Building Socialism is about the social life of buildings and the people who lived in them, what buildings and society have done to each other, and what they can tell us about Vietnam, East Germany, socialism, the Cold War, and Doi Moi. The book focuses on Vinh, a frontier city that was destroyed by US bombings in the 1970s. How Vinh was rebuilt to represent the futurity of socialism, how it disintegrated almost instantly, and how it continued to mean something are the stories told affectively by Christina Schwenkel. Meticulously researched and compelling, this book will satisfy as well as haunt students of architecture and urban studies, as it shows how far and deep the field could go: how architecture moved from an elite project to become a societal process; from “East German architecture” to become an institutional form of the Vietnamese socialist state; from a communitarian bonding to...

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