Architext
About the Book Series
The Architext series brings together recent debates in social and cultural theory and the study and practice of architecture and urban design. Critical, comparative and interdisciplinary, the books in the series will, by theorizing architecture, bring the space of the built environment centrally into the social sciences and humanities, as well as bringing the theoretical insights of the latter into the discourses of architecture and urban design. Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, sexuality and the body, to questions of identity and place, to the cultural politics of representation and language, and to the global and postcolonial contexts in which these are addressed.
Postmodernism and Architecture at the End of Apartheid
1st Edition
By Hilton Judin
April 16, 2026
Set against a social and political urban landscape of segregation and forced removals, Postmodernism and Architecture at the End of Apartheid unpacks postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s as it unfolds in South Africa during the final brutal decade of apartheid. Architecture and apartheid are ...
Modern Architecture in the Balkans: From Le Corbusier to Tito
1st Edition
By Lorenzo Pignatti
January 22, 2026
This book is an attempt to comprehend the reasons for modernity in the Balkans, beginning with the famous Journey to the East undertaken by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1911; a journey during which the future Le Corbusier was the first to appreciate the originality of the region’s architecture. ...
Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest
1st Edition
By Iulia Stătică
November 30, 2023
Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly ...
Political Postmodernisms: Architecture in Chile and Poland, 1970–1990
1st Edition
By Lidia Klein
March 31, 2023
Political Postmodernisms shows how sites outside of Western Europe and North America undermine an established narrative of architecture theory and history. It focuses specifically on postmodern architecture, which is traditionally understood as embodying the flippant and apolitical aesthetics of ...
Building Practice in the Dutch East Indies: Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century
1st Edition
By David Hutama Setiadi
December 30, 2022
This book reveals the ‘epistemic imposition’ of architectural ideas and practices by colonists from the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies from the late-19th century onwards, exploring the ways in which this came to shape the profession up to the present day in what is now known as Indonesia. The...
Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital
1st Edition
By Hilton Judin
April 08, 2021
This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative...
Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland: Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity
1st Edition
By Florian Urban
December 14, 2020
Garish churches, gabled panel blocks, neo-historical tenements—this book is about these and other architectural oddities that emerged in Poland between 1975 and 1989, a period characterised by the decline of the authoritarian socialist regime and waves of political protest. During that period, ...
The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968
1st Edition
By Ana Miljacki
August 14, 2020
The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the ...
Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration
1st Edition
Edited
By Mirjana Lozanovska
March 23, 2020
Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration explores the interface between migration and architecture. Cities have been substantially affected by transnational migration but the physical manifestations of migration in architecture – and its effect on streetscape, neighbourhood and city – have ...
Neocolonialism and Built Heritage: Echoes of Empire in Africa, Asia, and Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Daniel E. Coslett
July 12, 2019
Architectural relics of nineteenth and twentieth-century colonialism dot cityscapes throughout our globalizing world, just as built traces of colonialism remain embedded within the urban fabric of many European capitals. Neocolonialism and Built Heritage addresses the sustained presence and ...
Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space
1st Edition
Edited
By Anoma Pieris
July 08, 2019
Architecture on the Borderline interrogates space and territory in a turbulent present where nation-state borders are porous to a few but impermeable to many. It asks how these uneven and conflicted social realities are embodied in the physical and material conditions imagined, produced or ...
The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949-1964
1st Edition
By Juliana Maxim
November 29, 2018
The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture is the first systematic architectural history of Romania under socialism written in English. It examines the mechanisms through which modern architecture was invested with political meaning and, in reverse, how specific architectural solutions came to ...