Architecture is Always Political

Written between 2016 and 2019, before the watershed of lockdown and the Great Reset into stakeholder capitalism it initiated, the articles collected in this book were originally published on the website of Architects for Social Housing (ASH), the London-based architectural practice. They were written, therefore, against the background of the crisis of housing affordability created by the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 and the collusion of the architectural profession in how the financial institutions responsible for it turned what should have been their accountability and regulation into a financial stepping stone to where we are now. Many of these articles came out of the various practices of ASH in exposing and challenging this collusion, which gives this book a practical foundation in the relationship between finance capitalism, government policy and property development largely absent from academic studies based on other academic studies. So although its case studies look back 900 years to the origins of current land ownership in Britain and include some key moments and buildings in the history of architecture - including the Sacré Coeur in Paris, the Narkomfin building in Moscow, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, the Unité d'habitation in Marseilles, the Seagram building in New York, the reconstruction of post-war Dresden, modernist housing estates in the UK, the New London Vernacular and international corporate architecture - the focus of this book is how the practice of architecture can move beyond the impasse at which it finds itself today. This begins with identifying what has produced it.

Simon Elmer lives in London and Hong Kong. In 2002 he received his PhD in the History and Theory of Art from University College London, and he has taught at the universities of London, Manchester, Reading and Michigan. In 2015 he co-founded Architects for Social Housing, for which he is Head of Research. His books include The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (2023); The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022); two volumes of collected articles, Virtue and Terror (2022) and The New Normal (2022); and with Geraldine Dening, Saving St. Raphael's Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022), For a Socialist Architecture: Under Capitalism (2021); and Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018). Architecture is always Political: A Communist History is the first volume in a new series titled the ASH Papers, which collects in book form the most important articles from the ASH website.

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