TAL July 26' Newsletter
Summer updates, No Stamps No Camps and a review of Antifascist Architecture
Dear Architectural Workers,
We hope you’re all staying cool this summer! The Architecture Lobby has been busy these past few months with a recent turnover of a new Organizing Committee for the upcoming year and a continuing set of projects we’re excited to share with you, as well as a member-written review of Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Roche’s Antifascist Architecture, with some reflections how it relates to our organizing today.
First of all we’re planning a new set of strategic priorities for our organization for the upcoming year. We’re excited to do more public facing programming and media production centered around knowledge sharing and organizer training. We’re hoping to equip more architectural workers with the resources they need to unionize their firms and plot alternative models for more equitable practices. All modes of survival in such precarious times. More so as we’re all certainly so tired of discord and zoom meetings, we’re planning another in person congress in 2027! Expect more updates on all this soon.
In terms of recent projects, our No Stamps No Camps campaign in collaboration with Design As Protest and Atelier Office has been underway. This project is a collective effort to use architectural, engineering and planning methods to disrupt, stall, and halt construction on ICE facilities. Last month, we conducted research into ICE’s planned facility in Surprise AZ and produced graphics to be shared with a national partner. We are continuing this work by applying this method to the remaining active warehouse sites at Socorro, San Antonio, and Williamsport. In tandem, we are developing pamphlets to be used for citizen education and citizen agency to use our toolbox to push back at the grassroots or municipal level. If you’d like to follow our findings, we’re publishing them to the substack below:
There is still plenty of opportunity to contribute. If you’re interested please reach out to info@architecture-lobby.org.
In solidarity,
TAL
Organize with Other TAL Worker-Members:
Join the Discord server to connect and coordinate with other nation-wide architectural workers: Discord Sign-Up Here and reach out to info@architecture-lobby.org with any questions.
Organizing Committee (OC) meeting - Thursday, May 14th @ 9:00pm EST.
Join event via Discord Here
All are welcome.
TAL Green New Deal (GND) Working Group - Every Monday 7:00pm EST
Architectural Workers organizing for a Just Transition in the Building Sector.
Special GND session: Arielle Hersh, Director of Policy and New Projects at Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, will join us to discuss Mayor Mamdani's Block by Block housing plan. Monday Aug 3rd
Beyond TAL:
EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing - Sign Up
A great place to kick-start the skillsets that are critical to agitating for a union in your workplace.
Direct Action & Mutual Aid:
Donate to anti-carceral de-arrest fund: Mid-West Immigration Bond Fund
Add Jobsite anti-ICE Worker Protections to Your Drawings and Specs: Resources from Arch League of NYC
What Are We Reading:
Assembling the Architect by George Barnett Johnston
A Moratorium on New Construction by Charlotte Maltherre Barthes
Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences by Anton Jäger
MEMBER WRITING
We want to publish writing by Lobby members. These pieces do not reflect the positions of the Architecture Lobby as an organization, however we hope to provide a space for discussion of architectural labor conditions and how to make change in our profession and the world. If you’re interested in contributing to our newsletter, please email us!
Notes on Antifascist Architecture
By DM
Antifascist Architecture written by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche is a much needed call-to-arms for anyone working as an architect today. In an era of slop and resignation, even framing the output of architecture in terms of public benefit and not just an instrument of financial speculation and material waste is now a radical act. The bar for discourse in our profession is low, often depoliticized and solipsistic, but the scope and ambition of Antifascist Architecture to break out of this bind is laudatory.
The book provides ammunition for our fight against capitalist realism, and what they describe as “business ontologies” that claim that all social processes, such as how we create architecture, must be mediated through capitalist market relations. In opposition to this, they present a heterogenous counter-canon of architects, projects, and strategies for what the authors describe as an “anti-fascist avant garde continuum”, an array of case studies, all contingent on their specific times and places but all united in being instances of architecture in service of a mass political project greater than itself. There is a certain “optimism of the will” in how the authors write about architecture as something that’s never the master of its own destiny, but capable of great things in the right political-economic conjecture.
Antifascist Architecture is strategically non-prescriptive with its politics in order to focus on architecture, though its expansive scope does mean that it cannot actually provide clear answers on “what is to be done?” for its radicalized readership at this moment. This feels intentional on the authors’ part but does open up a series of debates I believe we should be having and will be concluding this piece with.
The book opens with a critique of the old auteurial view of architectural practice as best promoted and exemplified by Ivy League patrician and Nazi Party ideologue Phillip Johnson. The vestiges of that form of practice have been dwindling away, as the size and number of firms in a “starchitect” mold, have been declining with each successive generation, from their celebrity heyday in the 80s to early 2000s, to the boutique “post-digital” firms post 08 recession, to an even smaller set of academic adjacent practices today. The elitist cultural attitude of this model is increasingly out of touch and economically unviable, but still present amongst our profession’s firm owners. By identifying this tendency in the form of Phillip Johnsonism, we can better diagnose its vestiges and sweep it into the dustbin of history.
