Lytle Shaw will be with us on Saturday night, to present his investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic building for the French Communist Party’s central committee in Paris.
Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Niemeyer’s building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s – and also a literal Marxist structure.
Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building with its cave-like assembly hall into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.

Mysteries of a Communist Cave is the second in the “Gumshoe” series of architectural books published by Park Books, that emulates the detective novel to propose an original approach to the writing of architectural history.