Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International
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Abstract
Edited by Reinhold Martin and Claire Zimmerman, Architecture Against Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines architecture's foundational role in the repression of democracy. The book gathers essays from notable scholars throughout the world who write about the troubled relationship between architecture and antidemocratic politics, with detailed case studies of instances throughout the world when the built environment has been harnessed as an instrument of authoritarian power. Cornell AAP Architecture faculty Esra Akcan and María González Pendás will speak about their contributions to the book, along with other essayists.
Biographies
Reinhold Martin
Professor
Reinhold Martin is a historian of architecture, technology, and media at Columbia University. His latest book, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (2021), examines the role of media and materiality in shaping educational institutions. He coedited Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (2024) with Claire Zimmerman. Martin is currently writing two books: one on the intersection of energy, utility, and use-value in the 20th-century technosphere and another on philosophical aesthetics in modern architecture.
Claire Zimmerman
Professor
Claire Zimmerman is a historian of architecture, industrialization, and mediation at the University of Toronto. Her recent book, Albert Kahn, Inc.: Architecture, Labor, Industry, 1905-1961 (2025), explores the intersection of labor and architecture. She coedited Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (2024) and Detroit Moscow Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (2023). She is currently coediting a project on property and architecture, contributing to a network on the costs of architecture, and leading the Ph.D. program in Architecture, Landscape, and Design at Toronto.
Esra Akcan
Professor
Esra Akcan is a Professor at Cornell University's Department of Architecture. Her books include Landfill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, and Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with S. Bozdoğan). She has written over 200 scholarly articles and is coeditor of Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (with I. Dadi). Her forthcoming book, Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism and Architecture After Conflicts and Disasters, explores the architecture of post-conflict rebuilding.
María González Pendás
Assistant Professor
María González Pendás is an architectural historian at Cornell University, specializing in modernity, coloniality, and the Spanish transatlantic world. Her research focuses on the architectural dimensions of fascism, race, and religion, particularly in the context of Hispanidad. She coedited Pious Technologies and Secular Designs (2022) and is working on two books: Holy Modern, examining fascist reimaginings of architecture in postwar Spain, and a study of labor, politics, and concrete technologies in developmentalist Mexico.