Santa Lucia and Roche are the most incisive when they move past critique and deliver their conception of antifascist architecture via case studies. The studies tow a fine line. On one hand, the architects profiled are described in hagiographical terms. For an ordinary architect reader of this book, toiling away in Revit at their job, it’s exhilarating to imagine what architects could achieve in a revolutionary society. Postcolonial architects like Friedrich Silaban in Sukarno’s Indonesia, and Abderrahmane Bouchama and Georgette Cottin- Euziol in post-independence Algeria show how architecture can address human needs when unfettered from a reactionary political order. The book also highlights underacknowledged radicals in Europe, including a biography of the infatigable Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky, who outside her most famous Weimar era work on the Frankfurt Kitchen, continued as an anti nazi partisan and activist for decades after World War 2. Architects aren’t just designers of buildings but also have political lives outside their day jobs. The two can even reinforce one another. The anti-fascist life is the good life here, where radical politics enables radical architecture.
While the book does not dwell on the question of how successful these case studies were, the book also doesn’t shy from explaining how these case studies were only made possible by political victories and can so easily be blotted out by political defeat. This is most prominent in the case of the Gabriel Mistral Cultural Center built in Allende’s Chile in 1972. The project was a triumph of Stakhanovite worker fortitude and revolutionary optimism, however the building soon became the office of Pinochet’s police force following the 1973 coup and a site for brutal reactionary violence. This goes to show the limits of architecture: a building can host community programs and art, but can also host torture chambers. We can pour our hopes into architecture we think will be good in the world but our projects can fail due to thugs with guns, Israeli missiles, or neoliberal austerity today.
The hagiographical tone does become less useful – though no less inspiring – with the subset of case studies who either did not practice architecture, or were architects whose reasons for inclusion skew far from their practice of architecture. Kiyoshi Kuromiya’s architectural training was probably the least interesting thing about his exemplary life, crossing seemingly all the radical movements of the 1960s-80s. In fact, we should be glad he was slacking off from architecture school and finding better things to do. Meanwhile a few case studies seem incidental to architecture as they involve people not trained as architects, doing activities outside the scope of traditional architecture. You could argue that there’s a spatial aspect to squatting in 80s NYC, or the Black Panther’s Oakland Community School, however I’d question the value of categorizing this work as “architecture” when they didn’t create buildings nor do you need any architectural skills to do what they did. Mutual aid and squatting are radical acts with real value that do not require architects and will happen regardless of architects involvement. Would I like architects to get involved with these things? Yes, but I want architects to do many political actions outside their jobs, like joining picket lines, canvasing, or running for political offices, but I would not call those architecture either.
That being said, I do see great value in Santa Lucia and Roche’s counter-canon as going past critique and producing an alternate vision of what the profession and built environment we’re fighting for could actually look like. As an organizer with the Architecture Lobby though, my interests and analysis are focused on how a book like this supports the cause of radicalizing architectural workers toward the labor focused Marxist position I hold. To this end I have several provocations which I believe we as “Antifascist” architects should be debating.
The book makes what’s probably a strategically sound choice to not spend too much time litigating what is fascism and whether we live in a fascist society. This helps keep the book focused on architecture and not litigating inter-left debates on political strategy. However I do believe the question of what constitutes fascism matters to how we organize.
The authors derive their definition of fascism from a variety of sources that define fascism as more than just the ideology of the mid 20th century Germany and Italy, based on a total mobilization of society in service of militant ultranationalism, but as an ideology with a longer history. To quote Langston Hughes, fascism is “a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America” situating fascism in the reactionary violence of the plantation and the colony, and reminding us that the Nazi’s domestic policies were modeled on the Jim Crow South and their concentration camps practiced earlier by the colonial powers in Africa and Asia. To these theorists, Fascism is a latent tendency within liberal capitalism to protect property relations in moments of disorder, whether that disorder is the threat of the Russian Revolution, or the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War. However if we make this necessary expansion of the definition of fascism it becomes difficult to determine what is “fascist” as in an organized reactionary ideological project, versus what is part of the liberal status quo.
Let’s apply this to architecture. I would argue that there’s plenty of reactionary architecture that isn’t connected to a fascist political project. Saudi megaprojects like NEOM, similar starchitect white elephants in Europe and Asia, luxury housing projects in gentrifying neighborhoods, and data centers are all unpopular and socially harmful projects, however they all the result of rapacious financial speculation and not concerned with enforcing a fascist vision of society. Humans are incidental to these forms of profiteering and fighting these forms of architecture is a fight against capitalism writ large more than a fight against any organized fascist movement.
