Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. By Christina Schwenkel,. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. xviii, 403 pp. ISBN: 9781478010012 (cloth).

Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. By Christina Schwenkel. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. xviii, 403 pp. ISBN: 9781478010012 (cloth).

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 a mechanism for exclusion; from reflecting the social realities of Vinh to creating a condition for its transformation. And how vulnerable architecture is in all its power to form and transform identity.

The strength of the book lies in the arrangement of different perspectives to convey the affective power of the material environment. Chronologically organized, the story begins with the painful birth of a modernist city—that is, the annihilation of a town that made possible a blank canvas for the construction of a new time and space—and ends with the buildings’ afterlife. Time, however, feels more cyclical than linear, for what has passed returns to haunt or redeem the present. The book is thus made up of memories stored in archives and in people's minds.

The beginning chapters are filled with sensory encounters in which dead bodies and destroyed buildings are interchangeable. Through a set of visual archives (and a powerful narrative of soundscape), readers are invited to witness and experience the setting and to take the position of a...