Building Socialism - The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Hardcover)

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh's mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh's new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam's first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

General

Imprint:	Duke University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	November 2020
First published:	2020
Authors:	Christina Schwenkel
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	432
ISBN-13:	978-1-4780-1001-2
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > General Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
LSN:	1-4780-1001-0
Barcode:	9781478010012

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