It’s also notable that past fascist movements produced much more architecture in service of their vision of society. There are no megaprojects, civic buildings, or monuments being built by the contemporary fascist movement. Their aesthetic output is mostly ai generated slop content posted to government social media accounts, and farcical never-complete projects like Trump’s White House ballroom which seem more like personal fixations for our aging strongman. The oligarchic backers of the far right are more concerned with financial speculation and profiting off war and surveillance than they are in sponsoring public architecture, and the American state has little capacity to build any public architecture either. The only remaining architecture to get public funding is that of America’s prison-military-industrial complex. Specifically, the expansion of ICE facilities across the US right now is the only instance where an organized fascist movement, that of Stephen Miller’s nationalist faction within the MAGA coalition is building anything and even this is in continuity with past liberal administrations prior to the Trump presidency and the current rise of the far-right.
It’s critical that we do not let liberalism off the hook for enabling the resurgence of fascism. In the realm of politics, the Obama presidency continued to expand Bush’s national security state and ramped up deportations. His new monolithic library contributes to gentrification in the south side of Chicago today. Antifascist Architecture brings up the student occupations of buildings in 2023 in protest of the Gazan Genocide as an act of architectural resistance. It wasn’t fascists who sent cops to beat down those students and passed laws stifling their speech, it was the Biden presidency and Democratic politicians who did so in the name of (selectively applied) liberal values of inclusivity and anti-racism.
In the realm of architecture, we can also say that our current notion of the profession of architecture as a “liberal” profession that provides a public good is also collapsing. It is clear that architects do not have the agency to actually protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public, (as described in the AIA code of ethics) when it goes against the profit motives of their clients. We’re taught to assume that producing architecture is inherently ethical and this noblesse oblige differentiates us from other workers. Liberals and fascists share this belief in the promethean power of architects to change society, they simply differ on the value system underpinning said architecture.
This idealism is the reason that liberal architecture has failed to stop fascism. Santa Lucia and Roche’s critique of the ineffectualness of Foucault’s heterotopia (hopelessly individualized) and Koolhaas’s social condenser (farcically technocratic) points towards this direction. Extending a critique of liberalism in architecture allows us to critique the focus on individual action, superstructural rhetoric, and the acceptance of neoliberal business ontology that have defined contemporary architectural practice. We need a new set of values that do not privilege architects over other workers. Our work is equally as ethical as a carpenter or plumber’s work is capable of being ethical. We do not have unique agency over the built environment, we simply are one actor amongst many, and it’s only via organizing this whole collectivity is change made.
More so, as leftist architects, we cannot cede the critique of the status-quo of the built environment to the Right. The crises of today, of housing shortages, ugly shoddy buildings, and climate change, are apparent to the general public. Architecture looms large in the Fascist Right’s imaginary of how to solve these issues albeit in the incoherent form of memes of Roman statues, gilded Trump towers, and other lost glories. The profession of architecture is derided as polluted by “wokism” and “postmodernism” and if only architects could return to “tradition” all would be resolved.
This all resonates with many people who are frustrated with capitalism’s inability to provide the built environment it once was capable of constructing. The Left must do more than defend the business ontology of the status quo from the Right. If the public decries how five-over-ones look in their neighborhoods, we cannot put up our hands and just say that this is all that architects can produce given current economic constraints. We must argue that it is capitalism to blame and that the Right’s desire for a Trad Phillip Johnson type, or Neoliberal Silicon Valley disruptor to be their savior cannot outsmart the free market any more than the rest of us can. We do have unique expertise with the built environment though, and we must offer a socialist vision of production, governance, and finance as an alternative to the capitalist system.
Yet we need to handle this question of how to envision the future carefully. Santa Lucia and Roche’s final chapter is concerned with utopias, both political and architectural. The authors introduce an anarchist conception of utopianism, where utopian social relations can be created in the present, spurred on by necessity and capable of resisting capitalism. Mutual aid is cited as an example of utopian practice here. Curiously this is not a form of political thinking engaged in by the vast majority of the profiled architects in the book, who were in varying forms socialists or Communists looking to transform their society from a feudal or market-based form to a communist one. This is a fine difference and one outside the scope of this piece. In abbreviation, Marxist critiques of anarchist “prefigurative” politics, where a group attempts to model practices of their utopian society in miniature, are many, usually critiquing prefiguration as an impediment to our primary political task of seizing power and wielding it to reshape society (For more of that critique, I would recommend Vincent Bevin’s If We Burn).
