originality served both the reputations of previously-scandalized fascists, as well as the ideological space of neoliberalism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Pedagogy in architecture schools followed the recapture of fascist designers and sped along an attitude that there was no space in the field for critiquing the political dispositions of designers (except for the leftist, nonwhite, and nonmale architects systemically omitted from serious consideration).
Antifascist Architecture also assails the normalization of two philosophical underpins of much contemporary architectural discourse: the Nazi Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. Santa Lucia and Roche are unsparing in their analysis of Heidegger’s “worldlessness” as a call for replacement of actual living bodies with ideals. Heidegger evokes an essentialism of humans that robs them of agency and presence in the eye of the architect. Foucault similarly objectifies human subjects, although through a reputation peddled more consistently as radical and even leftist. To the authors, Foucault’s oft-cited “heterotopia” fits an emergent neoliberal political economy by transferring popular material demands to non-existent idealized realms where they pose no threat to the ruling order.
An entire chapter on “Chameleonism” helps orient architectural workers toward the concepts of commodity production and commodity fetishization, and it certainly is the most developed undoing of the capitalist basis for architecture’s unwillingness to oppose fascist political projects. Here also, the authors return to direct appeal to the readers, reminding them of their own need to continually reinvent their alienation from self to survive in the architectural field. “The brand,” may be the necessary psychosis to pull designers away from solidarity with other members of society and into self-serving— and rarely successful— programs of being valued for genius. Most architectural workers are victims of “the unethical normalization of theft” (p. 62) of their original ideas.
The longest section of Antifascist Architecture presents case studies designed to inspire the readers who survived the take-down of the first part. Designers like Svetlana Kana Radevic, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and Abderrahmane Bouchama deserve to replace the canonical spaces of Speer and Terragni, as well as the spaces of openly fascist Philip Johnson and fascist-enabler Le Corbusier. Projects including the lost Rashad Al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza, the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, ABC No Rio in New York City, and the Casa del Portuale in Naples should be studied widely as architectures rooted in solving collective human needs.
Antifascist Architecture concludes with a raucous presentation of antifascist design tactics that include unionization, open-source designs, service to the homeless, and proudly fugitive liberation of resources. This review leaves this section and the case studies for a direct encounter, because the overall agenda and confrontation of the field’s normalization of fascism offers the book’s most powerfully argumentative parts. Again, if the book were a seminar, it certainly front-loads the intellectual reckoning before turning to historical sourcing and final assignments. Hopefully, more than a few figures in the architectural field complete the course.
Where the insider and general readers of Antifascist Architecture may meet is the overall presentation of how architecture designed by fascists and fascist-enablers has been elevated in the discourse around important architecture, and how designs that embody collective projects against state and capitalist power have been omitted. Santa Lucia and Roche call for a “re-evaluation of what is understood is beautiful” (p. 73), which comes across as a poetic expression of what they articulate on one of the graphic pages as “[s]top fetishizing fascist bullshit!” Of course, their real goal is not just negation of architectural fascism but cultural valuation of antifascist architectures— especially those not yet realized.
Santa Lucia and Roche are not historians aiming to adjust how readers look at what already has been. They are agitators to builders of a future who will build what does not yet exist.
