Australia: Modern Architectures in History

Abstract

particularly highlighted in her investigation of the residents’ unsanctioned renovations of dilapidated apartments and walk-out basements. Schwenkel shows that an entrepreneurial urbanisation arose, especially amongst women, whereby residents constructed shops in the walk-out basements and adhoc markets and stalls in Quang Trung’s common spaces. Schwenkel’s intent in every facet of Building Socialism is to extend and democratise the objects of scholarship, and overturn commonplace narratives. The architectural historian to which Building Socialism refers most frequently is Esra Akcan, and Schwenkel cites both Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, 2012, and Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship, and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg, 2018 several times. Schwenkel adopts Akcan’s notion of the translation of built form between cultures and extends it to include habitation and affect (6). This corresponds to Schwenkel’s larger intellectual project of moving scholarship on buildings away from the discussion purely of high cultural objects to the lived experience of residents and users. Building Socialism rejects the notion of uniform socialist cities, especially assumptions about uniformity and drabness of life in socialist mass housing. Building Socialism shows that “people in Vietnam did not unconditionally accept modernist utopian design; they reworked and translated it, ideologically and architecturally” (321). Quang Trung emerges as a vibrant place, with a plurality of social life and unique spatial qualities that a more limited methodological palette may have left undocumented. As such, Building Socialism has much that can inform contemporary writing of architectural history.