I bring this up though for one reason though, that I believe that architectural utopian thinking and political utopian thinking are distinct, and utopian thinking in general does not default to being politically liberatory and is quite capable of co-option by neoliberalism. Being able to imagine a utopia isn’t enough to move society in that direction. You need political analysis of the world as it is and a theory of change. Architects, famously conceited in the belief their imaginations are uniquely valuable, are an example of how not to do this. The long history of architectural avant-gardes is a history of failures to mitigate or resist the negative effects of capitalism. Today much of what is considered utopian thinking in elite architectural firms and the academy is simply marketing of our services, a furtive attempt to appear relevant to the public, and to provide intellectual justification for what our clients want. A new model of antifascist architectural thinking will need to be wary of the siren call of architectural utopias shorn of politics as we were taught in history classes and via studio briefs. Instead, what Antifascist Architecture gets right is to describe the “utopian imagination” as part of our common humanity, that anyone can contribute to. It is noticeable that the utopia the book ends on does not prescribe a singular architectural vision, instead it’s a call for a “total human liberation”. Crucially this is a collective political vision for the future, not the product of architectural thinking.
Antifascist Architecture resolves the contradiction of architecture’s complicity with capitalist power with a contentious claim that if the profession of architecture is a product of capitalism’s division of the labor of designing and building, a communist society may not require architects. Santa Lucia and Roche call for a withering away of architecture in this future. However, I believe this “withering away” is already taking place in the form of the proletarianization of our work.
Architects once were prosperous small business owners (petit bourgeois), or an elite managerial stratum over other workers (labor aristocracy). This is increasingly not the case. Wages and working conditions for architects are in decline as profits in our industry decrease. Capitalism has responded to this by streamlining architectural production. The work we once did overseeing the totality of a building, is increasingly subdivided into the scope into an increasing number of consultant specializations. Building materials are standardized, manufactured off-site with nebulous supply chains, and we mostly just interact with them via BIM. The architect of today has less control over the design process, leading to each of us therefore having less knowledge and experience. The overall effect is a deskilling of architects, and much like workers on a Fordist assembly line, this process makes us more interchangeable, easier to hire and fire to the bosses’ whims.
How are architects reacting to this? Quite often with pessimism or by attempting to leave the field. A survey from Dezeen published in 2025 found that only 26% of surveyed architects “definitely want to stay in the field in the long term”. According to NCARB, there was a 4% drop in the number of licensed architects in the United States in 2024. It’s noticeable that “nontraditional” models of practice that differ from the typical architect’s scope are the most lauded in schools and the media, as opportunities for creative or ethical built work in the United States grow scarce.
We’re presently heading towards a future where architects are technicians with little design expertise or knowledge of the social effects of their work. Antifascist Architecture contains a chapter on antifascist strategies including some compelling ideas on escaping the stranglehold of BIM, more equal collaboration with construction labor, and embracing maintenance and re-use instead of new construction. These practices are certainly the future we want and while there are architects working in these modes today, it is also true that most architects presently lack the skills to work this way even if they wanted to. Perhaps one form of mutual aid within our discipline involves the necessary work retraining all these architects?
Meanwhile architecture schools are becoming more vocational. I am skeptical that most architecture students know who Phillip Johnson is. Much of the internal discourse we have about architectural theory and history are withering away and being replaced by tepid business ontologies that reduce architecture to another voiceless cog in the AEC industry.
This is a challenge for us in Leftist architectural circles. Much of the ideologies and figures that books like Antifascist Architecture critique are dying out, not due to our valiant efforts, but because today’s capitalist elite have less investments in architecture. Today’s oligarchs do not patronize architecture the way midcentury Fascists did. The process of radicalizing architects today involves less of “killing the Fascist-Phillip Johnsonite in your head” and reimagining yourself as a worker. Most architects today don’t have those notions because they’ve never been given the design opportunity, compensation and prestige of past generations. Organizing architects going forward is less a question of how to redirect a subset of frustrated intellectuals and more a question of how to radicalize a disorganized mass of apathetic and depoliticized workers.
One great thing about Antifascist Architecture is that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to resuscitate a dying profession and its elite self-image. There will be no return to anything like the midcentury role of architects during the 20th century, and with such damning fascist tendencies within it, why even should we? The history the book builds out of the margins of that period proposes something more resilient and useful for our future. It reminds us that there’s always something you can be doing as an architect to fight for a better world and that architects have organized in far worse circumstances. Faced direct state violence and much worse economic conditions and still have managed to contribute to political progress. The book wards off defeatism and asks us to demand more of architecture. Simply, we have nothing to lose and no choice but to fight. It’s great to read a book that throws some punches!
You can purchase your own copy of Antifascist Architecture via the US distributor, UChicago Press, and likely through asking your local bookstore. We encourage you to do so!